BY JULIA HALDANE
BRISBANE — Women are the invisible victims of wars over diminishing resources, Susan Price, women's liberation coordinator for the Democratic Socialist Party, told an audience of 50 people at a post-International Women's Day forum on "Women and Globalisation" held at the Resistance Centre here on March 17.
Price went on to say that the backlash against feminism since the 1970s had served the interests of the big corporations, which were seeking to channel working women into a flexible, un-unionised, casualised work force, as well as re-enforcing their traditional role as unpaid domestic labourers.
However, the anti-capitalist globalisation protests since Seattle last year were evidence of a "crack in the politics of quiescence", according to Price.
Jo Ball of Socialist Alternative spoke about the continued discrepancy between male and female wages and conditions, with most working women still earning approximately 66% of men's wages, and being much more likely to be employed in sweatshop conditions.
She pointed out the contradictions between the ease with which CEOs and other highly paid employees of globalised corporations obtain visas and move about freely, and the difficulty that women and children have in escaping from domestic violence and honour killings.
Gwen Charlton of the International Socialist Organisation referred to the Kortex strike in Melbourne in 1981 as an example of what can be achieved through struggle. She explained that the women in the Kortex factory managed to organise picket lines, resist police attacks, communicate across language barriers and defy union officials who wished to call off the strike.
Before this session, the forum had heard in-depth presentations on the plan to re-launch a campaign for the repeal of anti-abortion laws in Queensland.
DSP activist Katrina Barben spoke about the history of the abortion rights movement in this state, and about the continued failure of state Labor governments in the 1990s to respond to women's demands for the removal of abortion from the criminal code.
She outlined in some detail the long struggle for abortion rights in Queensland, and the various stages of the campaign, including the mass anger at the notorious police raids of the Greenslopes abortion clinic in 1985 under the conservative government of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Coral Wynter from the DSP spoke about the current debate in Queensland as to whether or not activists should seek partial reform of the abortion laws, or continue to demand repeal. She pointed out that the Western Australian restrictions on abortions over 20 weeks has meant that abortions are now not available, in practice, over 16 weeks.
Wynter argued that, with a large number of women elected in the ALP landslide in the recent Queensland state election, now was an ideal time to launch a new, all-out campaign to completely erase abortion from the criminal code, and make it a normal medical procedure, determined by a woman and her doctor, as it should be.