Rhian,
Ah,so.

Rhian,
The main differences I experienced personally is that when a deal is done in Asia Australians call it corruption & when a corrupt deal is done in Australia they call business practice. Australian bureaucracy calls it Government fees.

Well, Neil and Thomas,

It is totally understandable why it would be beneficial to Asian students to learn English as a second language - it's a no-brainer. But do Chinese/Asian students study many other of the world languages? Or, do they rely on interpreters, or simply converse in English?

Certainly, some familiarity with the culture (and a smattering of the language) of any nation or region with which one wishes to do business would show respect and 'interest', and thus hope to generate some positive attitudes. A good place to start, but ultimately I would expect specialist 'professional' assistance to be essential to making any real headway, and that the bulk of such assistance would come from withing the target country or a similar Asian culture - potentially including from withing our own multicultural community. I can't see many non-ethnic-Asian Aussie students rising to such a level of expertise.

Your 'Challenge': >>Asia engagement does not need to be highly dramatised, it just needs to finally be done.<<

You fellows appear to have done quite some study in, and of, China and its youth, language and culture, so I would expect you to have some valuable insights as to how best to develop our national and business relations with this super-power. Hopefully you may also be able to extend these insights to apply to our relations with other Asian nations?

So, why don't you have a go at telling us how best to rise to your challenge?

As a possibility, maybe we could use 'specialist' immigration as a catch-up, to span the existing chasm, educate our politicians, and set the broad educational ball rolling? (Maybe they may even tell us that anything more than a casual educational endeavour would be a waste of our time and resources?)

Saltpetre,
You make far too much sense for these characters to comprehend. Stop confusing them because it encourages them to produce even more academic dribble.

...I think it important not to confuse business with culture, per chance culture is sacrificed for business imperatives in the process.
Unfortunately evidence points to the latter when foreign culture (through Government Multiculturalism policies), pre-empts the need for social harmony.

...Multiculturalism is now prime Government business; An essential and over-weighted business of Government designed to support the propaganda machine in pushing economic growth. Unfortunately it is not working on the ground!

...The suck to Asians and their language “mantra” has nothing of substance to it more than another annoying addition to the unbelievable claptrap, adjunctive to Multiculturalism, as the "New-Age" secular religion under the control of Government "High Priests".

Agreed. This is another pointless load of academic twaddle with scant evidence to back it up.

, all the way back to popular writer Frank Clune's 1939 exhortation of Australians to "wake up" to Asian markets and prominent newspaper editor T.W. Heney's observation in 1919 that "every Australian businessman should carry a map of China in his head".

So, one businessman said something in 1919, what about all the business people who didn't? What about the business leaders who said, in 2007: 'This is the beginning of a boom that will last for nine generations'. Rubbish. It lasted for nine weeks.

For over a century Australians have let themselves and future generations down through myopic, blinkered, and timid attitudes devaluing cross-cultural knowledge and failing to put in the educational hard yards. From a young person's perspective, this is why the evidently beneficial study of Asian languages and societies is still a cultural anomaly rather than an educational assumption, despite us seeing Asia reap untold boons from their acceptance of the value of second-language learning.

Asians learn a second language - English - because English is the language of business plain and simple. We do NOT need to learn Asian languages to sell them our raw products, which they are rapidly starting to own before they leave the ground anyway. The article is myopic, not the Australian population.