Labor warns Australia cannot afford to turn its back on global bodies like the World Health Organization

Australia cannot afford to turn its back on global bodies such as the World Health Organization, Labor’s Penny Wong has warned, as the Morrison government audits its involvement in a raft of international organisations.

The government is close to finishing a review of the country’s engagement with global bodies, amid signals that Canberra will use its funding of the WHO to push for reforms.

But the audit is much broader than the WHO and stems from Scott Morrison’s declaration last year that Australia needed to avoid “any reflex towards a negative globalism” or “an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy” – sentiments that drew immediate comparisons with Donald Trump’s anti-globalist rhetoric.

The prime minister confirmed this week that a report prepared by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade would be “coming back very soon”.

Morrison portrayed the review in practical terms, saying Australia was “always going to consider where we put our funds and we always want value for money”.

Wong, the Labor Senate leader and foreign affairs spokesperson, argued Australia needed international cooperation because it was not a superpower that could just throw its weight around.

She said at a time when the world faced the worst pandemic in a century, it needed a strong and effective WHO more than ever.

“That means we need to be very active in making multilateral institutions like the UN and the WHO work better,” Wong told Guardian Australia on Friday.

“That has always been the job of our political leaders and diplomats – we don’t really need a review to tell us that.”

While accepting Australia should work with like-minded countries to shape and reform these organisations, Wong said: “The idea by some that we can just start from scratch is a fantasy and a waste of precious time and resources.”

Guardian Australia understands Dfat is still working on the report, but the view within the government is that the exercise is a way of ensuring that Australia’s involvement with multilateral institutions aligns with its national interests.

It is believed that any identified shortcomings are likely to spark calls for reform to those bodies rather than wholesale disengagement.

Hervé Lemahieu, the director of the Asian Power and Diplomacy Program at the Lowy Institute, said the world had changed drastically since Morrison made his speech on “negative globalism” and the forthcoming report need not be a scathing assessment of international institutions.

Lemahieu said the impression he got from last year’s speech was that Australia “could cherrypick its way through the international rules-based system and choose which elements of it it wanted to safeguard and uphold versus which elements it could do away with”.

“I’m not sure that that sort of à la carte approach is possible,” he said.

“If you undermine one aspect of the international rules-based system ... it tends to have a weakening effect on the entire edifice.”

Lemahieu said Australia should not go down the US route of scrapping funding to international agencies because this was “shooting yourself in the foot” and guaranteeing others – such as China – even more influence.

He said it did not help that Australia’s contributions to multilateral organisations, including the United Nations and its specialised organisations, had already decreased by about 25% since 2014-15.

Australia should work with other middle powers to jointly bring money and reform ideas to the table “and try to make a constructive pitch for the need for hardheaded internationalism”.

In the case of the WHO, Lemahieu suggested the body needed “a far more aggressive mandate to be able to pursue facts” similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

While Morrison has criticised the WHO over its position on wet markets and its slowness in declaring Covid-19 a pandemic, the prime minister has also praised the organisation for its “very important work” in assisting the Pacific to deal with a range of infectious diseases.

The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, confirmed the government would seek to “leverage off our membership” to press for WHO reforms.

The under-strain World Trade Organization is another likely target for reforms.

Dr Giovanni Di Lieto, a lecturer in international business and economics at Monash University, said the government’s review might spark a push to rewrite trade and foreign investment rules that could “revert the world economy to shorter and more resilient supply chains”.

Di Lieto said he “would not cry over the breaking down of the WTO” but warned that the government would need to harmonise its responses with its closest partners to avoid “a dog-eat-dog post-pandemic scenario”.