So it seems like I’ve arrived in Sydney at the dawn of a new Asian century.

And it certainly feels like it on first impression – I was driven to the hotel by a taxi driver from India, I am staying at the Shangri-La Hotel, a Hong Kong-based and big-on-China brand and for dinner, I had Thai chicken larb “salad”.

It wasn’t half bad.

On my first visit to Australia, decades ago, I arrived in Perth on a Sunday evening – and couldn’t find food anywhere. There was no room service at the internationally-branded hotel, and nothing was open. And as you know, deprive an Asian of her food and you don’t have a happy customer.

So Australia is certainly a very different place now vs then. How different will it be by 2025?

Well, if Julia Gillard’s Asia white paper, revealed yesterday, comes true, it will a country where all kids can speak an Asian language, where companies have top executives steeped in Asian experience and where tourists from Asia will come by the millions and spread out all over the country, away from the cities into the regions.

Already, half of the six million visitors to Australia come from China and Asia and more resources are being pumped into these markets to increase inbound tourism which is being challenged by the high Australian dollar.

My taxi driver told me that his business is suffering – “not many tourists these days”.

It’s hard – it’s an expensive place these days for visitors. A plate of “fried rice” in a hotel costs A$34, that’s almost S$40 and RM100. The Chinese would say that’s like eating gold-gilded rice.

Anyway, the media’s full of debate about the white paper – one columnist calls it “meaningless promises, replete with pure spin” while another says it is “bold on vision, short on funding”.

One thing is clear, there’s a lot Australia has to do to get itself ready for the Asian century.

Airports for one and in particular, Sydney – I noticed some improvement this time from a few months ago – but to say Sydney airport is straining at the seams is putting it mildly.

Infrastructure Australia chairman Rod Eddington – a familiar name to many in Asia’s travel industry – said the white paper “just reminds us that we have got to do a better job of engaging with Asia than we are at the moment if we want to make the most of the Asian opportunity”.

“If anything, I would say there needs to be a sense of urgency about it,” he said, adding, “The rest of the world is not sitting around waiting for us to realise how important Asia is.”

More than that realization though is also an understanding of how much Asia has changed and is changing and it seems to me, this is more about Australia playing catch-up than wake-up.