CAMERON MILNER: The woke United Nations has outlived its usefulness to Australia

The United Nations is going the way of the dinosaurs; it’s overly large and no longer suited to its fast-changing external environment.

It’s time Australia recognised the need to unhitch our future security from the UN alone and fully embrace our true friends and long-term allies, the US, UK and democracies such as Israel.

The UN was a good idea after the horrors of two world wars in 20 years, but it is now past its use-by date, and Australia needs to be thinking now about how the future looks.

The UN has been its own worst enemy, pursuing woke agendas and issuing meaningless statements of condemnation ignored by all except the circle jerk of NGOs, diplomats and hangers-on who are the only ones to think the organisation has any clout left.

The UN-sponsored recognition of a Palestinian state — with no plan to deal with Hamas — was probably the last nail in the coffin. It showed the UN at its weakest; a virtual-signalling darling of the commentariat.

That the Gaza ceasefire was brokered by Donald Trump, not the UN, speaks volumes for its utter irrelevancy. The proposed peacekeeping force of fellow Arab nations won’t be donning the UN’s blue helmets anytime soon.

Still, the UN continue to think they are running the most sought-after club in town.

They have tapped rivers of gold to build a bureaucracy that’s being listened to less and less.

The UN run the climate change conferences around the world. An opportunity to circle the world in private jets, pass commentary on the developed industrialised world while running a protection racket for China’s emissions. Yet they still expect to be taken seriously.

The UN actually says China, the world’s largest carbon polluter since 2006, responsible for 30 per cent of global emissions, is somehow a special case and deserves a “developing country” free ride.

Is it any wonder the US under President Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement?

Then we have the UNRWA, the aid organisation specifically set up to help Palestinians. UNRWA disgraced itself by aiding and abetting the terrorist organisation Hamas. Hamas stole over 90 per cent of all UNRWA aid and profiteered from the misery of Gazans.

UNRWA said in 2022 — a full year before the October 7 atrocities — that 1.5 million Gazans were starving daily on their watch.

And let’s not forget the Hamas command centre under the UNRWA office or the many of their employees who fought for Hamas, including on October 7.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there.

The UN Independent International Commission has apparently determined that Israel has engaged in genocide in Gaza. The UN-backed International Court of Justice has issued arrest warrants for democratically elected members of the Israeli government who acted in self-defence and were charged in absentia.

The UN has singularly failed to rein in rogue states or end global conflicts.

One of its stated aims is to defend human rights around the world.

They were painfully quiet after the massacre of innocents on October 7, hopelessly ineffective in Africa against ethnic and religious cleansing and in defending the rights of minority groups like the Uyghur, lest they offend China.

Then of course, we had the farce of the UN World Health Organisation being China-subservient during the global pandemic of COVID-19.

The egalitarian principle that every member nation gets one vote has just meant China has bought influence and their votes.

The UN has built a bloated organisation that seeks to be the global morality police, but no longer with any moral authority of its own.

Countries — be they Russia, China or the US — are taking more and more unilateral actions and ignoring the pronouncements from the UN.

The UN passed motions asking Iran not to go nuclear, yet it took Trump and Israel to bomb them to protect the world from an Islamist nation obsessed with Israel’s destruction.

The UN has painted itself into a corner of total irrelevance.

Middle power Australia has been the beneficiary of the UN’s stabilising influence in the past. But that’s made us flabby and complacent, unfit to protect our nation.

Australia may well have had Labor’s Doc Evatt there at the start of the UN, but that’s not an excuse for nostalgia to replace common sense now.

In a world that’s more dangerous than it has been in a generation, we can’t rely on some meaningless motion being passed at the UN General Assembly any longer.

We can’t hope the toothless tiger of the UN will do much more than tweet something and hope someone — anyone — was still listening to them.

Australia needs real friends and old allies to navigate our way ahead.

AUKUS is vital. So is a much bigger army, navy and air force.

So too is not taking 10 months to meet President Trump and being the 57th world leader he’d met with in his current term of office.

The UN has been the victim of its own wokeness. Its ease at being used as a mouthpiece for others political agendas and its fundamental weakness at reigning in conflicts around the world have made it irrelevant at best.

The UN has become a self parody; an episode of Utopia but with global bureaucrats and over-entitled diplomats.

Our future won’t be secured by Penny Wong prattling on at a UN lectern. It’s dependent on alliances and relationships that transcend the quagmire of mediocrity that is today’s UN.

Its time Australia unhitched its future from the UN alone and made our own lasting alliances that can outlast the political dinosaur that is today’s UN.