Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard will address the United Nations General Assembly next week. She would deliver her address while attending the opening of the 67th session of the General Assembly. She will be in New York from Sept 23 to 27.

"The United Nations is the world's pre-eminent multilateral body, and Australia, as a founding member state, is committed to active engagement on its agenda," Ms Gillard said in a statement.

Besides addressing the UN, the prime minister will also meet with other world leaders and take part in events related to the Millennium Development Goals, education and international peacekeeping.

Commenting on the ongoing global rage over the anti-Islam film which had resulted in a violent demonstration in Sydney on Saturday, Ms Gillard - an atheist - pointed out that migrants like herself who live in Australia's multicultural society brings with it the obligation to leave old hatreds behind and find shared identity on common ground.

"Multiculturalism is the meeting of rights and responsibilities, the right to bring to this nation as a migrant your heritage and your culture and your language and religion. It's the meeting of those rights with responsibilities . . . to find work, to learn English, to uphold our rule of law, to be a full participant in our democracy, to recognise women as equals in our society," Times Live quoted Ms Gillard's Thursday address to Parliament.

It was her first appearance in Parliament since the death earlier this month of her father, John Gillard at the age of 83. She took the occasion to thank the MPs and Australians for overwhelming her family with kindness after her father, a migrant from Wales, passed away.

She attributed reaching her current political post to Labor values and stress on the value of education her parents passed on to her.

"He felt more deeply than me, in many ways, some of the personal attacks, that we face in the business of politics, but I was always able to reassure him that he had raised a daughter with sufficient strength not to let that get her down," The Herald Sun quoted Ms Gillard.

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