Al Jazeera, The Stream

I was a guest host of AJE’s social media news show, The Stream, again this week. The topic was one close to home for me – Australia’s policy towards asylum seekers. The discussion followed an announcement by the Australian government last week that it will start to issue bridging visas to enable some of the asylum seekers currently in mandatory detention to live and work in the community while their claims are being processed. One of our guests was David Corlett, who led the Australian reality TV series Go Back To Where You Came From, which sparked a lot of much-needed discussion of these issues. Later in the show we also talked about a new industrial park in Haiti, which former U.S. President Clinton helped launch this week.  While it is being heralded internationally as a great step forward for Haiti, our guest, Yannick Etienne, questioned the value of the jobs it will create when workers are being paid the Haitian minimum wage of $5/day. Haiti Grassroots Watch released a report critical of the environmental and social impacts of the development today.  You can watch the show here: http://stream.aljazeera.com/episode/21892