Over the past three months, Australians have been fixated by the trial in Indonesia of a 27-year-old Queensland beautician, Schapelle Corby. On May 27, she was found guilty by a court in Bali of smuggling more than 4kg of cannabis, and sentenced to 20 years in jail. Corby has won millions of supporters in Australia, who are convinced that she is innocent.
The reaction to the sentence by some of the Australian media and some of her supporters has demonstrated that while Australia is in the Asian region, there is still a good deal of ignorance and misunderstanding about other countries in it.
Despite the fact that it is one of the most multicultural countries, people here still sees Asia primarily in economic terms. This reflects a failure of the political system to ensure that students can speak Chinese or another Asian language, and have at least a basic level of understanding about the history and culture of Asia.
There are currently only 6,000 students at Australian universities studying Chinese - a pitifully low number, given that China is to the 21st century what the US was to the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The reluctance of business and governments to push to the fore the need to speak Chinese or other Asian languages seems to be built on the premise that, as Ted Fishman says in his new book, China Inc, there are as many people in China learning English as there are Americans, Britons and Canadians who speak English as their first language.
But to simply focus on a common business language misses the point. As General Peter Cosgrove, head of the Australian defence forces observed, 'language skills and cultural sensitivity will be the new currency of this world order'.