A giant waste of taxpayers' dosh or money well spent. It's a question that's often been asked about that great, amorphous body known as the United Nations, which is in itself something of an oxymoron given there's little united about the 193 countries that are part of the club.

Our membership costs tens of millions of dollars a year, with the lion's share of it going on peacekeeping operations that we deliberately, it seems, have no part of.

In his parting shot as Foreign Minister Murray McCully said the Government's avoided peacekeeping deployments because the United Nations has resisted the need to change. The system, McCully says, is seriously broken when 80 percent of foreign aid shelled out each year, worth billions of dollars, goes to the victims of violent conflict when the leaking mother ship spends just a fraction on preventing wars.

And he has a point, it's your classic ambulance at the bottom of the cliff stuff.

We poured more than half a million bucks last year into Helen Clark's to get elected as the Secretary General to effect change, only to see her come home midfield out of the 10 candidates. McCully's message then wasn't quite the same as his departure shots this week.

He was saying then the Clark bid was money well spent, declaring the United Nations is a profoundly important body. Surely its importance though is having influence in a world that seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, not helped by the rumbles from Washington.

That influence isn't helped by the American administration being the biggest debtor to the UN, essentially because there's no appetite to pay their bills with the lawmakers there saying it's a bloated bureaucracy that offers little, or no value to US citizens.

That's patently not the case with the 43,000 UN staff working out of its secretariat in New York and with almost 3000 of them being American citizens, by far the lion's share of staff when you consider the second biggest bankroller of the UN, Japan, has just a few hundred. The economic benefit to the Big Apple has put at around $3.5 billion a year. And of course there's the hundreds of millions that pour into the pockets of American corporates.

So why does New Zealand belong to the United Nations? Well, because almost everyone else does it seems.