Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the 2½ minutes available to me, I would like to add my comments to this motion recognising the establishment of the United Nations and the important part that it plays in world politics. The United Nations learned very much from its predecessor, the League of Nations, and the failure of the United States to ratify it, which left it rather a body waiting to fail. The United Nations has been successful in establishing many important organisations which have served the world well, particularly the World Health Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Australia has played a very large and successful role in peacekeeping operations, as others have pointed out during the course of speaking to this motion, but I would like to say that very often the United Nations can also be a source of profound disappointment to us. One of the best examples of that has been the inability of the United Nations to take any meaningful role in preventing the devastation and murderous behaviour that has occurred in Zimbabwe under the dictatorship of Mr Mugabe. Although he purports to have elections, we see again and again how this fails and how the United Nations is totally unable to deal with it in any way. On the other hand, when it establishes something like the Millennium Development Goals and we see the accent and importance it has placed on the development of microcredit, which has the ability to open up the lives of, particularly, women right across the world by giving them loans which enable them to establish their own small businesses and to succeed in providing for their families in a way that is quite new and quite refreshing and that empowers them, one can only say that this is the sort of thing where the United Nations is truly successful.

There are many examples that others have given in speaking to this motion, but I would simply like to say that Australia’s contribution has been profound right from the beginning. The four times we have served as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council have been marked with our success. It has grown from 51 member states to, in 1996, 192 member states.

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