Up there with Rwanda, but at what cost?

Foreign Minister Bob Carr was quick to say the vote demonstrated that the world liked Australia and esteemed us as a nation of good values and a big contributor. Presumably, the world feels the same about Rwanda, which was also elected to a temporary seat yesterday.

In one of those exquisite pieces of timing by which the UN is always threatening to put satirists out of a job, a UN report the previous day concluded that Rwanda's Defence Minister was sponsoring rebels in the Congo "accused of annexing territory and committing atrocities".  It's a hard thing to earn, apparently, this international esteem.

No doubt the Security Council will benefit from Australia's presence.

The question is whether Australia will benefit.

One of the many dolorous consequences of this vote is its effect on our vastly bloated and ineffective aid budget, already over $5 billion and scheduled to rise to $8bn and more.

It is not the few tens of millions of dollars spent on diplomacy related to the bid that counts. It is rather the hundreds of millions, perhaps over time billions, of dollars of distortion in our aid budget that the bid necessitates.

Over the time of the bid we have more than tripled our aid to Africa. We give aid too thinly to too many countries and much of it is ineffective.

Similarly, we have vastly increased aid to Palestinian groups, a number with extremely dubious associations, in a blatant political pander.

There is a vast economic literature that explodes the idea that aid is an effective way of promoting development or eradicating poverty. And if you think aid creates long-term goodwill from the recipient to the donor, just look at Egyptian or Pakistani attitudes to the US.

Billions of dollars of aid over many years have bought dependency, political extremism and seething hatred of America.

 When the Howard government lost the last Security Council bid in 1996, it decided not to saddle up for another try quickly.

It reached this decision in part on the basis of the kind of aid promises, and distortions, that were necessary to win a bid.

Had we lost this bid, our aid budget would have declined, as it probably still will if Tony Abbott is elected prime minister.

If Labor stays in office it will probably feel the need to honour all the pledges it made to win this tawdry bauble.

And here is the greater danger of this Security Council position. It will almost certainly lead to the trivialisation of Australian foreign policy.

How can this be, you ask, when we will be on the world's premier decision-making body? Well, all the real decisions are made among the permanent five members of the Security Council.

A commentator in the Fairfax newspapers subconsciously made the point about the impending distortion of our foreign policy on Thursday: "If we win, the conflicts in Syria, Sudan and Somalia will take on added importance".

Exactly. We cannot get the government, as it is, to concentrate on foreign policy in our region, on the things that are of most importance to us.

Julia Gillard has not visited Papua New Guinea as Prime Minister. When she touched down in India this week, it was for only the second Australian prime ministerial day in India in five years. We run the smallest diplomatic service in the G20 and one of the smallest in the developed world. The pattern of prime ministerial travel in Southeast Asia is very weak.

We do not do our core tasks in foreign affairs because they are not sexy, they offer very little domestic political pay-off, they are hard to spin well in the 24-hour news cycle.

Now more than ever our foreign policy will be caught up in the boutique trivia of UN reform, the media-friendly issues of the Middle East and Africa, where we can have no impact, and in the great global gabfests.

Even worse, it is part of the ongoing Europeanisation of Australian political culture under the Gillard government. The obsessions of multilateral bureaucrats and the chattering classes of Manhattan will overwhelm the already meagre effort we make on the issues of greatest importance to our national interest.

By the way, as I reported weeks ago, the government had more than enough pledges from foreign nations to win this vote some time ago. It denied this outright when I reported it, yet yesterday confirmed directly that it had pledges for 150 votes (of which 10 didn't deliver) for some time. The more deeply you get associated with the UN, the less mere foibles like the truth seem to matter.

Nonetheless, Carr deserves congratulations for the professionalism and effectiveness of his lobbying in recent months.

We now take our place among the global giants: Luxembourg and Rwanda.