[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 173 (Friday, November 3, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16687-S16690]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       THE UNITED NATIONS AT 50: LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING FORWARD

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, in response to a question I asked 
Dr. Jessica Mathews about an op-ed piece that appeared in the 
Washington Post, she sent me a speech made by Foreign Minister Gareth 
Evans of Australia.
  I took the trouble to read the speech, and it is a good summation of 
where the United Nations is, where it has been, and where it should go.
  Foreign Minister Evans points out the successes of the United 
Nations, like El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique, as well as areas 
where there are deficiencies. He calls upon the nations to move quickly 
on a chemical weapons convention, and I hope the United States would 
join in that effort.
  Of no small significance is his comparison of the costs of running 
the United Nations compared to other entities.
  Note these sentences from his address:
       The core functions of the U.N. (involving the Headquarters 
     in New York, the Offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi, and 
     the five regional Commissions) cost just $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 by $600 million.
       The total number of personnel needed to run those U.N.'s 
     core functions is around 10,700; compare the local 
     administration of my own national capital, Canberra--again 
     just one city in one of the U.N.'s 185 member states--which 
     employs some 22,000 people on the public payroll.
       The cost of the U.N.'s peace operations last year--in 
     Cyprus and the Western Sahara and the former Yugoslavia and 
     thirteen other locations--was $3.2 billion: that's less than 
     what it takes to run just three New York City Departments 
     (Police, Fire and Corrections).
       Add to the core functions of the U.N. all the related 
     programs and organs (including UNDP, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, 
     UNCTAD and International Drug Control) and you are 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 like a lot, but 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.
       Go further, and add to the core functions and the related 
     programs all the other specialized programs and agencies of 
     the entire U.N. family--that is, add agencies like the FAO, 
     ILO, UNESCO and WHO, plus the IABA, and put into the equation 
     as well the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank group 
     and the IMF, which between them employ nearly 10,000 people 
     and spend nearly $5 billion annually) and you are still 
     talking about total U.N. personnel of just around 61,400 and 
     a total U.N. system dollar cost of $18.2 billion.
  He also praises Canada's leadership in suggesting that we have a more 
effective system of responding to world emergencies, and I join him in 
lauding what Canada has done.
  I ask unanimous consent that the full statement be printed in the 
Record.
  The statement follows:

          The U.N. at Fifty: Looking Back and Looking Forward

 (Statement to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations by 
   Senator Gareth Evans, Foreign Minister of Australia, New York, 2 
                             October 1995)

        Mr. President, I congratulate you on your election to the 
     Presidency of this great Assembly. Your election is a tribute 
     both to you and to Portugal, and Australia will work with you 
     to ensure that this historic Fiftieth Session is as memorable 
     as it could possibly be. And I join in warmly welcoming, as 
     the UN's 185th member state, our fellow South Pacific Forum 
     member, Palau.
       If we are to effectively prepare for our future we must 
     first be able clearly to 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. There 
     were imaginings of it in the minds of many for a very long 
     time, and we saw emerge, between the World Wars, a pale 
     approximation of it with the League of Nations. But it was at 
     that special moment in San Francisco, fifty years ago, that 
     today's concept of a community of nations was first truly 
     born. And that concept has passed the test of fifty 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 
     globalised 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 fulfill all 
     their dreams 

[[Page S 16688]]
     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 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, that 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 UN 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 faced potential nuclear holocaust. And no one 
     should forget the role that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation 
     Treaty has played in falsifying the almost universal 
     prediction in the 1960s that within two decades there would 
     be twenty 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 still 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 UNICEF that today 80 percent 
     of the world's children are immunised against six killer 
     diseases. And this is just one of hundreds of similar stories 
     that the UN 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 
     three hundred 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 globalised world.
       The Charter of the United Nations spoke 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 and political and civil--has been 
     one of the UN's most important and constructive roles.
       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 the 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 last fifty years. 
     It is the great movement of decolonisation, as much as the 
     Cold War and its aftermath, that defines the modern world as 
     we 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 organisation 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 organisation better 
     oriented to performance, to delivery to people of the things 
     they need and have a right to expect. And it must be an 
     organisation which seeks to reintegrate, and better 
     coordinate, the implementation of the UN's three basic 
     objectives so clearly articulated at San Francisco fifty 
     years ago--the objectives of peace (meeting the need for 
     security), development (meeting economic needs) and human 
     rights and justice (meeting the need for individual and 
     group dignity and liberty).


                            the peace agenda

       Disarmament and arms control continue to be of crucial 
     importance in the peace agenda, and a major challenge 
     immediately ahead will be to maintain the momentum of 
     multilateral disarmament and non-proliferation efforts. The 
     decision by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review and 
     Extension Conference 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--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 soil of Fangataufa in Australia's 
     Pacific neighborhood. 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 needs still to be ratified 
     into effect (and I urge those states who have not yet acceded 
     to it to urgently do so). This is not the time to be 
     encouraging skepticism about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation 
     Treaty, as the French and Chinese tests are doing. It is, 
     rather, the time for the nuclear powers to be encouraging its 
     universal observance in the way that they best can--by 
     showing that they themselves are absolutely 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 programs; 
     for all the nuclear weapons states to sign on to the nuclear 
     weapons 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 CTBT 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 
     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 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 
     extreme difficult to piece back together.
       All that said, it has been encouraging to see the progress 
     made in recent days toward resolving the conflict in the 
     former Yugoslavia, and in moving the Middle East peace 
     process a substantial new step forward. The UN should always 
     be prepared to lend its support and encouragement to 
     preventive diplomacy and peace making efforts taking place 
     outside the formal framework of the UN system, and it should 
     remain particularly alert to the opportunities envisaged in 
     the Charter for advancing the peace agenda through regional 
     organisations. In this context, we in the Asia Pacific have 
     been pleased with the rapid evolution of the ASEAN Regional 
     Forum 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 to the 
     question of improving the United Nations' rapid reaction 
     capability, and I  

[[Page S 16689]]

     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 UN 
     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 standby arrangements. 
     No organizational arrangements will substitute for clear-
     eyed decisionmaking 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 the future with situations like that 
     in Rwanda, where last time our response was so tragically 
     inadequate.


                         the development agenda

       The security agenda tends to dominate most popular 
     perceptions of the UN's 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 decolonisation that looms at 
     least as large.
       Decolonisation led to the emergence of a world economy 
     which for many years has been seen as divided principally 
     into two categories--the developed and developing countries. 
     But today the picture is more complicated. Mainly for reasons 
     of change in technology and information systems, we now live 
     in a global economy. No part of it is entirely separate from 
     the whole, and no-one can act in that economy in an effective 
     way entirely alone. Because we live in a global economy a key 
     part of our action to deal with the problems of development 
     must 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.
       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 21st Century. The agenda is available 
     for all to see. It has been fulsomely described in the six 
     global conferences held by the United Nations in the last 
     four years--the conferences on children, the environment, 
     human rights, population, social development and 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 geographic regions where 
     particular focus is still required, and where the UN's 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 UN system. 
     Other regions where the UN 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, 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 APEC in developing 
     cooperative strategies in the Asia Pacific region to promote 
     prosperity and stability, complementing the UN's broader work 
     for these goals at the international level, offers 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. It 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.


                              human rights

       The complex and inter-linked 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, social and cultural rights just 
     as much as the civil and political rights on which developed 
     countries tend to focus their 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. Programs to help 
     countries develop national institutions and systems to 
     promote and protect human rights will enhance their capacity 
     to prevent violations and make a direct contribution to human 
     security.


                       the organizational agenda

       It cannot be emphasized enough that the peace and 
     development and human rights agendas I have mentioned are all 
     inter- linked. We need to avoid the compart- mentalisation 
     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, 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 and 
     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 that the 
     structure of the United Nations that grew up during the last 
     fifty 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 
     organization. Just as it is urgent that we complete work on 
     An Agenda for Development in this fiftieth year, it is 
     equally urgent that we compete the work of the high-level 
     working group on the reform of the United Nations system, 
     also within the fiftieth year.
       The structural problem that it is probably the most 
     urgently necessary to resolve, if the credibility of the UN 
     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 
     where 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 must now do is move 
     to the stage of forging political consensus on a new Security 
     Council which will be effective, represents 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 UN 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 UN (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 by $600 million.
       The total number of personnel needed to run those UN's core 
     functions is around 10,700: compare the local administration 
     of my own national capital, Canberra--again just one city in 
     one of the UN's 185 member states--which employs some 22,000 
     people on the public payroll.
       The cost of the UN's peace operations last year--in Cyprus 
     and the Western Sahara and the former Yugoslavia and thirteen 
     other locations--was $3.2 billion: that's less than what it 
     takes to run just three New York City Departments (Police, 
     Fire and Corrections).
       Add to the core functions of the UN all the related 
     programs and organs (including UNDP, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, 
     UNCTAD and International Drug Control) and you are 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, but 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.
       Go further, and add to the core functions and the related 
     programs all the other specialized programs and agencies of 
     the entire UN family--that is, add agencies like the FAO, 
     ILO, UNESCO and WHO, plus the IAEA, and put into the equation 
     as well the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank group 
     and the IMF, which between then employ nearly 10,000 people 
     and spend nearly $5 

[[Page S 16690]]
     billion annually) and you are still talking about total UN personnel of 
     just around 61,400 and a total UN system dollar cost of $18.2 
     billion.
       61,400 may sound like a lot of people, but not when you 
     consider that more than this number--65,000 in fact--are 
     employed by the three Disneylands in California, Florida and 
     France. Three times as many people--183,000--sell McDonald's 
     hamburgers around the world as work for the UN 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.
       When you put the UN's financial problems into this kind of 
     perspective, the solutions do not look quite so hard. Surely 
     between us the 185 member states, with our combined defence 
     expenditure alone of around $767 billion (as calculated in 
     the UNDP's 1994 Human Development Report), can find that kind 
     of money? But of course the problem of paying for the UN 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 can and should be 
     solved within the UN system by allowing the UN 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, and however much we 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 judgment, it is 
     time to look again--this time very seriously indeed--at the 
     options which do exist for supplementing member states' 
     contributions by external sources of finance. The 
     practicability of collecting a levy on every one of the $300 
     thousand 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 for such a levy 
     of just .001 per cent--which hardly seems likely to have any 
     significant economic consequences--we could generate $3 
     billion. And we know that if we could levy international 
     airline passengers just $10 for every international sector 
     flown--which would be very easily collectable indeed--we 
     could also raise $3 billion, nearly the whole annual cost of 
     UN peace operations.
       There are as well other revenue options that have, to a 
     greater or lesser extent, the same rational nexus with UN 
     costs that these do, in the sense that they involve 
     transactions which are international, which 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 own the UN system; if the 
     Secretariat had direct access to non-member state revenue, 
     who knows what adventures it might be inclined to get up to. 
     But ownership and control are totally separate issues. The UN 
     operates on a sovereign equality principle which means that, 
     for example, those six states which presently between them 
     pay over 55 per cent of the UN's regular budget should under 
     no circumstances have greater authority over how it is spent 
     than the overwhelming majority of members who each pay much 
     lesser proportions of the total.
       Surely, whatever the funding sources involved, the crucial 
     question is 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 doesn't mean that those member states 
     should themselves have to prove all the funds in the first 
     place.
       In talking to many of my foreign ministerial colleagues 
     from a wide range of countries and across all continents on 
     these issues over the last few days, I have found an almost 
     unanimous reaction that the UN's present and likely 
     continuing financial crisis demands that these issues be 
     looked at again, without any pre-judgments 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 explicitly to think through what has 
     hitherto been more or less unthinkable--how to fund the UN 
     system in a way that reaches out beyond the resources that 
     member states are prepared to directly put into it. Such a 
     group could report to, or work with, a committee of 
     representatives of member states--one in existence already 
     (like 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 been already, 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, and 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 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 fifty years ago, and in 
     the past fifty 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 decolonisation which 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, fifty years beyond San 
     Francisco, we need to renew that idealism, and walk down some 
     of the uncharted paths that idealists have always been 
     prepared to tread.

                                            WHAT THE UN SYSTEM COSTS                                            
                                               [1994: $US million]                                              
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Assessd         Voluntary                                      
           Elements of UN system              contributions    contributions    Total budgets       Personnel   
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Core functions (Secretariat [New York,                                                                          
 Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi], ICJ and                                                                           
 regional Commissions).....................          1,182.9            315.4          1,498.3           10,743 
Peace operations (UNFICYP, UNDOF, UNIFIL,                                                                       
 UNIKOM, MINURSO, UNAVEM, UNOMIG, UNOMIL,                                                                       
 UNAMIR, UNMIH, UNTAC, UNPROFOR, ONUMOZ,                                                                        
 UNOSOM II, ONUSAL, UNMLTIC)...............          3,234.9              0.0          3,234.9          [71,284]
Related programs and organs (UNCHS, UNCTAD,                                                                     
 UNDP, UNEP, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNIFEM,                                                                      
 UNITAR, UNRISD, UNRWA, WFP, International                                                                      
 Drug Control, International Trade Centre                                                                       
 and OPCW).................................          1,512.2          3,322.1          4,037.3           22,515 
Independent specialized agencies (FAO,                                                                          
 ICAO, ILO, IMO, ITU, UNESCO, UNIDO, UPU,                                                                       
 WHO, WIPO, WMO and IAEA)..................          2,113.1          1,671.4          3,784.5           18,179 
Bretton Woods Institutions (IBRD, IDA, IFC,                                                                     
 IFAD and IMF).............................            444.1          4,436.9          4,881.0            9,991 
                                            --------------------------------------------------------------------
      Total................................          8,490.2          9,745.8         10,236.0           61,428 
                                                                                                                
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes.--Budget data: for core functions, derived from 1994-95 data in proposed budget for biennium 1996-97 (A/50/
  6), halved to produce annual figure; for peace operations, provided by the Peacekeeping Financing Division;   
  for specialized agencies and IAEA, derived from relevant biennium budgets, halved in produce annual figure;   
  for related organs and programs and Bretton Woods Institutions, derived from UN and World Bank sources and    
  compiled by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and ALISAID, Canberra. Personnel data: core function      
  personnel include both established and extra-budgetary posts; peace operations figures as at 30 June 1994 from
  Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization in 1994 (A/48/1).                             

  

                          ____________________