“If you have effective political missions, properly funded and properly resourced, able to deal with emerging crises before they erupt into the security crises, it is a far more effective use of dollars and far more effective in terms of loss of life,” Rudd told Sputnik.
He pointed out that under the current system of UN funding, it had a budget of about $20 million a year for political missions, and a budget of $8.5 billion a year for peacekeeping operations – “once wars have erupted and we failed to prevent them.”
“It’s easy to have 20/20 hindsight and to pretend that we are wise when we look backwards but I do wonder if we had had more effective political diplomacy at the beginning of the Syria crisis, whether we would be facing the same dilemma that we face today,” the former prime minister said.
The second issue Rudd underlined was the fact that the United Nations did not have the funds to allocate for reaching its sustainable development goals (SDGs) to bring out of poverty the 1.4 billion people worldwide.
“But in the UN system there is no money to do that,” Rudd said pointing out that the total international development assistance budget of the world is now $140 billion a year, most of which goes for humanitarian crises.
Rudd continued by stressing that the recently adopted 16 SDGs should nevertheless be turned into reality.
“And the revelation that needs to occur in UN thinking is how do we effectively deploy private capital, not just public capital to realize these important objectives. And therefore how we make private financial investment both domestic and international attractive for these sorts of projects and how do you use the limited supply of public capital to reduce the risks of these investments for private sector investors,” Rudd said.
UN should speak in one voice
Another failure of the United Nations that the organization fails to speak in a single voice, while representing dozens of different agencies, which in turn only complicates problem solving, Rudd said. He stressed the great job of the UN workers participating in the field operations, but said the overall pattern needed to be changed.
“There are so many good UN workers out there doing great things on behalf of the international community. But often there is a problem of coordination on the ground, there are too many UN agencies, each speaking with a separate voice to one government,” Rudd said.
He said sometimes a host government, say the government of Sierra Leone, might be dealing with 16 different UN agencies, each of which was not working closely with each other in their engagement with the local government.
“So we can be much more effective if we speak with one UN voice to each government around the world. And that is a more effective use of money,” Rudd concluded.
Rudd, who held the Australian prime ministerial office in 2007-2010 and in 2013, presides over the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) non-governmental specializing in security, prosperity, sustainability and the development of common regional norms and values.
