Our remote team (in SEA) adds a tonne of value to our local Australian based team; but they mostly do maintenance work and are heavily integrated into our local team (they’re quite literally just treated as remote devs, rather than their own company). It’s worked really well for about 6-7 years now
You didn't say "cheap/hasty" you said "cheap", and I can assure you teams in Australia outsourcing dev work to SEA are doing it because it's cheap(er).
A lot more people live in SEA than Australia, so it's probably both easier and cheaper to find people. SEA also speaks English and I'm sure there's good programmers around there somewhere.
Another good reason to have remote support in Asia is it's a different time zone. Not for Australia obviously, but that's a harmless thing for a US company to do.
