Perth Indymedia

Supporters of the labour movement across the country experienced a real shot in the arm last Wednesday, when an estimated 100 000 people marched through the streets of Melbourne in support of the Australian Council of Trade Union's Change the Rules campaign. Alex Whisson had the opportunity to speak to one of the organisers of the march, Assistant Secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council Wil Stracke.

A few weeks ago we promised to bring you a range of perspectives on the Syrian war. We've already spoken to Leila Al-Shami, blogger and co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. We also heard from Mark Goudkamp of the Sydney Stop the War coalition.

Today we speak to Jay Tharappel. Jay is a PhD researcher at Sydney University's Political Economy Department, an anti-war campaigner with Hands off Syria, and a prominent political commentator on social media.

We began our conversation with the question of the recent Western bombing of Syrian government targets, in the wake of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma by the Syrian Arab Army.

"The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."

That’s the wording of the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, enshrined in law after a referendum in 1983. There’s now another referendum scheduled for May 25th to repeal that amendment. Shauna Stanley is a campaigner with the Melbourne Irish Abortion Rights campaign. She began by explaining what the amendment has meant for Irish women’s ability to choose to have an abortion.

The world was stunned early last week to hear Dr Mahathir Mohamad, long term former autocratic ruler of Malaysia, had won the right to form government. The opposition coalition he led received a 12% swing and gained some 54 seats in the national parliament.

Alex Whisson spoke to Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj, who it’s confirmed has lost the seat he held for the Malaysian Socialist Party since 2008. Dr Kumar began by giving his assessment of the political factors behind Mahathir’s return to power.

The Change the Rules campaign is an initiative of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Its goal is to, as the name suggests, change the laws and regulations governing industrial relations in this country. From unpaid penalty rates to record low wage growth, to the fact one third of big businesses in Australia don’t pay any tax at all, the hope is this campaign will focus public attention on the lack of economic justice and basic fairness in this country. It’s already breathed new life in to a labour movement long struggling for relevancy and indeed its very survival. Yesterday the architect of that campaign, newly elected Secretary of the ACTU Sally McManus, was in Fremantle to address the annual May Day festival.

The current protests in Gaza have involved tens of thousands of people. It’s the largest sustained mobilisation of Palestinians in many years. Despite the largely peaceful nature of the protests, at least 48 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Army, and many hundreds wounded.

Dubbed the Great Return March, this new movement has given birth to a flowering of creative, non-violent resistance to the Zionist occupation. Palestinian scholar and author Dr Ramzy Baroud has written for many years on the history and politics of the Palestinian struggle.

Alex Whisson interviewed Dr Baroud ahead of his Australian speaking tour, beginning with the question of why the Palestinian struggle for justice and nationhood has for so long been grossly mischaracterised as terrorism and nothing but terrorism.

Independent journalist and commentator Michael Brull recently wrote a three-part special report for New Matilda on conflict within the NSW Greens.

The piece focuses on a dispute, which eventually made its way to the NSW Supreme Court, over the validity of Cate Faehrmann standing for preselection in the upper house of state parliament. Faehrmann, who won the court case and is now expected to take up the Legislative Council seat vacated by Mehreen Faruqi, is a person of some standing within the party structure, having served as Richard Di Natale’s chief-of-staff from 2015 until March of this year. It’s fair to say the prospect of her nomination was not welcomed by all party members. Indeed, some media commentators, as well as people inside the Greens, have characterised this dispute as one shaped by an ongoing, increasingly bitter civil war between the hard left and so-called moderate factions of the state party branch.

Alex Whisson caught up with Michael Brull and began by asking him to outline what the dispute was about and what, in his view, its political significance was.

Last week we spoke to Mark Goudkamp from the Sydney Stop the War coalition to get his perspective on the Syrian war. Today we turn to Leila Al-Shami, co-author with Robin Yassin-Kassab of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, published by Pluto Press. Alex Whisson began by asking Leila to start at the beginning, to go back to what happened in the early months of 2011, when massive street protests broke out against the Assad regime.

Many observers, including many people on the left, accept the Assad regime carried out a chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma on April 7th, killing some 60 people and injuring dozens of others. And many people, with a gut instinct against war, support the idea of the so-called international community responding to such attacks with limited, targeted airstrikes. Others take the view the strikes are part of a Western imperialist agenda and that, in the long run, they will only serve to increase the suffering of the Syrian people.

Alex Whisson spoke to Mark Goudkamp of the Sydney Stop the War Coalition to address these vitally important questions. He began by asking exactly why the British, French and American bombing of Syrian government targets ought to be opposed.

Though there will be May Day events around the country this weekend, there are few people who would seriously argue they’re not a pale shadow of the past.

With only around 15% of workers members of a trade union, and only one in ten in the private sector, the truth is the labour movement in Australia is at a historical ebb.

Alex Whisson spoke to Liz Humphrys, political economist at the University of Technology Sydney, and author of the upcoming book, How Labour Built Neoliberalism, to get a better understanding of this sorry state of affairs.

Liz began by explaining the historical importance of Bob Hawke’s signature achievement in government, the Prices and Incomes Accord, in the decline and degeneration of the Australian trade union movement.