Strange UTF-8 decoding error with Jenkins + Python

I've come across a strange problem while setting up Jenkins to build Python projects. For some reason I get the following error:


Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "setup.py", line 32, in <module>
    'Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Python Modules',
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/distutils/core.py", line 152, in setup
    dist.run_commands()

  ...

  File "/home/jenkins/.jenkins/jobs/django-console/workspace/django_attest-0.1.1-py2.7.egg/django_attest/__init__.py", line 0
SyntaxError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'utf_8_decode'

In any case it's fixed by adding the following as an environment variable (I added it to the Properties Content section):
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8