Russell Trood (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is probably fair to say that there are few international organisations which are more widely vilified, more widely admired and more widely misunderstood than the United Nations. For over 60 years, the UN has been an integral part of the landscape of modern international relations; yet controversy and confusion abound over its roles and responsibilities and over its value and effectiveness. For all this, however, I believe that we would all have cause for deep regret if the UN were to suddenly collapse or lose its capacity for effective action. It is time that we in the international community, and in Australia in particular, recognise the danger to the UN’s legitimacy and encourage a serious, renewed effort to address its weaknesses and shortcomings. The UN needs reform, and Australia is among those countries whose voice could be important in bringing it about.

The vision for an international organisation of universal membership and broad mandate emerged from the ruin and wreckage of the Second World War. The charter was adopted at San Francisco on 25 June 1945, and the organisation itself came into existence four months later, with a membership of just 51 countries. The charter was as visionary as its agenda was ambitious:

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war …

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights …

to establish … respect for the obligations arising from treaties …

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom

In the 61 years since 1945, we have put a man on the moon, eradicated smallpox and unravelled DNA, the building block of life—all signal achievements—yet, in that period, there has not been one day without war or conflict somewhere in the world, not one week when basic human rights have not been systematically abused, and not one year when hundreds of thousands of people have not starved to death. Measured against these realities, the UN has certainly fallen well short of its high ideals.

But perhaps we should not be too quick to condemn the UN for its failures. The organisation now has a membership of around 200 countries. They exhibit a diversity of social values, political cultures and economic circumstances well beyond anything easily imagined by the UN’s founders. As a result, it is often a fraught exercise to secure agreement on any but the most anodyne of policy decisions. It is both comforting and, perhaps for some, rather frustrating that the UN has no ability to act of its own accord. It is a creature of the international community and it is beholden to it. It can do no more and no less than that community, or at least an influential section of it, may permit. If the UN has failed to address pressing issues on the international agenda and deserves criticism for its delinquency, then the international community also deserves censure.

Few things so vividly underscore this reality than the agonising search for a Security Council resolution in relation to the current situation across the Israeli-Lebanese border. As divided as the principal parties have been, it has taken weeks to arrive at an appropriate form of words for a resolution that will end the conflict. And even now it remains unclear whether the ceasefire will be fully accepted and followed by the combatants. Some will see this as a failure. More correctly, it is a reflection of the division of opinion on the issue. This has always been the UN’s burden—and it has often been costly, as the debacles in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, among many others, testify.

Given the realities of UN policymaking, no country would be wise to place its security solely in the hands of the United Nations. Certainly I would not wish Australia to do so; but nor should Australia be uncritical of the UN’s failings. Some of its decisions and actions have been deeply offensive and have directly challenged the political and social values that we most cherish as members of a liberal democracy. The corruption within UNESCO in the 1980s, the disgraceful subversion of the role of the old Human Rights Commission, and the General Assembly’s 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism all come to mind as examples. We cannot and should not stand by as uncritical observers when the UN acts in ways that challenge our interests or offend our values.

Yet we are part of the international community. Accordingly, we would be foolish if we did not recognise that there are occasions when the UN can serve our interests. As a middle power with an inherently limited capacity to shape every event to its own ends, Australia can benefit from the multilateralism that is the essence of the UN way. Through the UN, norms of international behaviour are established and countries which are disinclined to play by international rules are encouraged to comply. Tensions can be dissipated and, occasionally, more serious conflicts can be avoided. The natural instinct of great powers to rule in their own interests is blunted, and Australia’s policy preferences can be accommodated through coalition building. All of these things contribute to order and security in an international system where anarchy is a constant threat to peace and stability.

The UN should not be approached in a suffusion of fuzzy and sentimental expectations that it will always deliver acceptable outcomes to challenging international problems. In today’s world we need a more hard-headed assessment of its benefits. We can see those benefits in the considerable contribution the United Nations has made towards resolving conflict through its peacekeeping activities. These now reach back over half a century and include missions in places as widely dispersed as Kashmir, Suez, the Congo, the Sinai, Namibia, and many more—including, of course, East Timor.

Brian Urquhart, a former Under-Secretary-General of the UN, once said, ‘Like penicillin, the UN came across peacekeeping while looking for something else.’ The international community should be grateful for this serendipitous good fortune, because UN peacekeeping is an important institution. It is of continuing relevance to the international community, as the new mission going into Lebanon vividly demonstrates. We cannot ignore the contribution which the specialised agencies make to the civilising of international life. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organisation, the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the World Trade Organisation—to name a few—are all part of the UN system. Each in its own way frequently makes a valuable contribution to the management of international affairs.

But, for all the good it does, few of us should be under any illusion that the UN is not in need of serious reform. The management structure is bureaucratic, its decision making is ponderous, the Security Council is unrepresentative of the modern world, the funding mechanisms need an overhaul and much else is needed. It was to these ends that the Secretary-General, Kofi Anan, convened the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in 2003. When the panel’s report, entitled In larger freedom appeared in March 2005, the Secretary-General hailed it as a:

... blueprint for a new era of global cooperation and collective action.

But, as so often before, the UN’s members were unable to summon the political will for change.

At the world summit in New York in 2005 little of consequence was achieved. Some welcome progress was made in relation to the protection of human rights, including the replacement of the disgraced Human Rights Commission with a new Human Rights Council, but in other areas the summit was an abject failure. No progress was made on Security Council or managerial reform and a stalemate was all that could be achieved on some urgent issues, such as nuclear non-proliferation. The summit was a disappointment, to say the least.

We cannot afford to allow this reform agenda to lapse. In a globalised world, where the so-called ‘problems without passports’ such as global terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, health pandemics, transnational crime and environmental degradation all loom as threats, the UN offers an important line of defence against a slide into greater insecurity. We cannot rely upon the UN to solve these problems but, as the century goes on, the UN will struggle to serve the international community effectively if reform does not take place. The UN must be made ready for the growing challenges of the 21st century. We can be under few illusions that this will be easy. It will require a significant shift in UN policy, and no doubt will not be possible until a new Secretary-General is installed in 2007.

But it is in Australia’s national interests, and we are among several key countries uniquely placed to agitate successfully for reform. Australia was a forceful participant at the San Francisco conference when the charter was negotiated, and we became one of the UN’s founding members. We have provided a President of the General Assembly. We have maintained a very active diplomatic presence within the organisation’s key deliberative forums throughout its 61 years of history. We have consistently made strong contributions to many of its peacekeeping missions and the work of many of its specialised agencies. In short, we have the credibility needed to press for change, and we should work with others to advance its progress.

In concluding, I recall the words of the murdered second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold. He once remarked:

The UN was not created to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell.

The need for salvation is as real today as when those words were uttered half a century ago. For all the patience we must summon, for all the challenges we must confront and for all the frustrations we must endure as a member of the UN, all would be magnified many times over if the organisation were to lose its legitimacy within the international community. The current Secretary-General has noted that the United Nations has suffered a decline in confidence. He is right. A slide towards crisis can only be avoided by extensive reform. Australia should commit its power and purpose to this end—and do it sooner rather than later.