Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Opponents have labelled the UN irrelevant—a geriatric 64-year-old overdue for retirement and ready for a pension. Indeed, some letters to the editor—even in my electorate of Braddon—call it a dire threat to civilisation and individual national sovereignties, and indeed a global plot to usurp the nation state. For supporters, on the other hand, it is the continued hope for the future and its best years lie ahead.

I am sure we are all aware in this House that extremes never demonstrate the real truth, for, to write-up the UN too much regarding its success or to write it off too soon after its failures is to do little but exaggerate. If one goes by the letter and spirit of the UN Charter, which came into force on ratification by a majority of signatory nations on 24 October 1945, multilateralism under the United Nations has been—and will remain—the most effective international organisation to lead the international system from anarchy to order based on international law and from dominance by hegemony to international democratic governance. Multilateralism a la carte has been a feature of some major and middle-power nations, particularly paralleling the neo-conservative’s regime of the Bush years—and during the Howard regime in Australia between 1996 and 2007—whereby there was a resort to multilateralism when it suited their interests and they spurned it when it did not.

Other choices have been unilateralism, bilateralism, regionalism or a device like the coalition of the willing. The true nature of the crisis or major challenges facing the UN, I suspect, are not so much the so-called new threats to international security, for example, those posed by genocide, ethnic cleansing, other large-scale violations of human rights, terrorism, transnational crime, climate change, environmental threats, poverty, rogue nuclear arms activity, pandemics and others. Nor, I would argue, is there no international consensus on the nature of threats to security, most notably collective security, or on the methods to meet these threats. Nor is it about the failure of the UN to adjust to the existing global power structure. It should be the global powers that should adjust to the body of international law and commonly shared human values underpinning the UN and embodied in the UN Charter. I believe the real crisis is, according to Muchkund Dubey, the former Foreign Secretary of India, well worth reflecting on and is:

The real crisis is that the more powerful among the Member States now want to go back on this body of international law and on these common values, and are bent upon continuing to turn a blind eye to the obvious inequities and imbalances in rules and regimes which govern international relations. The crisis lies in these countries having put themselves beyond the pale of some of the key instruments and frameworks of multilateral control, surveillance and constraints. The crisis lies in their preference for ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘exemptionism’ or for ‘multilateralism a la carte’. The crisis does not so much lie in occasional paralysis in decision-making, but in the built-in system of unequal decision-making and decision under pressure based on the exploitation of the vulnerability of the weaker Member States.

The Australian government, I suggest, has an obligation to our people, our region and our planet to strengthen the multilateral, rules based system. It does not have the right to tear it down along with others. Nor does it have the right to stand idly by in the name of some brave new unilateral world whose central organising principle is an ill-defined unilateralism with a nondescript moral purpose. The Australian government has instead a duty to help build up the rules based system given it does not argue for any alternative system. This is the mark of true statesmanship rather than the stuff of rank politics. Indeed, those are the words of our current Prime Minister issued on 25 April 2005 to the UN Association of Australia and the Australian Institute of International Affairs. I am glad there is a new regime with its attitude to the UN and I am glad there is one worldwide. Multilateralism is the best of an evolving system, not unilateralism and not multilateralism a la carte.

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