Despite Australia becoming increasingly enmeshed with the Asian world - whether economically, politically or culturally - we are experiencing a serious decline in the numbers of young Australians studying the region's languages, as well as its history and thought patterns.

This leaves us with a growing information gap, and one that has little to do with major events. If an aircraft crashes in Indonesia, a bridge collapses in Vietnam, or floods devastate much of China, it's more than likely you'll see it on the nightly TV news. You'll also find coverage in the following day's newspapers. But the things that regularly impact on the lives of our Asian neighbours - in the way that interest rates, mortgage payments and skyrocketing rents do with us - receive scant, if any, attention here. You might see some analysis in a specialist journal, but that's about all. Most Australians, for example, would have no idea how a shortage of onions and potatoes in northern India can impact on the life of a citizen there.

Australians, whether locally born or from overseas, who are fluent in regional languages, can already access much of this information via the excellent news services provided by say, SBS TV and radio. But that's a relatively small part of our population.

How can we fill in this knowledge gap?

One way to do it is for SBS TV or ABC TV to run a thirty-minute, government-funded segment that reports on such ongoing developments in Asia as reported by the region's own evening news bulletins. The footage could be run in the original language and subtitled in English. True, it might be more than a day old, but what would that matter?

At least we'd know more about what's going on in our Asian neighbours' lives when we sit down with them to talk. If we're not going to bother learning their language, maybe this is the next best thing we can do.

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Warren Reed is a former chief operating officer of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA). He studied for three years in the Law Faculty of Tokyo University over 30 years ago and has spent much of his adult life in the Asian region.