Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has distanced himself from US President Donald Trump’s climate denialism in a major speech warning that dictators will be able to dominate world affairs and wars will proliferate across the globe unless the United Nations overhauls the way it operates.

Albanese used his first national address to the UN General Assembly on Thursday morning, AEST, to argue that the world’s premier multilateral body risks becoming “little more than a final resting place for good intentions” without reform, as he seeks a more prominent role for Australia in global diplomacy.

Albanese’s speech, which described climate change as an “existential threat” to Australia’s Pacific neighbours, projected a strikingly different worldview to Trump , who used his address a day earlier to

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