Australia, 1995

I congratulate Mr. Diogo

Freitas do Amaral on his election to the presidency of this

session of the General Assembly. His election is a tribute

both to him and to Portugal, and Australia will work with

him to ensure that this historic fiftieth session is as

memorable as it could possibly be.

I join in warmly welcoming, as the 185th Member

State of the United Nations, our fellow South Pacific Forum

member Palau.

If we are to effectively prepare for our future we must

first be able to clearly see our past. If we are to see where

we must go, we must know where we have been: we must

be conscious of our failures, but we should be proud of our

successes.

The structure of today’s world community — of

sovereign, self-determined, independent States working

together on the basis of equality in a framework of

international law — simply did not exist before the Charter

of the United Nations came into being. There were

imaginings of it in the minds of many for a very long time,

and we saw emerge between the two world wars a pale

approximation of it with the League of Nations. But it was

at that special moment in San Francisco, 50 years ago, that

today’s concept of a community of nations was first truly

born. And that concept has passed the test of 50 years of

life.

Gifted though the authors of the Charter were, they

would I think be awed to see how very much their vision

of a globalized world has now been answered, and

exceeded. Today’s world is one world, a world in which no

individuals and no States can aspire to solve all their

problems or fulfil all their dreams alone. The ideas of San

Francisco have entered into the unconscious of people all

over the world. Those who refuse to acknowledge the

global character of our world, or who recoil from it and

retreat into unilateralism or, worse, isolationism, have

simply not understood the new dynamics that are at work.

Ours is an age in which we are called to more, not less,

cooperation — and to ever more, and more responsible,

sharing of our common destiny.

The ideas of San Francisco have assumed many

concrete forms, which have deepened and expanded over

the last five decades. States now habitually, virtually

automatically, conduct their relations with each other on

the basis of the United Nations Charter. We have added

continually to the corpus of international law and

agreements made pursuant to the Charter, in ways that

have touched every aspect of modern life. We have built

institutions that have sought to deliver to the peoples of

the world their most basic needs — for peace and

security, for economic well-being, and for dignity and

liberty.

It was natural that following a devastating world war

and the hideous brutality which accompanied it, the

Charter would have at its heart the maintenance of

international peace and security. So far, anyway, we have

passed the test of ensuring that the world would never

again be subjected to global conflict. The United Nations

has been, of course, deeply challenged in the maintenance

of peace, from the very beginning and ever since. There

are areas in which its attempts to maintain and restore

peace have been flawed, and where the United Nations

has faltered. But for all that has gone wrong in places like

Bosnia and Somalia and Rwanda we should not forget the

successes, like those in El Salvador, Cambodia and

Mozambique. To go back a generation, no one should

forget the role that was played by the Security Council

and the Secretary-General in that desperate month of

October 1962 when the hands of the clock were seconds

before midnight and the world did face potential nuclear

holocaust. And no one should forget the role that, for

example, the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty has played

in falsifying the almost universal prediction in the 1960s

that within two decades there would be 20 or more States

possessing nuclear weapons.

In development, in seeking to fulfil its commitment

to promote "social progress and better standards of life"

the United Nations has laboured hard, sometimes in very

difficult circumstances. The gap between developed and

developing countries remains unacceptably high; there

have been and continue to be difficulties with the

availability of resources for development assistance; and

we have to acknowledge the awful reality, according to

the World Bank, that 1.3 billion of our people still live in

absolute poverty. But in food and agriculture, in

employment and labour standards, in health, in education

and in building the infrastructure so vital to communities

in the developing world — roads, bridges, water

systems — the United Nations and its agencies have

worked relentlessly in the service of the human family. It

is because of the United Nations Children’s Fund

(UNICEF) that today 80 per cent of the world’s children

are immunized against six killer diseases. And this is just

10

one of hundreds of similar stories that the United Nations

can and should be telling.

Basic to the United Nations concept of the world

community was that it should operate under and foster the

development of law, justice and human rights. A

fundamental commitment of the United Nations is to

establish conditions under which justice may prevail,

international law will be respected and peace can be built.

In fulfilment of this charge, the United Nations has

provided the setting for the negotiation of over 300 major

treaties, including in such crucial fields as arms control,

transport, navigation and communications. This very

practical area of international cooperation has formed the

framework of a globalized world.

The Charter of the United Nations speaks not just of

securing better standards of life, but of those better

standards being enjoyed “in larger freedom”. And the

articulation, development and implementation of human

rights standards across the whole spectrum of rights —

economic, social and cultural as well as political and

civil — has been one of the most important and

constructive roles of the United Nations. One of the worst

of all denials of personal and political freedom was that

imposed by apartheid. The triumph over that evil was above

all a victory for those South Africans and their leaders

whose freedom and dignity apartheid had so long denied.

But it would ignore the testimony of history not to

recognize the importance of the role played by the General

Assembly and the Security Council in creating the

conditions for that to occur.

For the peoples of this world, no political right has

been more important than the right to self-determination.

The achievements of the United Nations in this field alone

are testimony to the indispensable role it has played in

human affairs, with hundreds of millions of people having

exercised their right to self-determination in these past 50

years. It is the great movement of decolonization, as much

as the cold war and its aftermath, that defines the modern

world as we now know it, and which shapes the world’s

agenda for the years that lie ahead.

The United Nations of the future will need to be,

above all, an organization which works and speaks for all

its Members, no matter how large or small, and whose

legitimacy is thus without question. It must be an

organization better oriented to performance, to delivery to

people of the things they need and have a right to expect.

And it must be an organization which seeks to reintegrate,

and better coordinate, the implementation of the three basic

objectives of the United Nations so clearly articulated at

San Francisco 50 years ago: the objectives of peace —

meeting the need for security; of development —

meeting economic needs; and of human rights and

justice — meeting the need for individual and group

dignity and liberty.

In the peace agenda, disarmament and arms control

continue to be of crucial importance, and a major

challenge immediately ahead will be to maintain the

momentum of multilateral disarmament and

non-proliferation efforts. The decision by the Review and

Extension Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the

Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to extend the

Treaty indefinitely was, and remains — despite what has

happened since — the right decision. The work on a

comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty must be brought to

conclusion, as promised, in the first half of 1996. We

must also begin as soon as possible negotiations on a

treaty to ban the production of fissile material for nuclear-

weapons purposes. A further helpful step, although more

difficult to achieve, would be a regime requiring all States

to declare and account for their present stocks of fissile

material. The basic objective in all of this is to move

towards the goal that is agreed by all — and it should

never be forgotten that it has been agreed by all —

namely, that we will, ultimately, eliminate all nuclear

weapons.

It is in this context particularly that the decisions by

France and China to continue nuclear testing are to be so

strongly deplored. The environmental consequences are

bad enough of setting off an explosion more than five

times the size of that which destroyed Hiroshima — as

France did yesterday on the fragile atoll of Fangataufa in

Australia’s Pacific neighbourhood. But the nuclear policy

consequences are even worse. This is not the time to be

reinforcing nuclear stockpiles and asserting their ongoing

deterrent role: the world wants and needs to be moving in

the opposite direction.

This is the time to be negotiating away those

stockpiles, and building verification systems of the kind

we did with the chemical weapons Convention — which

still needs to be ratified to come into effect — and I urge

those States that have not yet acceded to that Convention

to do so urgently. This is not the time to be encouraging

scepticism about the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty, as

the Chinese and French tests are doing. It is, rather, the

time for the nuclear Powers to be encouraging the

universal observance of that Treaty in the way that they

best can: by showing that they themselves are absolutely

11

serious about moving to eliminate nuclear weapons from

the face of the globe. The best way for them to do that

right now is for France and China to immediately end their

testing programmes; for all the nuclear-weapon States to

sign the nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties that now exist in

the South Pacific and elsewhere; and for those States to

commit themselves wholeheartedly to negotiating a

genuinely comprehensive, zero-threshold comprehensive

test-ban treaty into place by the middle of next year.

The past few turbulent years of United Nations

experience on the ground in peace-keeping and peace

enforcement has underlined the need for it to improve the

effectiveness of its work in these important fields. Australia

has welcomed the Secretary-General’s further work in this

area in his very lucid January 1995 “Supplement to An

Agenda for Peace'”. In our own contributions to the debate

on these issues, we have argued for the clearest possible

thinking to be given to the achievability of objectives right

across the whole spectrum of responses to security

problems — from peace-building to peace maintenance to

peace restoration to peace enforcement.

We have consistently argued, and I make the point

again very briefly today, that if the United Nations is to be

able to meet effectively the security challenges of the

post-cold-war world it must begin to devote more resources

to preventive strategies than to reactive strategies. It just

makes more sense to concentrate on prevention than on

after-the-event peace restoration, both for inter-State

conflict and in the unhappily now far more common case

of intra-State conflict. Violent conflicts are always far more

difficult and costly to resolve than non-violent disputes, and

failed States are extremely difficult to piece back together.

All that said, it has been encouraging to see the

progress made in recent days towards resolving the conflict

in the former Yugoslavia, and in moving the Middle East

peace process a substantial new step forward. The United

Nations should always be prepared to lend its support and

encouragement to preventive diplomacy and to peacemaking

efforts taking place outside the formal framework of the

United Nations system, and it should remain particularly

alert to the opportunities envisaged in the Charter for

advancing the peace agenda through regional organizations.

In the latter context we in the Asia-Pacific have been very

pleased with the rapid evolution of the new Regional Forum

of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN)

over the last two years as a new vehicle for dialogue and

trust and confidence-building, in our own region.

Particular attention has been given recently, as we all

know, to the question of improving the rapid reaction

capability of the United Nations, and I warmly commend

the work that has been done to clarify our thinking on

these issues by the Netherlands and Danish Governments,

and particularly in the major Canadian report, “Towards

a Rapid Reaction Capability for the United Nations”, just

presented to the Assembly. The very useful emphasis of

the Canadian study is on the idea of improving the United

Nations system’s capability at the centre first, particularly

in the area of operational planning, and thereby

encouraging greater willingness by troop contributors to

give practical and more urgent effect to stand-by

arrangements. No organizational arrangements will ever

substitute for clear-eyed decision-making by the Security

Council on the responses and mandates that are

appropriate to particular situations, but the implementation

of changes of this kind should make us much better

equipped as an international community to deal in future

with situations like that in Rwanda, where last time our

response was so tragically inadequate.

The security agenda tends to dominate most popular

perceptions of the United Nations role, but we in the

international community must never allow our attention to

be diverted from the demands of the development agenda,

now as pressing as ever. When historians hundreds of

years hence look back at this last half century, the cold

war and its aftermath will not be the only great

international current to be remembered; it will be the

giant step of decolonization that looms at least as large.

Decolonization led to the emergence of a world

economy which for many years has been seen as divided

principally into two categories, the developed and the

developing countries. But today, the picture is more

complicated. Mainly for reasons of change in technology

and information systems, we do now live in a global

economy. No part of it is entirely separate from the

whole, and no one can act in that global economy in an

effective way, entirely alone. Because we live in that kind

of economy a key part of our action to deal with the

problems of development must, accordingly, be

multilateral, and the key problem facing us, both

multilaterally and in our bilateral, donor roles, is that

within the global economy the gap between rich and poor

countries, despite all efforts to resist this, has grown. The

fact that some 1.3 billion of the 5.7 billion people alive

today live at an unacceptable level of poverty is morally

insupportable, and dangerous.

12

The United Nations of the future must, as a matter of

the most urgent priority, forge a new agenda for

development and reshape its relevant institutions to

implement that agenda effectively. This is as important as

any task it faces in the service of the human family and in

recreating itself as an institution fit for the twenty-first

century. The agenda is available for all to see. It has been

fully described in the six global conferences held by the

United Nations in the past four years — the conferences on

children, the environment, human rights, population, social

development, and now women. There have also been

important studies by the international financial institutions

and by academic institutions. We know now what we need

to do. We must resolve, politically, to do it.

In pursuing these various themes it is important,

however, for us not to lose sight of those geographical

regions where particular focus is still required, and where

the United Nations role is more vital than ever. Africa’s

influence and importance continues to be felt throughout the

world in every field of human activity and culture. Exciting

political developments, including the ending of apartheid,

have been accompanied by major new efforts to restructure

and reform national economies. Those efforts demand the

continued support of the international community, and in

particular the United Nations system. Other regions where

the United Nations needs to play a particular role to

facilitate economic and social development are the Central

Asian republics, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and in a

number of areas in the Indian Ocean region.

The Indian Ocean region is one where Australia, as an

Indian Ocean country as well as an Asia-Pacific country,

has been promoting, with others in the region, both

governmental and non-governmental efforts to enhance

regional cooperation, particularly on economic and trade

issues. The success to date of the Asia-Pacific Economic

Cooperation Council (APECC) in developing cooperative

strategies in the Asia-Pacific region to promote prosperity

and stability, complementing the United Nations broader

work for these goals at the international level, does offer

one possible model for the countries of the Indian Ocean

Rim to consider.

The institutions of the United Nations relevant to

economic and social development are urgently in need of

reform. The General Assembly has created the high-level

Working Group needed for political consensus on this. That

must complete its work in this fiftieth anniversary year, and

it must do so creatively, setting aside past vested interests

in the system. We must implement the development agenda

of the future in a way which ensures a productive and fair

place in the global economy for all States.

The complex and interlinked system of principles,

legal regimes and machinery that the United Nations has

established to promote human rights is one of its major

achievements. It must be built upon and strengthened,

recognizing always that the human rights whose

universality and indivisibility we assert are about

economic and social and cultural rights just as much as

about the civil and political rights on which the developed

countries tend to focus so much attention. Priority must

be given to the major international human rights

instruments and machinery and the committees which

monitor their implementation. By this means we can

provide a frank, non-confrontational and constructive

dialogue amongst States parties.

The advisory services and technical-assistance

activities of the United Nations can also play a role in

promoting the observance of human rights and the

implementation of democratic principles around the world.

Programmes to help countries develop their own national

institutions and systems to promote and protect human

rights will enhance their capacity to prevent violations

and, accordingly, make a direct contribution to human

security.

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized enough that the

peace and development and human-rights agendas I have

mentioned are all interlinked. We need to avoid the

compartmentalization that occurred throughout the cold-

war years, in which peace-and-security issues,

development issues and human-rights and justice issues

were isolated in completely different conceptual and

institutional boxes. Any viable modern concept of

international peace, let alone peace within States, must

recognize that peace and security and development are

indissolubly bound up with each other. There can be no

sustainable peace without development and no

development without peace. And human rights, in the

fullest sense, as I have described them, have to come into

the equation too. There is unlikely to be sustainable peace

in any society if material needs are satisfied but needs for

dignity and liberty are not.

No agendas of substance, no matter how clear in

concept, how well-coordinated in principle they may be,

will mean anything to people if they are not able to be

implemented through effective organizational structures

and instruments. There has been widespread recognition

in recent years, as we all know, that the structure of the

13

United Nations that grew up during the past 50 years is

simply not adequate to the tasks of the next.

We now have an embarrassment of riches with respect

to ideas and proposals for change to the United Nations.

Just as it is urgent that we complete work on “An Agenda

for Development” in this fiftieth year, it is equally urgent

that we complete the work of the high-level Working Group

on the reform of the United Nations system also within this

fiftieth year.

The structural problem that it is probably the most

urgently necessary to resolve, if the credibility of the whole

United Nations system is to be maintained, is that of the

Security Council. The debate on this subject has been long

and detailed and is familiar to all of us. Australia’s definite

view is that it has been going on for long enough, and we

are now at the time when action is required. Last year, we

submitted some illustrative models on the basis of which

consideration could be given to an expansion in the

membership of the Council. Others have made very specific

proposals. Again, in this field there is no lack of ideas.

What we have to do now is move to the stage of forging

political consensus on a new Security Council, which will

be effective, represent the whole membership of the United

Nations and sensibly reflect the realities of today and the

future, not those of 1945.

There are many structural changes and personnel

reforms that could and should be made within the United

Nations system to improve its efficiency. But ultimately the

quality of that system depends on what we are prepared to

pay for it.

It is important to appreciate at the outset the order of

magnitude of the sums we are talking about. The core

functions of the United Nations, involving the Headquarters

in New York, the Offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi,

and the five regional Commissions, cost just US$ 1.2

billion between them. To take just one comparison, last

year the annual budget of just one Department in one

United States city, the New York Police Department,

exceeded that $1.2 billion by $600 million.

The total number of personnel needed to run those

United Nations core functions is around 10,700. Compare

the local administration of my own national capital,

Canberra — again, just one city in one of the 185 States

Members of the United Nations — which has some 22,000

employees on the public payroll.

The cost of United Nations peace operations last

year, in Cyprus, Western Sahara, the former Yugoslavia

and 13 other locations, was $3.2 billion. That is less than

what it takes to run just three New York City

Departments: the Police Department, the Fire Department

and the Department of Correction.

If we add to the core functions of the United Nations

all the related programmes and organs, including the

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the Office of

the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

(UNHCR), the United Nations Children’s Fund

(UNICEF), the United Nations Conference on Trade and

Development (UNCTAD) and the International Drug

Control Programme (UNDCP), we are still talking about

a total of around 33,000 people and a total budget,

including both assessed and voluntary contributions, of

$6.3 billion. That sounds a lot — rather more than just

for the core functions — but it is not quite so much when

one considers, for example, that the annual global

turnover of just one international accounting firm, Price

Waterhouse, is around $4.5 billion.

If we go further than that and add to the core

functions and related programmes all the other specialized

programmes and agencies of the entire United Nations

family — agencies such as the Food and Agriculture

Organization (FAO), the International Labour

Organization (ILO), the United Nations Educational,

Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the

World Health Organization (WHO) and the International

Atomic Energy Agency, and put into the equation as well

the Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank group

and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which

between them employ nearly 10,000 people and spend $5

billion annually — we are still talking about total United

Nations-system personnel of just around 61,400 and a

total United Nations-system dollar cost of $18.2 billion.

A total of 61,400 may sound like a lot of people,

and it is, but perhaps it is not so many when we consider

that more than this number — 65,000, in fact — are

employed by the three Disney theme parks in California,

Florida and France. Three times as many people sell

McDonald’s hamburgers around the world as work for the

United Nations system. And $18.2 billion might be a lot

of money, but just one major multinational corporation,

Dow Chemical, which happens also to have 61,000

employees world wide, has an annual revenue in excess

of $20 billion.

14

When we put the financial problems of the United

Nations into this kind of perspective, as I think we ought to

do more often, the solutions do not really look quite so

hard. Surely, between us, with our combined defence

expenditure alone of around $767 billion, the 185 Member

States can find that kind of money. But, of course, the

problem of paying for the United Nations has now become

critical because of the unwillingness or inability of so many

of the Member States, including the biggest of us all, to

pay their assessed contributions, notwithstanding that the

cost of these for the major developed-country contributors

works out at between $7 and $15 per head per year — the

price of no more than one or two movie tickets in this city.

We have a short-term problem, which I believe can

and should be solved within the United Nations system by

allowing the United Nations to borrow from the World

Bank. But we also have a longer-term problem which,

frankly, does not look as though it is going to be solved,

however much we continue to work at adjusting assessment

scales, exhort Member States to pay up and remind them of

the consequences under Article 19 of the Charter if they

fail to do so.

So what are we to do about all this? In my judgement,

it is time to look again — this time very seriously

indeed — at the options which exist for supplementing

Member States’ contributions with external sources of

finance. The practicability of collecting a levy on every one

of the $300,000 billion worth of foreign-exchange

transactions that now occur every year remains to be fully

assessed, but simple arithmetic tells us that if we strike a

rate of just .001 per cent for such a levy, which hardly

seems likely to have any significant economic

consequences, we could generate $3 billion in revenue.

Moreover, we know that if we could impose a levy on

international airline passengers of $10 for every

international sector flown, which would be very easily

collectible indeed, we could also raise $3 billion: nearly the

whole annual cost of United Nations peace operations.

There are also other revenue options that, to a greater

or lesser extent, have the same rational nexus with United

Nations costs as these do, in that they involve transactions

which are international, take place within a framework of

law and cooperation provided by the United Nations and

can be harmed by a breakdown in international peace and

security — precisely the areas in which the United Nations

has a fundamental responsibility.

But traditionally, a threshold objection of principle has

been mounted against any such talk. Member States, it has

been said, should themselves wholly own the United

Nations system; if the Secretariat had direct access to

revenue other than assessed contributions of Member

States, who knows what adventures it might be inclined

to get up to. But ownership and control are totally

separate issues. The United Nations operates on a

sovereign-equality principle, which means that, for

example, those six States which between them pay at

present over 65 per cent of the United Nations regular

budget should under no circumstances have greater

authority over how it is spent than the overwhelming

majority of Members, each of which pays much lesser

proportions of the total.

Whatever the funding sources involved, the crucial

question is surely how and by whom the money is spent.

It is absolutely crucial that there be appropriate control of

funds by Member States, with all the accountability

mechanisms that implies. But that does not mean that

those Member States should themselves have to provide

all the funds in the first place.

In talking about these issues to many of my

ministerial colleagues from a wide range of countries and

across all continents over the last few days, I have found

the almost unanimous reaction that the present, and likely

continuing, financial crisis of the United Nations demands

that these issues be looked at again, without any

prejudgements of the questions of principle or

practicability involved.

I would suggest accordingly that the time is right for

the Secretary-General to convene once again a high-level

advisory group, like the Volcker-Ogata group established

in 1992, with a mandate to think explicitly through what

has hitherto been more or less unthinkable: how to fund

the United Nations system in a way that reaches out

beyond the resources that Member States are prepared to

put directly into it. Such a group could report to or work

with a committee of representatives of Member States —

one in existence already, such as the High-Level Working

Group on the Financial Situation of the United Nations or

one newly created for the purpose.

A great deal of work has already been or is being

done on many of these issues, and it should be possible

for such a group to report within six months or so —

certainly within a year. The parameters of the debate have

to be changed, and for that to happen we need an

authoritative new statement of the art of the possible.

Here, as elsewhere, we have to move forward. We

have to look to new ideas. We have to encourage

15

humankind’s ingenuity to search for better ways for States

to deal with each other as relationships take new shape, as

new States emerge and as problems which could not have

been conceived of a few years ago become the challenges

of the day.

We will fail to meet those challenges if we adhere

solely to the ideas and dogma of the past. The United

Nations was itself founded on a mixture of idealism and

pragmatism. Both were essential to build a new world 50

years ago, and in the past 50 years that idealism has not

disappeared. It was an important force in bringing about the

end of the cold war, and, more than anything else, it was

idealism that lay behind the process of decolonization,

which so shifted the tectonic plates of history.

To some idealism will always be the enemy of

practicality. But to others it will always involve, more than

anything else, the courage to take advantage of new

opportunities, ensuring that at least some of today’s ideals

will become tomorrow’s reality. Perhaps now, 50 years

beyond San Francisco, we need to renew that idealism and

walk down some of those uncharted paths that idealists

have always been prepared to tread.