Perth Indymedia

We speak to longtime commentator, author and activist Helen Razer on the #SerenaWilliams cartoon, racism in Australia, the #metoo campaign and the changing nature of political discourse.

Helen is a regular contributor to publications such as New Matilda and The Age and is the author of four books. Her latest is titled Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young.

Ian Rintoul of the Refugee Action Coalition on the weekend protests at the Yongah Hill detention centre, which followed the attempted suicide by a 22-year-old Iraqi refugee. Ian began by discussing the man's welfare.

"Alcoa's got a lease for the bauxite for the next 40 years and they want to give us a one year contract each, which to me seems a bit unfair."

Alcoa workers at the Kwinana alumina refinery shared their thoughts on day 25 of their strike.

Co-coordinator of 350 Perth Franca Gilissen talks to Alex Whisson about the Rise for Climate Action. She began by addressing the question of widespread indifference to the climate crisis.

Ride share drivers took strike action on Monday the 6th of August calling for better pay and conditions from Uber. Indymedia's Raymond Grenfell spoke to Ride Share Drivers United spokesperson Max Marino about why they had decided to take industrial action.

As the Israeli Air Force bombed Gaza last week, killing several Palestinians and wounding many others, a tweet from the United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process, Nickolay Mladenov, neatly summarised the gross distortions of the way Israel’s criminal occupation is so often presented to the world. “Everyone in Gaza needs to step back from the brink”, wrote Mladenov, thus repeating, yet again, the tired old lie of moral equivalence between an occupying force and the resistance forces opposing it. Depressingly, it seems nothing ever changes for the long-suffering Palestinians. Yet many commentators believe the Israeli massacre of 60 Palestinians on May 14th may yet prove to be a historical turning point in the struggle for Palestinian national liberation. Palestinian-American human rights lawyer, activist and writer, Noura Erakat, spoke to Alex Whisson on the back of her Australian speaking tour.

Have you heard of the Defence Amendment (Call Out of the Australian Defence Force) Bill 2018? Chances are you haven’t. It was recently introduced into the federal parliament with scant attention from the media, and scarcely a whimper from the public at large. One of the few people paying attention was freelance journalist Paul Gregoire. Alex Whisson spoke to him late last week.

Earlier this month human rights lawyer Lizzie O'Shea wrote an article for Eureka Street that ought to trouble anyone concerned about the expanding power of the surveillance state in this country, as well as the grotesque hypocrisies that lie at the heart of the Australian political class.

A former intelligence officer, known only as Witness K, and his lawyer, potentially face up to two years in jail, for exposing a 2004 operation to bug the cabinet offices of the East Timorese government. O'Shea spoke to Indymedia's Alex Whisson.

Recent months have seen a wave of protests against Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua. Picking up where a similar set of student and pensioner-led protests in 2013 left off, the growing movement has been met with brutal repression, with hundreds killed and injured. Famous for leading the Sandinista National Liberation Front, first in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, and then resisting US-backed death squads throughout a decade-long civil war, Ortega’s political legacy is now, to say the least, a contested one. Alex Whisson caught up with long time Nicaragua solidarity activist, Lori Hanson, and began by asking if it was accurate to describe Ortega’s government as a form of neoliberalism with an ostensibly left wing face.

As grassroots protests against Trump’s detention of migrant children spread across America, one of the striking things about the outrage from the liberal press and Democratic Party politicians is its shameless hypocrisy. These are pundits and politicians who, in many cases, supported President Obama's deportation policies, as well as the detention of unaccompanied children who had family members in the United States. What accounts for this selective, blatantly partisan outrage? Alex Whisson put this question to New York-based author, journalist and commentator Doug Henwood.