BY ANGELA LUVERA
SYDNEY — High school students all around Australia are preparing to strike on May 1 to join the blockades and protests against corporate rule.
Students will be striking for many reasons — for the cancellation of third world debt, to express anger at the proposed closure of public high schools in Sydney's inner-west, to demand an end to environmental destruction.
Students in Sydney and Perth held 48 hour hunger strikes in solidarity with Third World hunger on April 20. The hunger strikers demanded that Third World debt be cancelled.
Students affected by the state government's proposed school closures in Sydney have called on parents, teachers and students to strike on May 1 to show their dissent. They will be picketing the stock exchange on April 24, burning a coffin to symbolise the "death of education".
Students in Perth will be staging a "die-in" outside the stock exchange to symbolise the senseless deaths of people in the third world. Eighteen thousand children die each day in heavily indebted poor countries from diseases which could and should have been treated.
The strike has been called by Resistance, the socialist youth organisation, and has been endorsed by M1 organising collectives around the country.