REMARKS:
John Langmore
National President, UNAA
I wholeheartedly thank The Interfaith Centre of Melbourne for organising this service to mark the opening of the 60th Session of the General Assembly and the 2005 World Summit of Heads of State and Government in New York. This is expected to be the largest meeting of heads of government ever held, which leads naturally to the hope that momentous decisions will be made.
Yet the preparations for the Summit have vividly demonstrated the awful intensity of current global conflicts, and the impediments they are causing to agreement about the future of international relations. Fortunately the UN Charter and the accumulated decisions and actions of the last 60 years offer an influential framework of norms and experience for reform and new strategy.
The purposes of the UN continue to be as centrally important as when they were written. The Charter begins:
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights...
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom...
have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.
Tragically our own country joined in abandoning the third of those goals when it shared in the invasion of Iraq without Security Council agreement. The summit next week was intended to address the resulting disarray in the international order. Incremental progress was being made in negotiations to refocus international institutions and policy until a couple of weeks ago when the US Ambassador to the UN proposed deletion of most of the proposed concrete steps forward.
This creates a difficult position for the Australian Government: will it continue to support the Millennium Development Goals, the International Criminal Court, nuclear disarmament as prescribed in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the responsibility to protect vulnerable peoples in order to prevent genocide, or will it acquiesce to pressure from the United States to delete those commitments?
We must be clear where Australia's interests and responsibilities lie. A serious commitment to international peace and justice leads directly to multilateral cooperation. Global dominance by one country which does not accept ิthe obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law' is not the way to international peace. The interests of Australians will be best served by firmly advocating multilateral cooperation and collective security. We should use our friendship with the United States to speak with honesty and clear purpose.
Our international responsibility as Australians is to seek - as individuals, communities and as a nation - to welcome strangers, support economic and social development in impoverished countries and to find peaceful means for resolving conflicts.
I find repeated inspiration in Eleanor Roosevelt's nightly prayer for the vision and strength to seek a world made new. She chaired the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her prayer begins:
'Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us, that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness [people] hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.' Amen
The Interfaith Centre of Melbourne - Promoting Understanding and Cooperation For Peaceful Coexistence