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600 g kangaroo tenderloin 250 ml beef broth jus 6 quandongs 50 g riberries 50 g desert lime 4 rosella owers 50 g muntries 2 tsp 7 spice 400 g warrigal greens 2 tsp butter 1 cup mixed beach herbs (salt bush, barilla, beach mustard, beach banana)
_{John Newton: "The Oldest Foods in the World. A history of Australian native foods with recipes", New South: Sydney, 2016.}

600 g kangaroo tenderloin
250 ml beef broth jus 
6 quandongs 
50 g riberries 
50 g desert lime 
4 rosella owers 
50 g muntries 
2 tsp 7 spice 
400 g warrigal greens
2 tsp butter 
1 cup mixed beach herbs (salt bush, barilla, beach mustard, beach banana)
_{John Newton: "The Oldest Foods in the World. A history of Australian native foods with recipes", New South: Sydney, 2016.}

If we just put aside the dubious language definitions completely. And if we put aside the equally dubious chemical reductionist stance of the scoville scale that measures pungency just by casicin content. Then we can still trust our senses. Going by purely organoleptic categories, it might become clear that even the isolated until 1788 Australians used plants like pepperberry, mountain pepper to spice up their food.

Example to add to the wikipedia entry:

Tasmannia lanceolata is the tree that produces the Tas- manian pepperberry and leaf. Dr Konczak says ‘It is a very aromatic native pepper which was developed under the Antarctic climate’ when Australia was attached to Gondwanaland.

Or a spicy recipe devoid of American or Asian spice:

600 g kangaroo tenderloin 250 ml beef broth jus 6 quandongs 50 g riberries 50 g desert lime 4 rosella owers 50 g muntries 2 tsp 7 spice 400 g warrigal greens 2 tsp butter 1 cup mixed beach herbs (salt bush, barilla, beach mustard, beach banana)
_{John Newton: "The Oldest Foods in the World. A history of Australian native foods with recipes", New South: Sydney, 2016.}

This is more of a language use problem, in several ways.

The most intriguing part about this is that in English the familiar Piper nigrum (black) pepper gave its name away to all these spicy-hot chili peppers and variant spellings and meanings, because of their similarity in tongue sensations. All while Columbus had set sail to find trade routes for the spices, now in some parts of the world only those dishes containing plants discovered after Columbus are called spicy? Quite a carrousel indeed.

###Answer to question as originally posted: This is more of a language use problem, in several ways.

The most intriguing part about this is that in English the familiar Piper nigrum (black) pepper gave its name away to all these spicy-hot chili peppers and variant spellings and meanings, because of their similarity in tongue sensations. All while Columbus had set sail to find trade routes for the spices, now in some parts of the world only those dishes containing plants discovered after Columbus are called spicy? Quite a carrousel indeed.

Answer supplement to updated question

Now that it should be clear that spicy should logically mean containing lots of spices/herbs/aroma/taste/zing/hotness:

The claim is correct if spicy is equated with capsaicin, and the claim is correct if it is assumed that nearly all popular spicy Asian dishes with their recipes from today would be missing a crucial ingredient without Latin Americas gift to the culinary world.

However, we were nitpicking with language, let's be serious about the history of spicy food in Asia:

Etymologists believe that “curry” originally came from kari, a word in Tamil that means sauce or gravy. The history of this preparation goes back more than 4,000 years to the Indus Valley civilization, where people often used stone mortar and pestle to finely grind spices such as fennel, mustard, cumin and others. In fact, excavations at Harappa and Mohenjodaro have unearthed pottery fragments with traces of turmeric and ginger, belonging to the period between 2600 – 2200 BC, thus making curry (or at least the predecessor to curry) one of the oldest food items in the world. As pointed out by historians, the curry was often eaten with rice, which was already being cultivated in the area.

Sumerian tablets that have survived also talk of a similar food recipe for meat in some kind of spicy gravy and served with bread, as early as 1700 BC. The Apicius cookbook of the 4th century AD contains many meat recipes that were cooked in a similar fashion, with the use of ingredients like coriander, vinegar, mint, cumin and so on. Authored in the 1390s, The Forme of Cury is significant for possessing the earliest reference to the word “cury”, though it was taken from the French term “cuire” for cooking. With the arrival of the Portuguese in Goa in the 15th century as well as the Mughals in India in the early 16th century, the curry recipe underwent multiple revisions.
_{Realm of History: 9 Of The Oldest Food Recipes From History Still In Use Today}