Help themselves, at least. But when they aren't distracted by Kofi Annan's mood swings and Iqbal Riza's excessive paper shredding, they can always find some busywork as
James Morrow describes in
The Australian:
But even if Annan's days -- if not those of the UN -- are numbered, that does not mean that the busybodies of Turtle Bay, New York, and Geneva, Switzerland, are not still finding plenty of things to do. Like meddle in Australian politics, for example. In a fantastic example of being critical of the speck in someone else's eye while missing the plank in one's own, the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has come to the conclusion that human rights and multicultural tolerance in John Howard's Australia are as rare as Tasmanian tigers.
...
The report, available through the website of the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights (www.ohchr.org), makes for some entertaining reading -- and is also a cautionary tale about the dangerous fallacy of "international law".
One of the committee's big problems in the report is that some Australian states and territories have mandatory sentencing requirements for certain crimes. This is problematic for the UN because more indigenous people are sent to jail under these laws than members of other ethnic groups -- something which, in the perverse correlation-proves-causality logic of the UN, proves Australia racist. (The idea that mandatory sentences might also lead to a colour-blind judiciary apparently never occurred to them.) Under UN thinking, Australia's democratically elected state and territorial governments are free to make their own laws -- so long as they don't offend a body whose voting members are mostly very non-democratic countries.
And those pesky Aussies have a bad attitude too!
Alexander Downer had the courage to say: "We are a democratically elected government in one of the most liberal and democratic countries you will find on earth. And if a UN committee wants to play domestic politics here in Australia, then it will end up with a bloody nose."
These days, the UN has got a lot more than a bloody nose - it is also facing a crisis of legitimacy that has been coming for years. From the start, its biggest problem has been that, to paraphrase the old joke about the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither united nor comprised of nations. Far too many of the member-states did not earn their nationhood in any sort of real way (by, say, populating and cultivating territory or fighting a war of independence) but because someone a long time ago drew some lines on a map. And as modern history has proven, the resulting governments treat their citizens with about as much respect. For the UN to call Australia out for racism and human rights violations would be a joke if it weren't so serious.
Ruh roh! Hey, not to worry! Perceptions will change when the
UN takes over the Internet.
