It's the 61st session of the General Assembly of the United Nations this week. Heads of government from all over the world are there. George W Bush, Hugo Chavez, Thabo Mbeki, Michael Somare, Jacques Chirac, Thaksin Shinawatra (even if he has no job to go home to); Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Robert Mugabe, they're all there, including... um, Alexander Downer.

Instead of strutting on a world stage where The Voters Back Home won't see him, John Winston Howard spent yesterday morning strutting on a world stage where All The Voters Back Home were watching. He gave a speech at the Crocoseum at Australia Zoo as part of the extremely kitschy globally-televised send-off for Steve Irwin. And then he toddled off to the north of Queensland for the twentieth-anniversary piss-up, er, meeting of the Cairns Group.

Let's just recap, John-Boy: the Cairns Group is a gaggle of 18 agricultural exporting nations and is intended as a meeting of Trade Ministers. Your trade minister, Mark Vaile, is there, as he should be. The United Nations General Assembly is a gaggle of 192 nations - just about every sovereign state in the world. You, John-Boy, as a global citizen should be in New York with all of your peers, not doing a junket in Far North Queensland.

And certainly not leaving this country's voice on the world stage to the Global Village Idiot himself.