Eighty people gathered at the State School Teachers Union offices in Perth for the Socialist Ideas Conference over the weekend of June 26-27. Speakers included Jeyakumar Devaraj, Socialist Party of Malaysia MP, and Richard Downs, spokesperson for the Alyawarr People's Walk-off in the Northern Territory.
Julia Gillard becoming Australia's first female prime minister days before the conference set the tone for much of the discussion. A session on 鈥淔eminism Today鈥 had a new context, although it concluded that demands such as equal pay, abortion rights and the right to give birth at home births will need to be fought for regardless of the PM鈥檚 gender.
A plenary session called 鈥淔ighting for Change in Gillard's Australia鈥 was addressed by Alison Xamon from the Greens, who discussed building a parliamentary alternative to the two-party system. Other speakers were Phil Chilton from the Refugee Rights Action Network and Alex Bainbridge, the Socialist Alliance鈥檚 federal election candidate for Perth.
Other plenary sessions included speakers such as: Marianne Mackay from the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee, Gemma Weedall begin_of_the_skype_highlighting聽聽聽聽聽end_of_the_skype_highlighting, who attended the World Peoples鈥 Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Kiraz Janicke from the 91自拍论坛 Weekly Venezuela bureau.
Workshops covered a range of topics such as radical history, civil liberties, socialism and human nature, and socialist perspectives on Palestine.
It was a highly successful and exciting event. All those who attended left better informed and enthused for the next steps in the struggle.