UN General Assembly
1996

﻿I should like to extend warm congratulations to Mr. Razali on his election as President of the General Assembly. As a close neighbour of Malaysia, Australia will confidently rely on his experience and sound judgement as he presides over this important session of the Assembly. I feel greatly honoured to be leading for the first time the Australian delegation to a session of the General Assembly. A year ago, when the Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations, it made an important promise: to give to the twenty-first century a United Nations that would serve effectively the peoples in whose name it was established. We must keep that promise, but to do so we 8 will need a clear view of contemporary circumstances and of those which we can see unfolding into the twenty-first century. The landscape that was revealed at the end of the cold war, just a little over five years ago, has many new features, some of which are still not clear. What is clear,