The US was right to walk out on this theatre of absurd UN players

The Trump administration was perfectly justified in walking out of the absurd and frequently surreal United Nations Human Rights Council.

This body is as malodorous and counter-productive as its ­despised predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, which was abolished in 2006 because everybody, even Kofi Annan, recognised it had become not only a joke but a vehicle for celebrating the suppression of human rights.

Sadly, its successor has not proven any better. When it was formed in 2006 it was peopled by such human rights stalwarts as Cuba, Russia and China. A year or two later Libya was elected to be a member. Now it is run by similar shining lights of human rights, such as Venezuela and Qatar.

They never get criticised, of course. But every year the council goes through many iterations of its obsessive denunciations of ­Israel. It has proposed and passed more resolutions against Israel than any other nation.

For all that, Australia was reasonably well advised not to withdraw.

It is an almost complete waste of time for us to be on this committee and we expended an absurd amount of diplomatic effort to get elected, as though this were some kind of distinction for our nation, to sit alongside the worst human rights abusers in the world and pass fatuous resolutions serving their political agendas.

There are only two serious ­arguments for Australian participation. One is that we can help in a campaign to reform the body. That has always been a forlorn but worthwhile ambition.

The other, more subtle, ­national-interest argument is that while these ridiculous UN committees are of not much interest to us, they are of interest to quite a lot of our friends. Therefore our participation yields us a very small amount of extra coin that we can use in pursuing our own national interests with our friends and others who take this UN theatre of the absurd more seriously than we do. We should always be clear-headed in our participation in the whole culture of UN nonsense.

This is one area where Donald Trump’s instincts are sound.

His UN ambassador, the immensely impressive Nikki Haley, eloquently represents the best of US values every day at the UN. And she was eloquent in explaining the decision to leave.

(Mind you, her emerging celebrity status probably limits her longevity in the Trump universe.)

But, of course, the US position would be infinitely stronger if Trump, like previous US presidents, were a strong and consistent advocate for human rights.

Instead, lately he’s been telling us that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the most repressive, totalitarian and murderous dictator on the planet, “loves his country” and indeed the people of North Korea “love him”. That is nuts, of course, as perfectly ridiculous as most of the pronouncements of the UN Human Rights Council.

Still, for the US to walk out is a moral statement. And a good one.