If Australia manages to get a temporary seat at the UN Security Council this will be a good thing for Australia as it enhances our image and influence in the UN and in international affairs generally.

Australia is not a member of the NAM and the Iranians and others may see our participation as opportunistic.

Australia should continue to support nuclear non-proliferation and global peace. The UNSC permanent members are all nuclear armed states. The UNSC members and other nuclear armed states need to dismantle their nuclear stockpiles and commit to making the planet a safer place. Humanity does not need nuclear weapons.

First hand knowledge is better than reading a version of it in the AUSTRALIAN.

Yeah, let's put more sanctions on the Iranians, Julie. After all, it worked so well with the Iraqis, didn't it?

Yeah, starving women and children is the way to go, the way to achieve peace, the way to bring an end to all war, isn't it, Julie? I mean the Israelis have tried starvation along with genocide, stealing land and taxes, using phosphorous munitions, etc, and we can see just how much peace has been achieved, haven't we?

Yeah, Australia should stick to its principles assuming it had any real principles!

Until reading this article, I didn’t know about Australia’s attendance at the NAM summit. So on that basis, I thank Julie Bishop for informing me of ONE action amongst the shameful litany of obsequious behaviours comprising Australia’s foreign policy that I can finally be proud of.

After the inhumane 13-year sanctions ordeal that Iraq was put through – which, among other horrors and injustices, impoverished the country, crippled its previously advanced health system causing the deaths of 500,000 children under five, and brought literacy levels from 95% in 1987 to 40% in 2003 – Ms Bishop now has the audacity to be enraged by Australia’s ‘failure’ to maintain a similar level of slow demo-torture on the population of Iran.

Whether or not Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program is not the real point – even though so many try to make it so. The fact is that the country is surrounded by hostile nuclear-powered pro-Western states. Starvation sanctions and belligerent diplomacy will bring the country to its knees, as it did to Iraq, but will not address the diplomatic realities that are driving Iran’s decisions on weapons defence – nuclear or otherwise

I fear this Coalition will take us to war based on the lies of terrorism and the demonisation of Russia and China because they will no be subdued by the Banking Military Industrial Complex.

What in the name of fortune are we putting sanctions on Iran for? The only ones they are affecting are the poor and the needy in the Iranian population. It would be more logical to put sanctions on the Israelis, Americans and their nuclear armed allies until they destroy their massive stockpiles of nukes.