Kiwis called on to rally behind UN bid

Jim McLay raises the prospect of a new of generation leaders, including New Zealand's Prime Minister, leading reform at the United Nations. Photo / Richard Robinson

New Zealand's representative at the United Nations, Jim McLay, is calling on the whole country to get in behind a campaign to win a seat on the Security Council in 2015.

He does not expect to see World Cup-type excitement.

"But I would like to see a quiet sense of solidarity and support - a sense that we are doing something important and doing it together."

Back in New Zealand this week to brief the Government on the campaign, Mr McLay gave a speech in Wellington to the NZ Institute of International Affairs.

"We hear much of New Zealand Inc; this is its opportunity to front up," he said.

Speaking to the Herald, he said the best analogy he had heard to explain why New Zealand wanted to get on to the Security Council was a parliamentary one.

"It's like the difference between being a member of Parliament who aspires only to be a backbencher and one who aspires to be a Cabinet minister.

"If you say that I'm just going to be a backbencher for all of my political career, no one is going to take you very seriously."

The analogy is not academic: Mr McLay served in Sir Robert Muldoon's Cabinet - later ousting him to lead the National Party from 1984 to 1986.

The Security Council itself, he said, was "the one body whose decisions have the force of international law".

"It can authorise the use of force, it can establish peace-keeping missions, it can impose sanctions, it can establish tribunals to examine breaches of human rights [and] it has a broad range of responsibilities that really are at the sharp end of international peace and security."

Yesterday, Mr McLay briefed the Cabinet's external relations and defence committee on the bid, announced by Helen Clark in 2004 (for a vote in 2014) and reaffirmed by Mr Key in September last year in his first visit as PM to the UN.

New Zealand aims to be one of two members of the so-called "Western European and Others" group.

Spain has begun its campaign to be the other. It is not a joint ticket, but the two countries regard each other as complementary candidates rather than competing.

They are co-operating with the aim of establishing enough early support to dissuade others from entering the race.

Mr McLay said that after some discussion with colleagues about what New Zealand needed to do to get elected to the Security Council, "the conclusion I came to out ... was 'be ourselves'."

"The most important thing was what sort of energy New Zealand projects, how it is regarded at the United Nations, and all of that was very positive and that we should bank it.

"What you see is what you get."

It would be New Zealand's fourth stint on the council. The last time, 1993-94, New Zealand argued for a UN response to the genocide in Rwanda.

Although it was unsuccessful, New Zealand was on the right side of history and "it reinforced our reputation of being principled and independent".

Reform of the UN, especially of the restricted membership of the Security Council and the veto allowed for the five permanent members, has been an objective for successive New Zealand Governments.

In his Wellington speech, Mr McLay raised the prospect of new-generation leaders - such as Mr Key and fellow PMs David Cameron (Britain) and Stephen Harper (Canada) - leading reform at the UN, which is virtually unchanged since it began in 1945.

"In the past few years, we've seen the election of a new generation of political leadership, heads of Government when elected still in their 40s, of differing political persuasions, but all, in their own way, daring to take new approaches to resolve great issues, without referencing past ideological benchmarks: in our geopolitical milieu alone, Cameron, Harper, Key.

"Might they and their global contemporaries be the ones to rehearse again the grand debates of 1945 and agree to a new order, and what would it take to bring them together for that purpose?"

Despite acknowledging criticisms of the UN structure since its inception, Mr McLay defended it as having tangible benefits for New Zealand.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea had delivered New Zealand a 4 million sq km economic zone (EEZ), the world's fourth largest.

And under the UN's extended continental shelf regime, New Zealand's extended continental shelf covered 1.7 million sq km of seabed beyond the EEZ, six times the size of this country - "an outcome that could never have been achieved through bilateral negotiations".