Well done to our Foreign Minister who has been in New York this week giving the United Nations a good dose of reality.

He raises a critical point - if the United Nations is ever going to drag itself out of the quagmire it’s found itself in, when it comes to action, action on anything short of peacekeeping and handing out food, the problem is the veto.

The veto cripples the place and McCully argues it needs to go, and he’s right.

It is hard to fathom how the veto ever 'got past go' as far as an idea is concerned.

The veto is the one vote required in the Security Council among its permanent members that scuttle anything.

When the UN was set up post the World Wars, the ideals and ideas were lofty. The intentions were solid and sound: A body to once again oversee the well-being of the globe and never again would it be plunged into the darkness of the past decades. Yet given all the ugliness they were coming out of, how could they have possibly thought that requiring 100 percent agreement on anything all the time was ever going to work?

Could they have been so profoundly shell-shocked by the great conflicts of the 20th century that they were fooled into believing that the lessons had been learned and only good will and common good would reign? And if that question was answered with a yes, then maybe the next question should have been were they mad?

McCully in his speech points out they spend $8 billion a year on peacekeeping, but maybe if they spend a bit preventing things getting out of control the Bill might go down and people might not get killed. 

There isn’t a conflict going globally where the United Nations Security Council has manned up, led from the front, and driven the global direction and reaction, in fact the exact opposite is true. 

The Security Council has done nothing on ISIS, little if anything on the Ukraine. It watched Libya; it packed a sad when bush led the way in Iraq, and all because of the veto. 

When you have Russia and China in the same group as Britain the States and France, you’ll never all agree on anything, ever.

So the UN is left basically as a clean-up operation, a few blue berets dispatched into places needlessly destroyed. A few shipments of food, a few refugee camps with tents to house all those who lost their homes due to the Security Council watching on while they were burned or blown up. 

And poor old America historically left to be the global sheriff because it knows it’s the only player big enough to lead the way and make a difference.

The great hope is McCully starts a movement, the greatest thing the United Nations could do is recognise its impotence and actually address it.

But then that would require universal agreement - so don’t hold your breath.