Retrieving and setting AddressBook State

Further to my previous posting in thread "Retrieving customer attributes and primary contact", I am still having problems correctly setting the state value through web services.

I have worked through the process of setting the country by a long case statement to match the string value for each country and return the au.com.netsuite.webservices.Country value. I have to think that there must be a better way...

However, I cannot set or retrieve the State value. This is because au.com.netsuite.webservices.State seems to only have the value for US states.

I have tried this with Set Up > Company > General Preferences > Allow Free-Form States in Addresses checked and unchecked, but it seems to make no difference. If I set a US state through the browser interface, I see that returned from the value in au.com.netsuite.webservices.CustomerAddressbook, but if I set an Australian state, the value returned is _alabama (ie enum 0).