Thanks very much for having me here, on this very warm Sydney day.
To excellencies, to friends can I say thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you.
Can I first acknowledge the traditional owners of these lands, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to the elders and to any First Nations people here today.
I want to start with a personal story. I just wanted to acknowledge a long-term member and a former president of the South Australian division of the United Nations Association of Australia, Lidia Moretti.
She had years of dedicated service to your organisation. She was also a member of the Committee for the Adelaide International Women's Day Breakfast – it's a breakfast I have hosted now for 23 years – I started very young! – and it is the largest IWD event in Australia so we're very proud of it.
Lidia passed away last month. I know she is missed by so many who had the pleasure of knowing her and working with her.
And people like Lidia are what makes this great association. I pay tribute to all of you for all that you do to help Australians understand and engage with our United Nations.
And I do want to thank you for inviting me to help frame your discussions at the conference – and I thank Gabriel for cutting his speech short. Sorry about that.
Well let's start with where we were I think just under a month ago.
The world's eyes were fixed on New York, where the leaders gathered for High Level Week at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly.
Nearly two years of concerted effort by countries to create the space for peace which culminated in the New York Declaration…
Which amongst other progress saw the Arab League condemn Hamas and reject its involvement in Palestine's future.
And we saw many countries, France, Portugal, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia recognise Palestine, to encourage new momentum for a two-state solution.
And we saw the pivotal meeting between President Trump and the leaders of the Arab and Muslim nations that helped land the terms of the 20 point peace plan that is now being implemented.
The United Nations was not an accidental setting for these big developments.
It still has unmatched convening power.
It still remains deeply meaningful to the vast majority of the world's countries and peoples – and it still carries weight as a place where peacemakers can come together.
But we can't kid ourselves: the UN is in crisis. It faces a budget reduction of 30 per cent, exacerbating its ongoing liquidity crisis.
And the UN's image today is too often one of falling short.
And there are many reasons for that.
Confidence is being undermined across all three pillars of the Charter – peace and security, development and human rights.
In sum, the world is becoming less equal, more unstable and more dangerous – and sadly there is little faith the UN system can meet the geostrategic circumstances that define our times…
The changing way major powers are engaging and asserting themselves...
The trend away from rules towards the exercise of power.
Many of us have observed we are living in the most difficult strategic circumstances since World War Two.
And as you know it is the settlement of that conflict which gave rise to modern multilateralism and the rules-based order…
A system predicated on the understanding that peace is built by the many, not only the great powers…
The understanding that each nation must make its own choices, exercising its agency to decide its destiny.
And that we must always seek to strengthen our multilateral engagement, because choosing to work together is central to preserving, and demonstrating, our sovereignty.
As central as it is, the United Nations ultimately exists in service of this purpose – it's not in itself the purpose.
And today's changing circumstances have more countries asking anew how we ensure we can live in a world where every country has a voice. Where no country dominates, and no country is dominated.
In particular, countries with substantial economies and capable tools of statecraft are determined to play a greater role in shaping regional and global international relations for the better - not content to leave our future world for the major powers to solve and decide alone.
As the Prime Minister said in his national statement in the General Assembly last month:
The creation of the international rules-based order owes much to the post-war leadership of the United States of America.
For the region Australia calls home, that stability has underpinned a generational economic transformation.
But we cannot ask – and should not expect - any one nation to uphold the rules or guarantee the security on which all of us depend.
The Prime Minister is right. Our changing circumstances are demanding more.
And you can expect that assertive middle powers, like Australia, will correspondingly work harder in existing and in new coalitions.
You see, building coalitions is central to our ability to assert our interests. They are diplomatic force multipliers.
This is clear in how much of Australian diplomacy is multilateral: not only through the UN, but also through the Pacific Islands Forum, ASEAN, G20, APEC, and the burgeoning minilateral groups like the Quad, CANZ (Canada-Australia-New Zealand), and MIKTA - which Australia is chairing in the year ahead.
We are strengthening our traditional partnerships - including just this week with our closest ally and principal strategic partner, the United States…
And we are also evolving the traditional concept of likemindedness, as our interests are affected by the changes we are experiencing.
And we are pursuing new alignments to better assert ourselves.
We are moving into a new era of amplified middle power diplomacy.
This will continue as we seek to work for our interests in an ever-more contested world – and as middle powers seek strategic balance in a multipolar world.
Countries well comprehend that while our interests are collectively served by working together to solve global problems, not every global problem we face can have a UN institutional solution.
And where the UN can offer the solution, we must ensure it is equipped to deliver it.
There has long been a need for reform. And that need has become starkly urgent as the UN now responds to its budget crisis.
So today in this room, a room of Australians with a deep interest in the United Nations, I want to begin a conversation with you about the future of the United Nations, and Australia's vision for it. And I want you to be part of that discussion.
You see as we celebrate 80 years, we can't revel in nostalgia.
We have to grasp the opportunity of this crisis, and of amplified middle power diplomacy, to shape the UN's future.
Because if we want the UN to have another 80 years, which we do – or even another ten years – we must reform it.
And I want to start this discussion about reform by underlining again how deeply invested most countries are in the multilateral system.
You see countries are making purposeful efforts to safeguard the rules and norms that underpin it.
And I want to demonstrate that point by telling you about something that happened on the Sunday before High Level Week.
I stood that day on the North Lawn of the UN Headquarters to launch the new Declaration for the Protection of Humanitarian Personnel.
A Declaration a year in the making. I initiated it at last year's High Level Week, because respect for international humanitarian law is being severely undermined.
And I want to thank all who were involved in bringing it to fruition, including Angela from DFAT who is here today.
2024 was the deadliest year on record for humanitarian personnel. More than 380 killed and hundreds more wounded and kidnapped. 2025 is on track to be worse still.
Australia felt this deeply with the IDF strike last year against World Central Kitchen vehicles, which killed Zomi Frankcom and her colleagues.
So what is this Declaration about?
The Declaration renews international commitment at the highest political level to upholding international humanitarian law and protecting aid workers.
And on that Sunday, before High Level Week, the first day we opened the Declaration, 104 countries signed up – an extraordinary response.
And with me on the North Lawn that day were the foreign ministers and senior representatives we had worked with in developing this Declaration, from Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Sierra Leone, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
And we were joined by ministers, ambassadors and senior representatives of a hundred countries; the UN humanitarian chief; dozens of humanitarian and civil society leaders including the secretaries-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Federation of the Red Cross.
It was actually very moving, because as I stood up on that podium - and looked across the sea of faces from across the world, and listened to the remarks of my colleagues, one after another rededicating their country to upholding international humanitarian law – I was left in no doubt.
So many of us want to protect what we have built together.
And we see our interests in a world that operates by agreed rules.
A world that respects sovereignty and protects civilians.
This Declaration has been the most important Australian multilateral initiative since we were on the UN Security Council eleven years ago…
When we set a new standard for what an elected member can achieve, including by securing consensus on a resolution authorizing an independent investigation into the downing of Flight MH17, without a Russian veto.
And we will again demonstrate what middle powers can do, should we be successful in our candidacy for the Security Council for 2029-30.
The Declaration reminds us what Australian multilateralism can be, and the Declaration reminds us of what the world wants us to protect – countries working together with many stakeholders – the UN, international organisations, NGOs and civil society, to achieve a common purpose.
To affirm our common humanity.
Yet there is much more that we need to defend.
In my first speech to the General Assembly, I reminded that forum of why the multilateral system makes people's lives better in really practical ways.
It promotes economic development, it makes trade more fair – together supporting job creation, overcoming poverty, and enabling small and medium countries to resist coercion.
It guards against the spread of nuclear weapons.
It sets the standards that keep food safe.
It assigns the satellite orbits that take the internet to the most remote reaches.
It mandates the rules for the maritime domain – and we have raised this week our concerns with China's unsafe and unprofessional intercept of a RAAF P-8 aircraft.
The UN sets the standards that keeps thousands of flights and 12 million passengers safely in the sky every day.
It seeks to prevent and address conflicts in peacekeeping, peacebuilding and political missions.
It advances gender equity and the position of women and girls in societies around the world.
It coordinates global action on climate change, including through the Conference of the Parties, which we seek to host with the Pacific next year.
And each year it saves more than 350 million children from malnutrition.
But we must face hard truths – the UN of tomorrow will and must look starkly different to the UN of today.
As I have said, the world's changed - and the UN faces a budget reduction of 30 per cent.
This is such a confronting statistics – of the top ten donors, we expect to see decreased contributions from six. And this compounds the budget issues caused by delayed and unpaid dues in previous years.
And cumulative funding cuts are expected to amount to 29 billion since 2023.
So, reform is essential. Because we don't want a UN that simply contracts. We don't want a UN that becomes increasingly dysfunctional and is at risk of capture.
We don't want a blunt 30, 40 or 50% slashing of each UN agency.
Because where that will lead is only 'shell' or 'zombie' agencies, doomed to fail because they can't deliver basic functions.
As it is, UN agencies are already too siloed, too duplicative and spread too thinly, on account of the thousands of meetings and mandates they are burdened with.
We don't want the critical, but often invisible, functions we all rely on – like disaster early warning systems or preventive healthcare that enables global health security – to simply degrade on our watch.
We don't want poverty entrenched, humanitarian crises unaddressed, human rights abuses to go unchecked until they spill over into regional instability, driving transnational crime and irregular people flows around the world.
We do not want a dysfunctional UN that can be manipulated by those who mean to dismantle it or to take it over for their own national, or often autocratic, aspirations.
And we don't want smaller or more vulnerable countries to go back to being overlooked, including in the Pacific.
So most fundamentally, we don't want reform to be a process without a vision.
I fear that this is, in part, what the approach has been.
We've got working groups meeting. We've got 'clusters' established. We've got intergovernmental negotiations being kicked off. We've got debates on boards. Papers being issued to merge different agencies.
But you know the key question we have to keep in our mind: What is the purpose? Because that tells us where we are going, and it is informed by what we want.
We want – Australia wants – a UN that helps the world solve the biggest problems of the day, delivering for the people who need it most. The standard-bearer for rules that keeps us talking – rules that keep us talking instead of fighting.
We want a UN that fulfils its promise of safeguarding sovereignty by promoting international peace and security, sustainable development and human rights.
Because – if you will excuse the expression - these are three sides of the same coin; each essential and mutually-reinforcing.
Australia wants a United Nations that can deliver reliably what we need most – global public goods that we know can only be achieved multilaterally, and that we know the world relies on.
Fundamentally, we want a modern, functional, forward-looking organisation, so that it can help with tomorrow's challenges – technology including AI, climate change, modern conflicts and people movement.
So Australia is for bold, ambitious UN reform: we are for vision, not process.
And we will test ideas, and we will put initiatives on the table, we will bring energy and pragmatism. And we will work with global partners.
And we want change on three levels.
First, UN leadership with the vision and weight to deliver, and with the courage to make the UN more efficient and effective.
Second, we want a UN structure fit for the coming decade.
We all have individual agencies we care about, but we can't afford overlapping mandates and duplication. We have to focus on purpose and critical functions, not structure.
Meaningful reform will demand that we all look deeper, that we all focus on what we can do without, but also what we must preserve and what we must grow, rather than just trying to do things as we have in the past.
But thirdly, we need members of the United Nations to embrace their role.
As I said in my first statement to the General Assembly three years ago:
"It is up to all of us to create the kind of world to which we aspire – stable, peaceful, prosperous and respectful of sovereignty."
Because ultimately the United Nations won't change if we don't change.
And ultimately this will need to be driven by and envisioned by middle powers and smaller countries, because as Australia knows we have the greatest interest.
Just as this was the case for Doc Evatt at the San Francisco Conference.
So we will focus our engagement in UN reform to maximise impact.
We will seek to promote our goals with chairing roles and we will advocate for the appointment of Australians to positions in the system.
We will use our candidacy for the Security Council to champion what we think matters most, like conflict prevention, peacebuilding, the protection of civilians.
And we will work in our coalitions, with partners traditional and partners new.
Championing initiatives like the Declaration for the Protection of Humanitarian Personnel, that reinforce rules and make a difference on the ground.
We will prioritise a United Nations doing what only it can.
A UN that enhances our sovereignty and our agency; and that operates in the service of multilateralism.
Because we understand that that is in service of our common humanity.
And we will do all of this, including with your help, because our country helped create the United Nations, and we want to help create its future.