Most people in Australia are being adversely affected by present governments' economic and social policies, but women especially are bearing the brunt of the attacks.

Less access to child care facilities, combined with the Workplace Relations Act and enterprise bargaining in the workplace, severely disadvantage women workers; funding cuts to education and increases in fees affect women students hardest; and the de-funding of public housing, women's crisis services and legal aid makes women even more vulnerable to entrapment in violent situations.

But Aboriginal and other women of colour are under particular attack.

Most Aboriginal women already live in Third World conditions in Australia. Their men are dying in custody at an increasing rate and their children are still stolen from them by the state. Yet last year the federal government massively cut funding for Aboriginal services and it is now threatening to legislate native title out of existence and weaken the Racial Discrimination Act.

Women migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds are already over-represented in the ranks of the unemployed or in the sweatshops where they work long hours in atrocious conditions for little pay. Funding cuts to English language courses, the proposed increase in the immigration fee, and new legislation (supported by Labor and Liberal) that prevents immigrants under the skills provision from claiming unemployment benefits, youth allowances and sickness benefits for two years after they arrive will throw even more migrant women into absolute poverty and exploitative situations.

Racism and sexism are institutionalised in Australian society. The ideas that non-white people are "naturally" inferior to white, and that women are "naturally" inferior to men are used both separately and in conjunction with each other to justify and maintain discrimination against millions of people in this country - to pay them lower wages (or none at all in the case of housework, which is still done mostly by women), to provide them with fewer services, to exclude them from political power and to intimidate them when they challenge this inequality.

The people who promote racist and sexist ideas and who implement the racist and sexist policies are not simply the Pauline Hansons, John Howards and Kim Beazleys in parliament.

They sit on the boards of the large corporations that devastate Aboriginal lands; that employ the sweatshop labour; that sell the beauty myth to women; that use their newspapers and TV stations to whip up racism and sexism by lying to the public about the real causes of environmental destruction, unemployment, crime and violence. That is, they are the big business owners who make enormous sums of money from the systematic denial of women and people of colours' right to equality, self-respect and a decent standard of living.

Over the past century women have campaigned for and won the formal right to vote and stand for public office, to have equal pay and to be free from discrimination, harassment and assault. The anti-racist movement too has won many formal rights for indigenous people and immigrants over the last 50 years.

These formal rights have not translated into real equality for most women or people of colour, however, and now even those formal gains are being taken back.

To stop the current attacks, let alone start to make progress towards real equality for women and people of colour, we urgently need to strengthen the women's liberation movement. We need to build a movement that is active - prepared to struggle in every sphere and with every means necessary; that is broad, democratic and inclusive - bringing together and fighting for the rights of all women; and that will stand and struggle side by side with all others who are fighting against injustice.