I know why the UN is telling us to get tough on climate and not China, India and America

The UN agencies are out of control and need a good clean out.

We need to kill off the club of international bureaucratic jobs and reward the people who do the real work. Get rid of redundant agencies, trim the fat from others and decently fund the ones quietly getting on with the job.

He deludes himself. He tells us, a small emitter, that we have to do better, to be more ambitious and clearly wants us to stop exports of coal and gas.

Perhaps he has some ideas up his sleeve in relation to jobs and income. Perhaps not.

What has he had to say to the really big emitters? Is he telling Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Donald Trump to get their act together?

Surely he's not travelling the world just having a go at the countries that will at least be polite to him.

He is clearly answerable to no one with a functioning brain.

What was he thinking when he warned that without action fruit and vegetables would be a once-a-year treat. That is seriously laughable and would cost him his job in the private sector and indeed in the public service of most countries.

The UN does some really good work. Like any bureaucracy, especially enormous and diffuse ones there is little effective oversight. That means there's a lot of waste and waffle.

For a while, there was outrage at the UNWRA's activities in Gaza.

Maybe not condoned by the UN as a whole but not dealt with either. The fashionable explanation is that you turn a Lord Nelson. That is, a blind eye.

There were claims at the time that no one else could deliver the aid as effectively. It was bunkum then and remains so.

This masthead ran a piece pointing out that the UN World Food Program (based in Rome) was a specialist food delivery agency that could, in fact, do the work. They're good at it.

When there's a disaster we often have our farmers call out to send wheat. That doesn't work in floods. The WFP has a rage of specialist products for different circumstances that can be airdropped and easily both prepared and consumed by those in need. Now they are in Gaza and are advertising for donations on social media. The WFP does good work.

Nonetheless, it's not perfect.

This story has been told but it bears repeating because it highlights the attitude and motivation that pervades some agencies. When in Rome and accredited to the WFP the first meeting with the CEO was instructive.

Apart from being rudely late as she was meeting "a friend", her first agenda item was to offer a photo with her in front of the UN and WFP flags. Clearly weird priorities. If you follow her career path you can see she is smart and moves within the international job circuit.

By the way, UN CEO jobs are part of an inner-circle club reward system all sorted out behind closed doors.

With the UN agencies strategically placed in cities like Rome, Paris and Geneva, with a nice apartment, a good salary and a good job becomes a gift that few can bestow. You know the drill.

You may well get the job as a reward for having supported someone on another matter entirely unrelated to the UN, but they can swing the job for you and you're happy.

The Rome agencies had a commissary where accredited diplomats and, in fact, anyone who worked at the agencies could buy stuff duty-free. By the size of the counter top, sales of the very expensive La Mer skin care were going great guns. Get rich while helping the poor.

The UN Food and Agriculture agency is important for us as a big agricultural producer. Its nickname was For Africa Only because as the CEO Jacques Diouf from Senegal proudly told me, he toured Africa giving out aid and now those countries all voted for him. He held the job for about 15 years.

The UNHCR offers one of the best examples of an agency that does good work but has had people at the top who are just out of touch.

When the current UN Secretary-General was head of UNHCR, Australia was experiencing great difficulty handling boatloads of people being dumped on or near our shores by people smugglers. The smugglers take good money from people who are genuine refugees and also those who just want a better life. They don't care if you get to stay in Australia. It is just about the money.

Given Australia was one of the few countries that had then and still has a planned intake of refugees for permanent resettlement and worked with the UN to try and be a good international citizen you might expect the UNHCR would at least verbally, if in no other way, stand up for us.

It would have been a mistake to hold your breath waiting for that.

Under one CEO, Ruud Lubbers,( he resigned due to an internal investigation) the UN actually removed the page in their information section that showed Australia was consistently the second or third largest taker of refugees for permanent resettlement along with Canada and after the United States. His explanation was both embarrassing and pitiful.

Not only did they not stand up for us, one of the biggest takers of refugees for permanent resettlement, they didn't even stand up for themselves.

They had internationally connected criminals running a rival business to them and they did nothing to be critical of them or shut them down.

It was a business that didn't care about your plight, only your wallet. In effect they said to people: "Forget the UNHCR, they can deal with the poor and needy, just give us your money and you can jump the queue".

So unaware of how this behaviour appeared to us was Guterres that he smilingly suggested we join the club that gave even more millions to the UNHCR. As if. The people doing the real work in these agencies probably do not get enough credit. The people at the top take all the credit.

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So what are we to do? First, I'd have a clean-out at the top of a lot of agencies. Make the appointment process much more transparent. Give the senior jobs to the people who have experience in the agency.

Try and kill the club of international jobs for mates. That will not be easy and might take years but it is important. It's not that they're bad people, or completely incompetent. It's just they have no real skin in the game. It's the people lower down who get lambasted when things go wrong.

Second, get a list of agencies, their annual cost and what they achieve each year. Make some, no, a lot of hard decisions. Cancel some agencies and cut others. In 1996, I had to find one-quarter of the government savings from just my part of the portfolio. It was a terrible job. But you would be surprised at how many things in government keep going simply because no one has seriously reassessed them in years. Nobody really benefits from what they do and nobody misses them when they are gone.

Third. Install a new agency whose sole job is to monitor the value for money from every dollar spent.

Fourth, engage in a re-education process so everyone understands that the UN is there to foster co-operation not to be a global government.