IN MY OPINION IT was Paul Keating who said Australia needs to realise we get our security in Asia not from Asia.
But what about our economic security?
It is true that Asia matters in terms of our economic security. Asia is important in terms of trade and increasingly important in terms of inward foreign direct investment but less so in terms of outward investment.
Asia accounts for 83 per cent of our total merchandise trade (compared with just under 33 per cent 50 years ago when Geoffrey Blainey wrote his famous book, The Tyranny of Distance, which maybe we can now say has been replaced by the "power of proximity"). 
Despite these trade patterns, information flows are still Anglo-American in nature and we are more moved by what the US Federal Reserve does than the People's Bank of China. This is partly historical and partly due to how much transparency we feel there is in economic institutions in our different trading partners.
In Asia we need to look at the big three engines of China, India and the ASEAN bloc.
Of course we need to look at China first as Australia's number one trading partner, especially given the market jitters already this year and concern about debt levels.
Despite some of the doomsday predictions China is still growing. However, it is undertaking one of the most significant economic transformations in world economic history.
China's decade-long double-digit economic growth has ended with Beijing trying to wean itself off its export-led growth model to focus more on domestic consumption and investment. And there has been some success with the tertiary sector, basically services, already accounting for 50 per cent of its economy.
In addition, China is still being boosted by back-end spending in what the Chinese call the "little country towns" with populations of 10 to 20 million-plus. These cities provide great markers for Australian architects, urban planners, landscape gardeners and other exporters of professional services.
So, the World Bank expects China may grow by 6.5 per cent annually instead of 7 per cent plus. And if there's concern about the stock market, remember the Shanghai Composite exchange is not London or Tokyo - the Chinese stock market still only commands 11 per cent of household income.
India, under Narendra Modi's "Modi mania", is now getting more favourable press. India was slower to modernise than China in terms of recent late 20th-century globalisation, having started its reform process in the 1990s.
Deng Xiaoping got China going in 1978. But it could be said if China is a Test match then India is a Twenty20 game with a quick-fire catch-up in terms of growth and trade links with Australia.
The World Bank regards India as a bright spot in its forecasts, this year anticipating 7.8 per cent growth, well above China.
The third economic engine for Australia in Asia is the Association of South East Asian nations, or ASEAN. Originally a defence pact, it is now a fully fledged economic community of 622 million consumers representing a market worth $3 trillion. That makes it the third largest economy in Asia and the seventh largest in the world.
ASEAN is economically diverse, from affluent Singapore to poorer nations in the Mekong Delta such as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. Many rate Vietnam as a hot spot to watch this year, along with a high-risk, high-return market, such as Indonesia.
Medium-term tailwinds in the trade sphere will help ASEAN nations, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership expected to boost Vietnam's economy by 10 per cent by 2030 through market access for its textile, clothing and footwear trade and benefit Malaysia's information and communications technology sector.
So what does this all mean for us in Australia? We have to adjust to lower commodity prices and some movement from the mining boom to the "dining boom", with more emphasis on agribusiness and food security in Asia.
The falling Aussie dollar is helping export competitiveness although 80 per cent of exporters now also import.
The power of proximity has replaced the tyranny of distance. And even if 2016 is a tough year for the world economy, Australia is still in the right place at the right time in the Asian century.Tim Harcourt is the JW Nevile Fellow in Economics at UNSW Australia Business School and author of The Airport Economist and Trading Places