I'll start by asking if anyone knows the name of Australia's Prime Minister. I'm asking because John Howard is flaunting Australia as the United States' best friend and himself as George W.'s closest chum.

There are reasons for Canberra's cozy relationship with Washington and for the fact that a lot of what I'm going to tell you about the struggles we face sound awfully familiar.

Australia is an imperialist power in its own right. For most of the past century, Australia has controlled parts of the South Pacific, and Australian industrialists have used them as cash cows. When you hear about political upheavals in the region -- from the coups in Fiji to the independence struggles of East Timor or Aceh -- you know that the Australian government and the corporate interests it works for have blood on their hands, just like the United States. Giants like BHP Australia and Santos, for instance, have made fortunes from the oil-rich Timor Sea. Australian troops have gone to Vietnam, Somalia, the Gulf War and Afghanistan. Iraq is next. Washington's most strategic spy base is Pine Gap, located in the middle of Australia.

September 11, 2001 dramatically changed the world. For ordinary people in Australia, having a government that acts like George W.'s Right Hand Man means that we're going to pay a heavy price, the same as you -- starting with a war we'll end up paying for with our schools, hospitals and welfare, and an attack on our civil rights. I'm going to talk about these struggles and the resistance which women are shaping, how revolutionary feminism is providing a bridge between our struggles today and where we aspire to go -- a just, equal and free world.

Before I left Australia, three significant events happened within days of each other. On Sunday, October 13, 45,000 people marched in Melbourne's streets against war in Iraq. That same day, news broke that bombs had gone off in a nightclub district of Bali. Untold hundreds were killed, including up to 150 young Australians on holiday. On October 18, rallies around the country commemorated the drownings last year of more than 350 refugees from Afghanistan and the Middle East as their leaky, overcrowded fishing boat sank on its way to Australia -- with almost certain complicity of the Australian government.

There's been a steadily growing movement against the bipartisan policy of mandatory detention for refugees trying to escape war, starvation and repression. Eighty percent of them are women and children. They live in concentration camps. Some are set up in Australia's isolated deserts and others on neighboring Pacific territories that Canberra bullied into taking in. Exactly a year ago, Howard based his re-election campaign on outright xenophobia -- demonising refugees as uncivilised, illegal "queue jumpers" and possibly terrorists. And he won! But the refugee rights movement has just as doggedly educated about people's right to asylum and about the inhuman conditions they're forced to live in. Graphic stories and scenes from Bush's war on Afghanistan did a lot to get some public support for opening Australia's borders to refugees.

Then the bombing in Bali brought it home, much like the attack on the World Trade Center did here. To watch the media propaganda, you'd think that no Indonesian died or lost a loved one. Even so, a year after 9/11, people have been quick to put some pieces together. Melbourne's major daily newspaper, "The Age," carried opinion pieces and letters to the editor blaming Howard's gung-ho pro-Bush policy for the attack.

As expected, Howard used the Bali tragedy to steamroll through "anti-terror" legislation which previously had been stalled by public opposition. And the very patriotic Australian Labor Party gave it the bipartisan green light. What's happened here in the U.S. over the past year is now going on in Australia: the outlawing of "suspected terrorist" groups; nationwide dragnets by security agencies against Arabic and Asian Muslims; and the freezing of organisations' bank accounts. There's now talk of a Bush-style Department for Homeland Security.

This so-called war on terror is really a class war, and capitalism faces a terrible dilemma. The system is about making wealth for only the few, not sharing it! To do that, it needs women to breed the workforce, raise it to be compliant and productive, and pack its lunches. Women's independence and equality is as unthinkable as sharing the wealth.

In Australia, women's rights are on the firing line, with reproductive rights as the prime target. Last year, an unmarried woman challenged Victoria's laws on access to invitro-fertilisation (IVF) treatment. Only women in a established heterosexual relationships can get it. This case pitched feminists against the religious zealots, and when the case went to the High Court, the Howard government teamed up with the Catholic Church. Howard was prepared to gut the federal Sex Discrimination Act in order to stop any state from allowing free access to IVF and donor sperm. This battle between women versus "family values" is currently at a stalemate.

Next news of national concern is the "low fertility" of Australian women. Which women might they be talking about? White women in heterosexual partnerships, of course, who have been making choices about if and when they'll have children. Who might be concerned? Our ruling capitalist class - the ones who deny refugee women the right to come into the country. The same ones who for decades have denied Aboriginal women, migrant women, poor women, and women with disabilities their reproductive choices -- by forced sterilisation, welfare authorities stealing their children or infant deaths caused by poverty and the racist health system.

Howard's privatisation of services and the stripping back of affordable childcare is forcing working women to give up their low-paying jobs and stay at home. It's impossible for them to juggle government child support payments with their inadequate wages. The tax on their earnings eats into their welfare support to such an extent that they can end up working for 40¢ an hour. Hardly worth the effort!

Australia and the United States are the only two wealthy countries in the world without paid maternity leave. Now that business needs more workers and consumers, paid maternity leave has become a popular idea in Australia. But the burning question is: who pays? The push is for government to foot the bill -- which amounts to another bailout for business and women, as taxpayers, paying for their maternity leave.

Canberra is privatising anything that moves. Telstra, Australia's national telecommunications enterprise, and Medicare, our national health insurance scheme, are next. Maximus, an American company notorious for the job it's done on welfare and workers' rights, is about to move into Australia with plans to take over Centrelink, the national social security system. The effects of privatisation on the Australian working class are as desperate as they are in the U.S., El Salvador or anywhere else.

The moralistic spin on privatisation is just as perverse and cruel, and Australia's Aborigines are getting the worst of it. As the result of more than 200 years of dispossession and genocide, their main income is welfare. The government is now stripping it back. Getting rid of "passive welfare dependency" shifts responsibility for the past two centuries onto the shoulders of the Aboriginal communities. And it is Aboriginal women carry the weight of holding their communities together.

This climate breeds fascist groups like the Blackshirts in Melbourne -- men whose partners left have them and won custody of their children. The Blackshirts stalk the women and others who they think defile the sanctity of the family and the fascist formula for womanhood.

But just as women are the subject of virulent attacks, we have the capacity to link every targeted movement into a powerful united front against bosses, rightwingers and fascists - and the capitalist system itself. Feminism is a revolutionary force that will lead in making the change that humanity so desperately needs.

Feminism that is internationalist and revolutionary is speaking to people who are looking for answers and ways to make change. Over past year, rallies have been making the connections between imperialist war and attacks at home. This year's May Day, for example, connected refugee rights, Palestine, opposition to Howard's Terror Laws and Indigenous issues to union rights. Radical Women collected lots of signatures for the petition of the Workers and Peasants School in solidarity with Salvadoran workers. At the commemorations in Melbourne and Geelong for the refugees who drowned, Radical Women put out a leaflet with the message: "The fight for refugee rights is a first-order feminist battle." The response from both women and men was that this is exactly how they see the refugee issue and this is why they come to the rallies.

Look at any protest action against privatisation or war, any anti-corporate mobilisation, any picket line, any speakout against the terror laws, any march for refugees or any standoff against ultra rightwingers and you see very determined women. And the faces are overwhelmingly young and of color. These women are becoming more and more interested in RW and our ideas, because we put sexism and racism at the centre of this class war. We say that what it will take to win is the uniting of all our movements around anti-capitalist, internationalist demands that address the needs of the most downtrodden.

One of the most exciting things about being in a revolutionary feminist organisation like Radical Women is meeting others around the world. We've worked closely with the Working Women Organisation of Pakistan (WWO). Organising in the centre of Bush's warzone, WWO is unionising the women workers, who are concentrated in Pakistan's super-exploited informal economy. This means fighting not just the boss but standing up to the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf and Islamic fundamentalism. Recently WWO has been involved in an anti-war coalition of women's, workers', and human rights organisations. WWO's analysis that only the solidarity and struggle of an united, international workers' movement will free their Afghan and Iraqi sisters, not U.S. bombings, has won support. RW has also made links with Malaysian feminist unionists and human rights activists who are leading the struggle against their government's notorious Internal Security Act that has jailed thousands of dissidents and been used as the basis for post-September 11 anti-terror legislation in our own countries.

Imagine revolution? The foundation is being built right now, on a global scale, through the unity of socialist feminism. Especially in the United States, but also in imperialist partners like Australia, we have an historic role to play. By making socialist revolution in our own countries, we would shut down capitalism from its source. We owe it our sisters and brothers around the world who have fought so long, and the millions who have died, in the endless wars made in our names. We owe it to ourselves. Bring it on! Adelante!