High school has always been turbulent at best, but never before was I confronted with institutionalised oppression in the way that I was when it came to Year 9 sex education.
Year 9 is the final year in my school where all students have access to sex education regardless of their subject choice, after this a student has to choose a physical education (PE) subject to learn more about it.
Resistance!
Like most sectors of society, the education system in Australia is under attack. For decades, education has been underfunded, so when Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that she intended to fund the Gonski reforms, many people were temporarily relieved.
Then she said that, to pay for primary and high school education reforms, the government would cut funding to universities. Private schools won鈥檛 lose funding and, in some cases, will get more. Yet the ailing TAFE system would get nothing.
So much for an education revolution.
Liah Lazarou, 28, is standing as a youth candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the South Australian seat of Adelaide, currently held by Labor MP Kate Ellis.
She was interviewed by Resistance member Liam Conlon about why she is standing in the election and what she is trying to achieve.
How did you get involved in political activism?
I grew up in a very working class background and was raised by a single father. He took me to my first rally, which was against Pauline Hanson in 1996. I was eleven years old.
Socialist activists are involved in political struggles across many different issues. From equal marriage rights to defending education, refugee rights to the environment, socialists help organise and lead these campaigns, and seek to win important political reforms around them.
It might seem contradictory for socialists to fight for reforms. Since socialists oppose capitalism and the capitalist state, why is it that they campaign for measures that encourage the expansion of the capitalist state?
The fight against homophobia is arguably the civil rights issue of our times. It is increasingly unacceptable that, in 2013, society continues to discriminate against people based on their sexuality.
This is most obviously demonstrated by the continued refusal to grant equal marriage rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LBGTI) people.
Austerity almost seems like the defining feature of politics today. Across Europe and the US, crippling cuts to education, health care and welfare budgets are driving millions further into poverty.
Even in Australia, where our economy has been spared the worst of the financial crisis, both big parties are raising taxes on ordinary people and applying cuts to welfare and education.
Last year, cuts to courses and staff at several universities, including Sydney University and La Trobe University, led to strong campaigns by staff and students to defend their education and jobs.
The federal Labor government has announced it intends to dramatically increase funding to primary and high school education as part of the Gonski reforms. But before you think that maybe, just maybe, the government might be making some policy that could be defended by progressives, there's a devil in the detail.
University of Queensland (UQ) Executive Dean of Arts Fred D鈥橝gostino said last month the gender studies major would be cut from the Bachelor of Arts program.
No student commencing next year would have the option of majoring in this area.
Gender studies has a 41-year history at the university. The program was won in the early 1970s by the powerful feminist movement of the time.
It was the first of its kind in Australia and one of the first in the world.
The ongoing strike at Sydney University attracted national media attention on March 26 when strike-supporting students were dragged from a lecture theatre by riot police.
The students were engaged in a 鈥渞oaming picket鈥 that was disrupting one of the few remaining classes held that day when police intervened. This sparked debate as to whether student supporters used appropriate tactics to make their presence heard.
This week on campuses across the country, Resistance members are opening their books and getting back into study. Our 鈥淏achelor of Revolutionary Activism鈥 will be open to anyone who is interested in getting an education in socialist ideas.
Classes will include a discussion on Marxist-feminism. Others will be about how we can save our environment, or how best to support the Palestinian people. It鈥檚 a little bit different in each city or campus, but there will be common themes. Everywhere Resistance will be putting forward an alternative vision on how to run the world.
For revolutionary rappers Rebel Diaz, the death of Hugo Chavez on March 5 came as a double blow. The Venezuelan leader had helped the Chilean hip-hop duo set up their community arts and resistance centre in New York's South Bronx after he visited the area eight years ago.
Important rallies were held across the country in defence of the single parent payment on February 5. After having the welfare safety net in Australia for some time, it seems insane there is a need to protest to protect such rights.
But protests like these made welfare a reality in the first place. These protests are defending an unprecedented attack, it's a return to the action that made social welfare possible.
To do so, it is important to understand the reason that welfare is under attack in the first place.
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