For the Public Good

By Isabelle Treasure, 2026 CSW Fellow

In March, I sat inside the UN General Assembly as a delegate at the 70th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)... me, a 20 year old Aussie law student. It's definitely not a sentence I ever expected to write quite so soon. Cue “is this freakin’ play about us?” because I assure you that sound consumed my mind frequently over my couple of weeks in New York.

Working internationally has always been a long term goal of mine, but goals are strange things. They can feel perfectly reasonable when they exist somewhere in the distant future and completely ridiculous when you suddenly find yourself living them. Through the Global Voices Fellowship, I travelled to the US alongside three other incredible Australian Fellows, joining advocates, policymakers, and delegates from around the world to discuss women’s access to justice.

I was old enough, and capable enough, to have a seat in the General Assembly, but ironically not yet old enough to join other delegates at the bar after our many long days. It was an amusing reminder that, despite where I was sitting, I was still very much 20.

I have spent a considerable portion of my admittedly short life trying to understand imposter syndrome. It’s something most of us feel at different points in our lives. I used to believe that overcoming it meant eventually becoming “qualified enough”, “experienced enough”, or “knowledgeable enough” that it disappeared. CSW challenged that. There were people in those rooms who had spent decades working on issues I was only beginning to understand. I could never compete with that experience, nor was I supposed to. My responsibility was to arrive prepared, contribute from the experience and knowledge I did have and, most importantly, listen.

That quickly became the standard by which I measured the week. I was completely infatuated with the desire to return to Australia with at least some of my assumptions disturbed. If I flew halfway around the world, attended dozens of discussions and came home believing exactly what I believed when I left, I would consider the experience largely wasted. Listening to women describe barriers to justice in countries and communities vastly different from my own complicated my understanding of what “access to justice” actually means. It can mean adequate representation in a courtroom, but it can also mean whether a woman can afford transport, obtain identification, safely report violence, understand her rights, access technology, secure housing, or find someone willing to believe her. Law matters enormously, but it is only one part of the infrastructure that determines whether a right can actually be exercised.

Despite all of the formal panels and negotiations, one of my favourite memories from CSW happened in a coffee line. I was standing behind a group of Tanzanian delegates speaking Swahili. They were each dressed beautifully in different variations of the colours of their national flag: green, yellow, blue, and black. Having lived in Tanzania for a few months, I was confident enough to hold a basic conversation, so I gave it a shot: “Habari za asubuhi?” They turned around, slightly surprised that an Australian had greeted them in Swahili, and a coffee line conversation became a discussion about Tanzania’s engagement at CSW, sustainability, our respective focus areas, and a shared affection for Tanzanian culture. We are still in touch. People I would probably never have encountered in my ordinary life became friends.

To me, that interaction captured the essence of multilateralism, and something I had not properly appreciated before experiencing it. The UN is easy to understand from afar merely as resolutions, negotiating blocs, acronyms, and bureaucracy. Those things do exist, and criticism of multilateral institutions is neither new nor always undeserved. Still, institutions are ultimately populated by people. CSW brought together people who may disagree profoundly on politics, culture, policy and even the meaning of progress, but who nevertheless travelled to the same place because they believed there was value in talking to and learning from one another.

International cooperation has produced outcomes so embedded in ordinary life that it can be easy to forget they required cooperation at all. Countries coordinate aviation so we can cross borders safely, respond collectively to disease outbreaks, protect cultural heritage, and negotiate global standards for human rights. None of this makes multilateralism perfect, but it does make it consequential. The problems we face increasingly refuse to respect national borders, and withdrawing from difficult conversations does not make those problems disappear.

In law, there is a Latin phrase, pro bono publico, meaning “for the public good”. I thought about it often in New York, although perhaps in a broader sense than lawyers usually mean it. Behind the enormous machinery of the UN are thousands of people who have built careers, travelled across continents, and sometimes spent their entire lives trying to improve circumstances for people they will likely never meet. There is profound kindness in that concept.

I returned home without a grand solution for how multilateral institutions should respond to every criticism levelled at them. But what did change was my understanding of what belonging in those spaces actually requires.

Everything feels unattainable until, suddenly, there you are doing it. I used to imagine that reaching a space as significant as the UN would require me to arrive with answers. Instead, I was reminded that being young does not make a person’s experiences, beliefs, or knowledge less worthy of contributing to a conversation. Nor does having a seat in an important room make anyone’s perspective inherently more valuable than somebody else’s. We all arrive carrying something worth contributing and, equally, something we do not yet know. This observation made my imposter syndrome feel so insignificant: I did not need to know everything to have something worth saying, and neither does anyone else. 

If multilateralism has a future worth defending, which I believe it does, I think it will depend on our willingness to remember both sides of that equation. To keep showing up, challenging what we think we know and remembering the people on the other side of policy. I’m grateful to have left New York believing that a desire to keep learning, and to always use what we learn for the benefit of others, is fundamentally what it means to work for the public good.