Australia’s bid for a 2029–30 UN Security Council seat raises the stakes at this month’s General Assembly, where Gaza, international law, climate and relations with the Global South will all matter.
Australia has a lot riding on this month’s UN General Assembly.
On Sunday the prime minister leaves for New York where in his address to the UN he will have to perform a tricky balancing act between Australia’s American ally and our ‘forever friend’ in Israel, and global majority opposition to both of them. Every nation has one vote in the UNGA, and Australia will need them to win a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the 2029–2030 term, for which elections will be held in June 2028.
The BRICS with their growing membership and influence in UNGA will stare down the US with its iceberg-size national debt, chaotic foreign policy, imperialist threats to take over other member states, arbitrary tariffs imposed on friends and enemies alike, and continuing wars of unprovoked aggression. China and Russia are building growing constituencies in the global south and east, and some Middle Eastern states are joining them.
The US will as always be isolated by its support of Israel’s Zionist project: its destruction of Gaza and its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon. Now it has announced that it will sell to Israel 40,000 bombs, each weighing 2,000 pounds, called Joint Direct Attack Munitions (GBU-31 JDAM). In ‘stealth’ mode, two of them can be carried in an F-35 ‘Lightning’ bomber, and up to six can be delivered in ‘beast’ mode.
The US sale must be music to the ears of Lockheed Martin, but not to the Palestinians. The UK and Germany also supply Israel with weapons to continue its genocidal pursuit of a ‘final solution’ in Gaza, and Australia makes components for the F-35 and exports them by indirect routes to Israel, activities which Labor ministers have obfuscated about or denied. None of it will regain lost friends in the UNGA for Trump and his allies. But while Britain and other EU countries have escaped criticism in this year’s Arms Trade Treaty Monitor report, the information Australia has provided is described as ’not meaningfully transparent’.
That looks bad for Australia, as does our delayed, minimal recognition of the Palestinian state, the limited sanctions Canberra has imposed on Israeli alleged war criminals, and the government’s studious avoidance of the term ‘genocide’ in relation to the findings of the international courts. By saying nothing about the Trump administration’s punitive sanctions on the International Criminal Court and its staff, Australia displays an absence of regard for international law and for the UN itself, which we claim have been fundamental in Australian policy since 1945.
Our silence also delivers reputational damage to Australia. We have held a non-permanent member’s seat in the UNSC five times: in 1946–47, 1956–57, 1973–74, 1985–86, and 2013–14. Australia will compete with fellow members of the Western European and Others Group to become a candidate. We will then have to persuade as many other nations in the UNGA as we can to support our bid. Finland is our only competitor at present but the campaign won’t be quick or cheap: the last one, launched by then prime minister Kevin Rudd, cost an estimated $25 million.
Australia will need, as in our 2012 campaign, to speak up on behalf of Pacific Island nations, but not just those who are anti-China. Our position on climate change, having co-hosted the last COP, will be more effective if we can cooperate with China in the interests of all the neighbours with whom we share our region.
The ‘Palestinian question’ was a key issue in 2012, on which Bob Carr as foreign minister managed to win votes by securing an unprecedentedly positive position for Australia. After the 2013 change of government, and despite Australia’s campaign slogan ‘We do what we say’, that position was reversed. Although Australia under Albanese voted to recognise Palestinian statehood in 2025, we have not joined other members of our Western European and Others Group (in which Australia is an ‘other’) in taking a stance against Israel’s aggression or acting in compliance with the Genocide Convention. Palestine is still central among the world’s problems, and Australia must take a firm stand on resolving it. Reciting ‘we support a two-state solution’ doesn’t cut it.
Anthony Albanese will not be able to avoid other key issues facing the UN – international law, human rights and how they can be applied wherever they are threatened around the world. Australia came out of its burrow last year to take something of a stand on these challenges when Foreign Minister Penny Wong was able to get around her risk-averse colleagues, the Attorney-General Michelle Rowland and Defence Minister Richard Marles. But at this year’s UNGA Australia will have to stand up and be counted, as Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada has done. In defying Trump at Davos he responded to Canadian public outrage. Similar outrage is evident in Australia, where more than 300,000 people marched for Palestine across the Sydney Harbour Bridge last year, and where Australian writers, actors, journalists and musicians have risked their careers and livelihood for the same cause. Thousands have demonstrated peacefully every week in support of Palestinians, and more than 300 young and old Australians packed the Parliament House theatre in Canberra on 15 September in support of Parliament applying our international legal undertakings in Australian legislation.
If Albanese could announce sanctions against Israel in the West Bank like those the UK, Canada and others have just imposed, the popular perception that he lacks courage and commitment could be dispelled, in Canberra and in many other capitals. That could even translate into success for Australia’s Security Council bid, and re-election for the ALP.
The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.