The United Nations was created to preserve peace and protect human rights. Eighty-one years later, wars rage, dictatorships sit in judgement of democracies, and the organisation increasingly seeks influence over decisions once made by sovereign nations. Perhaps it is time to ask a simple question: what is the UN actually for?
The latest United Nations General Assembly again demonstrated the contradictions at the heart of the organisation.
Donald Trump delivered a characteristically blunt attack on the UN and international institutions. Argentina's Javier Milei challenged the growth of supranational government and defended national sovereignty and individual liberty.
Others defended the institution. Emmanuel Macron declared:
“More than ever, we need our United Nations.”
Secretary-General António Guterres called for greater international cooperation while simultaneously acknowledging the need for substantial UN reform.
But behind the speeches lies a more fundamental problem.
The UN is supposed to represent the nations of the world.
It does.
It does not, however, represent the democratic peoples of the world.
The General Assembly has 193 members.
Australia gets one vote.
So does North Korea.
Canada gets one vote.
So does Iran.
Governments chosen in free elections sit alongside regimes that imprison political opponents, suppress free speech and deny their citizens the elementary democratic rights supposedly championed by the United Nations.
The Security Council is hardly more democratic.
Five nations—the United States, China, Russia, France and Britain—hold permanent seats and veto powers inherited from the settlement following World War II.
Russia can veto action affecting Russia. China can block measures contrary to China's interests. America can do the same.
This isn't a malfunction.
It is the system.
The UN Charter begins with the ambition to:
“save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.
How is that going?
Ukraine. Gaza. Sudan. Myanmar. Repeated conflicts across Africa and the Middle East.
The UN distributes food, assists refugees, vaccinates children and operates peacekeeping missions. These are valuable achievements and should not be dismissed.
But providing humanitarian assistance after war begins is not the same thing as fulfilling the organisation's central mission of preserving international peace.
When powerful countries or determined armed groups choose war, the United Nations repeatedly demonstrates how little power it actually possesses to stop them.
Perhaps nowhere is the UN's political imbalance more obvious than in its treatment of Israel.
Israel is not beyond criticism. No democracy should be.
But criticism should be proportionate and standards should be applied consistently.
They plainly are not.
In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 resolutions focused on Israel and seven concerning all other countries combined. In 2025, the comparable figures were 15 and 11.
Consider what that means.
The world includes North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Sudan, Myanmar and numerous governments with appalling human-rights records.
Yet one tiny democracy receives extraordinary and continuing institutional attention.
The Gaza war has made that imbalance even more obvious.
Israel did not begin the war on October 7. Hamas crossed the border, murdered civilians, took hostages and then fought from within one of the most densely populated urban environments on Earth.
Israel's military response has caused enormous destruction and civilian suffering. That deserves scrutiny.
But so does the extraordinary problem Israel faced: fighting an enemy embedded among civilians.
Israel has used evacuation orders, telephone calls, text messages, leaflets and other warnings intended to move civilians away from military targets. Whether those precautions were adequate in particular attacks is legitimately debated, but their existence is rarely prominent in the sweeping accusations heard from the UN podium.
Nor is Israel routinely judged against the conduct of other nations fighting comparable wars.
Instead we repeatedly hear some of the world's least democratic governments passing judgement upon one of the Middle East's few democracies.
That is the deeper problem.
The UN's moral authority depends upon consistent standards.
If similar conduct produces outrage when committed by one country and relative silence when committed by another, the institution ceases to look like an impartial defender of human rights.
It begins to look like politics conducted by majority vote.
There is another problem.
The UN of 1945 was primarily about peace and cooperation between sovereign states.
Today's UN reaches into climate policy, migration, health, development, gender policy, internet governance and now artificial intelligence.
International cooperation in these areas can be useful.
But there is a legitimate democratic question:
How much influence should institutions that voters cannot remove have over policies decided by governments that voters can?
Large countries can ignore international pressure when it suits them.
Smaller countries often cannot.
The gradual transfer of authority from national parliaments towards international agreements, conventions and bureaucracies therefore deserves considerably more scrutiny than it receives.
Simply abolishing the United Nations would solve little.
China would still be China. Russia would still be Russia. Iran would still be Iran.
And the world would lose useful mechanisms for diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, aviation, shipping, telecommunications and disease control.
Perhaps the mistake is assuming there can be only one international organisation.
Why shouldn't democratic nations create another?
Imagine an international organisation whose membership required free elections, freedom of speech, independent courts, rule of law and peaceful transfers of power.
Countries abandoning those principles could lose membership.
The UN could remain the forum where everybody talks.
A United Democracies could become the organisation through which free countries cooperate and act.
The United Nations is not useless.
That would be too simple.
The more uncomfortable conclusion is that an institution can do many useful things while failing at the purpose for which it was principally created.
Eighty-one years after its creation, wars continue, authoritarian governments help determine the UN's human-rights agenda, great powers veto action against themselves and the organisation's ambitions extend ever further into matters traditionally decided by sovereign governments.
Trump and Milei expressed their criticisms with unusual bluntness.
But behind the rhetoric lies a question worth asking.
If the United Nations cannot reliably defend peace, freedom or consistent standards of human rights, perhaps the world's democracies need an institution that can.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has released the 2026 Intergenerational Report, projecting an Australian economy more than twice its current size and per-capita incomes 55% higher by 2066.
Underpinning those projections is an assumption that long-term labour productivity growth will reach 1.2% annually. The Treasurer has identified AI as a pivotal contributor to achieving it.
That sounds encouraging.
Unfortunately, Australia has a rather inconvenient productivity record.
The Productivity Commission's September update paints a picture of prolonged stagnation.
Over the twelve years to June 2026, economy-wide labour productivity increased just 3.6%. The non-market sector—dominated by government-funded services—actually recorded a decline of 2.5% over the same period.
The economy has barely recovered from the productivity slump that followed the pandemic.
And this is the starting point from which Treasury expects a sustained recovery.
The first Intergenerational Report, published in 2002, assumed annual productivity growth of 1.8%.
Twenty years later, actual growth had averaged just 1.2%.
Yet aggregate GDP growth came remarkably close to Treasury's original projection. How?
Australia's population grew by approximately three million more people than forecast, largely because net overseas migration was roughly double the original assumption. Workforce participation also exceeded expectations.
The economy grew, but not in the way Treasury anticipated.
Subsequent reports continued to revise productivity expectations downward. The 2021 assumption of 1.5% was reduced to 1.2% in 2023.
The 2026 report retains that figure, despite another three years of disappointing performance.
The historical lesson is not that productivity cannot recover. It is that long-term forecasts have repeatedly overestimated Australia's capacity to deliver it.
Artificial intelligence undoubtedly offers enormous opportunities. It can automate administrative work, accelerate research, improve logistics and make skilled workers more productive.
But purchasing AI software does not automatically produce higher national productivity.
Businesses must reorganise their operations, retrain employees, invest in infrastructure and eliminate inefficient practices. Some will succeed. Others may simply add AI subscriptions to their existing costs.
Even Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock has cautioned that there is not yet evidence of an Australian productivity improvement attributable to AI. She has also raised the possibility that the investment boom in AI infrastructure could initially contribute to inflation rather than improved productivity.
There is an important difference between the potential of a technology and the capacity of an economy to exploit it.
Australia has been adopting digital technologies for decades. Yet productivity has continued to deteriorate.
Why should AI automatically produce a different result?
Treasury's 1.2% assumption might appear modest compared with the productivity growth Australia enjoyed in earlier decades.
But consider the consequences if actual performance falls short.
Illustrative cumulative productivity index, starting at 100. Three constant annual growth scenarios; not forecasts.
Calculated using annual compounding.
After forty years, sustained growth of 1.2% produces approximately 61% more output per hour. At 0.8%, the improvement is only 38%. At 0.3%, it is barely 13%.
The difference is enormous. It affects wages, tax revenue, government spending and the living standards of future generations.
Treasury's projections are scenarios built on assumptions, not guarantees. But when an optimistic assumption becomes the foundation of fiscal planning, its failure has consequences.
Australia's productivity problem predates AI.
It reflects a complex combination of weak business investment, poor capital allocation, declining productivity in government-funded services and an economy increasingly concentrated in activities where efficiency improvements can be difficult to achieve. The Productivity Commission has identified investment, skills and competition as important areas for reform.
AI may help address some of these problems. It cannot resolve all of them simply by existing.
The question is whether Australia's businesses and institutions will make the organisational changes needed to convert technological potential into measurable economic gains.
The experience of the past two decades provides ample reason to scrutinise the assumptions.
Treasury has already had to reduce its productivity forecasts once. The new report relies on the same 1.2% figure despite a much weaker recent record.
AI may transform the world. But Australia's economic projections depend on something much less certain: our ability to turn that transformation into productivity.
Further reading: 2026 Intergenerational Report, Productivity Commission's September 2026 update and Treasury's review of previous Intergenerational Reports.
- The AI Race Will Be Won With Energy — Explores the electricity, data centres and industrial infrastructure needed to realise AI's potential. It complements the new article's distinction between technological promise and economic results.
- How Much Migration Can Australia Absorb? — Examines the distinction between growth in total GDP and improvements in living standards, including the importance of productivity.
- Climate, Energy and Prosperity: The Debate That Shapes Our Future — Considers how energy costs, infrastructure investment and energy policy affect economic prosperity.
In my 31 August article, Are the Straits of Hormuz Open?, I estimated that Gulf oil exports had recovered to around 15–16 million barrels per day, including shipments through the Strait and pipelines bypassing it.
That was a substantial recovery from the March collapse, but still well below the pre-war flow of roughly 21 million barrels a day through Hormuz alone.
September has demonstrated just how fragile that recovery remains.
Attacks on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline and another tanker incident in Hormuz sent oil prices climbing. On 17 September, Brent closed at US$104.82 a barrel.
Then the news changed. Gulf shipments increased, Saudi Arabia moved to restore its pipeline, and reports emerged of possible renewed negotiations with Iran. On 22 September, Brent briefly fell below US$98 before recovering.
The market is reacting to something more substantial than diplomatic speculation.
Oil is getting through.
On 21 September, US Central Command reported that oil shipments through Hormuz had reached a six-month high. It said US naval operations had helped move more than one billion barrels of Gulf oil in recent months.
Saudi exports through the Strait have reportedly reached as much as 2.4 million barrels per day over the preceding fortnight.
These developments confirm the direction of travel, although they do not establish a precise current total for all oil passing through Hormuz. Military-reported movements, commercial tanker tracking and exports through bypass pipelines measure different things.
Hormuz shipments: six-month high reported on 21 September. Normal pre-war traffic has not been fully restored.
For Iran, however, the picture is moving in the opposite direction.
The US naval blockade, reinstated in July, has severely restricted Iranian oil exports. Reuters reported that crude loadings fell from around two million barrels per day in March to approximately 220,000–255,000 barrels per day in August. For seven weeks, no meaningful Iranian crude exports had passed through Hormuz.
Approximate barrels per day, March and August 2026. (Figures reported by Reuters.)
Oil is only one part of the pressure.
By sea: The blockade has sharply restricted Iran's access to its principal oil customer, China. Oil held in floating storage abroad has provided a temporary source of supply, but without fresh shipments that reserve diminishes.
And ordinary Iranians are bearing substantial costs alongside the government: higher prices, fewer travel options and increasing difficulties obtaining imported goods.
Iran has responded to the blockade with threats against shipping and continued resistance to US demands. Yet on 22 September, a senior Iranian official indicated that Tehran could reopen Hormuz within a week if Washington eased military pressure and lifted the blockade.
The proposal has not produced an agreement.
The economic pressure is measurable. Whether it will produce a negotiated settlement, prolonged confrontation or further escalation remains unresolved.
For the rest of the world, the immediate story is improving oil flows and easing prices.
For Iran, it is the steady contraction of its economic connections.
The Strait is becoming more accessible to Gulf oil. Iran's own route to world markets is becoming harder to use.
That is the striking contrast since our last report.
I would use this as the article draft and hold the cartoon, search description and X posts until you are happy with the text. The most useful continuing indicator will be the gap between total Gulf oil shipments and Iran's own exports, rather than oil prices alone.
