The Chaser Report - Blindsided by The Voice Referendum

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Albo has launched a surprise Voice referendum on Australia with no warning whatsoever. Meanwhile PWC has been hacked, but by who? Plus Harry and Meghan are looking for work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigall Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Dom, what a day. What a day, so much news to talk about. My heart goes out to PWC. I mean, of all the organisations to be hit with a data hack, the massive global hack, the poor things. I mean, the question is, who had the motive to... to heck, PWC.

Well, I presume it was PWC. Anyway, we'll get to that. We'll also get to very sad news from Montecito, with the news that not only has Megan's podcast archetypes not been renewed by Spotify, $29 million deal has fallen over, but a Spotify executive had some pretty spicy words to use about the South sexism,

which I'm looking forward to getting on to. But the big story today, Charles, is... The voice. The voice. Let's hear what two white guys think. After this, I mean, Sky News doesn't have a problem with covering it in that way. Why should we? And Charles, look, the legislation to have the referendum and to fund the referendum.

Yes. To a tune with $360 million has passed the lower house just now. It's a bad day. It's a bad day for just jumping the gun. Look, I'm with Peter Dutton on this one. Of course you are. Which is, we don't have any detail. We haven't been warned that this is coming.

This is just out of the blue. Like, I woke up this morning, not thinking that there would be a voice referendum at some point in the near future. And now Albo's just sprung it on the parliament without telling anyone. Why couldn't you mention it before? No one's voted in. Yes. Where was this in the campaign? Where was this on election night?

Yes. Why didn't he say the moment he got elected, we're going to do the voice in our first year in office? Where was that, Albo? No, it's not good enough. And there's only, like, as far as I'm aware, the only document that the, government has released is a 400-page document about it. Which no one's going to... If they were serious about this, Charles, they'd have one page.

Yes. And if one page we can all read that it'd be nice and clear, the Uluru statement of the heart, that's one page. Yes. It's one page that very few people have read in commenting about the debate. But nevertheless, it's a simple, clear document. What's 400 pages? What kind of nerd's going to read that, Julian and Lisa?

Exactly. There's too much detail. There's too much detail in the document and not enough detail about... When we're saying the voice, Charles, it's deliberately confusing. The government's trying to... When you say the voice, you think of John Farnham.

Of course you think of John Farnham. It's got nothing to do. I'm told with John Farnham. Or does it? Or does it? I mean, John Farnham, was he... No, I'm not going to go down that path. Well, I think we all mentally went down that path for a short while.

No. Look, he hasn't yet waited on the voice debate. Everything's going on with him. Is he need dead? No, he's not yet. Is he dead? No, not yet. I'm pretty sure he's dead.

He's going to do more tours. Are you sure? No, he did the last time tour. This is a sort of important. Where is Anthony Albanyzi on John Farnham's health? Oh my God. Where are you, Albo? You're right.

He's not dead. He's still alive. Let's celebrate. Well, this is a good day, Tom. Well, at least there's one voice that Unites Australians. One voice that United Australians are going, did you really need a bagpipe solo there, John? Okay, fine, why not?

But look, we need to know more about this before we can vote. It's literally just, it's an abstract thing. The government's put no meat on the bones. What is this thing? Yes, that's right. Yeah, and it's got both no meat on the boat and far too much detail of the meat that they've put on some of the bones. And I think there's a real, there's a real attack line opening up, which is if you lie about what it is, it creates doubt and fear in the community. Yes.

And then people are going to vote no. And I think that Labor has to own the fact that a lot of national party MPs, a lot of Liberal Party politicians, including the leader, are going to lie about it. And Labor has to take responsibility for that and address people's lies about this. I mean, Albo came out and slammed the misinformation. Yes, he said this. But isn't his side missing information as well? Yes.

They are. And, Charles, you know what I've heard. I've heard the problem with the voice is that it's, it doesn't go far enough. Yes. It doesn't go far enough. And also it doesn't do anything. Well, it doesn't do anything, but it really is why it's radical change.

It goes far too far in not doing anything. It's a massive change that does nothing. It's a deeply symbolic change. Actually, Linda Bernie said exactly that on the radio this morning. To deeply symbolic change. No, it's a change that's both completely non-controversial, but actually profoundly important. Well, I mean, Anthony Albanyzernees, it came. out today and said the words that I've been expecting somebody to say at some point during the

debate, which is that this is an advisory body. Because when you say it's an advisory body, everyone has an indigenous advisory body these days, except for the federal parliament. I mean, cricket Australia, when they commented in support of the voice, they went, oh, we asked our advisory body, we've got an indigenous advisory body. But David Littleproud, he's the head of the national party, he has come out and said, it's actually important that everywhere else has an advisory body. Oh, has he? He's not opposed to, Indigenous advisory bodies, except in Canberra. Well, what if all the Indigenous advisory bodies in the country, Charles, say the voice is a good

idea, we need a national one for the Federal Parliament? What do we do? Do we ignore that? Well, that's just vested interest, isn't it? It's just the hand scratching the back, isn't it? Yes, exactly. And so the whole thing is, and I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, you can have local advisory bodies.

Oh, yes, of course. You can have advisory bodies talking about the indigenous. The garbage collection we mentioned. Yeah, the garbage collection, how that affects Indigenous people. But when you're talking about, you know, how to deal with Indigenous health or something like that. Sure, the big issues. At a federal...

Closing the gap. That's all stuff that shouldn't be... shouldn't have an advisory body. That should be left to Canberra. Because what we hate is Canberra bureaucrats. Oh, the bubble, yeah. Yeah, the Canberra bureaucrats a bubble. And the one thing that you don't want to do is overly complicate the Canber bubble

by letting Indigenous people into the Canberra bubble. But also it's for the good of those people. Yes. If they go and go to Canberra and become part of the Canberra bubble, then they'll have nothing to say. We won't want to listen to them anymore. No, exactly. So what we need to do instead is to elect lots of Indigenous MPs to Parliament,

people like Linda Burney, and hear what they have to say about the voice. But do you think maybe David Littleproud thinks that Linda Burney should stay out of Canada? Is that the idea that... I don't know. The good news is that there are people, When Lydia thought I was very against this, she called it Dissimulation Day. So if you listen to her voice, her voice is a no.

That's right. Her voice is an absolutely no. So it just depends who his voice you're listening to. I don't even know what to think about this anymore, Charles. Which means that I'm voting no. If you don't know what it is and you don't try to find out what it is, then you vote no. I love that. Because that's their slogan, isn't it?

Like, if you don't know, vote no. Yeah. Rather than if you don't know, fucking find out, you lazy fuckweet. Well, Charles, it is a better. It's a better pitch, isn't it? If you don't know, vote no, than if you have a deep-seated resentment of Indigenous people, vote no. I mean, that's, that's, well, if that might be more honest for some.

Well, that actually tested really well with the, the National Party focus groups, yeah. So there you go, so look, it's happening. It sounds like it's actually happening. It hasn't passed the upper house yet, though. Should we write some ads for the no campaign? Oh, definitely. If you're a racist fuck wit, vote no. I mean, that's certainly blunt.

I like that. You'll capture some people. Yeah, I think so. If you put that on cabs, people who drive those cabs will probably vote no, but they would anyway. Yeah. I think doing some ads for the No campaign is a great use of the Chasers resources.

Yes, and I think that given how effective our ads have been in the past, at least that I've worked on, it would probably advantage the Yes campaign. Yeah, I mean, don't listen to the Chaser podcast. That worked quite well. Yeah, that was great. That was the basis of our current audience, if I think. Yeah, in fact, yeah, we've got huge ratings out of it.

It's done very well. So there goes, that's going to happen. The legislation's past the parliament. It is on. Moving on to PWC, Charles, this is very worrying. Yes. This is very worrying. Yeah, we look, they've been part of a big global hack,

and I'm assuming that they were auditing whoever hacked them, whichever in national band of pirates breached their firewall. Presumably, PwC was receiving payments from them. So are they going to look into it and do an audit of what happened? I think that commissioned PWC to find out what happened. So we'll never find out. Yeah. So the cybercrime group C-10P, they've got to get a better name than that.

Why is it? They should call in P-W-C. It's CLOP. If they call in P-L-C to come up with a more snappy title. Broke into the file service called Move It in late May. How are we coming? We're only finding out about this now and began stealing data from hundreds of entities. Oh, they wouldn't want to move too quickly at BWC, would they?

They wouldn't want to get in there too fast. Well, I really, really hope no Australian taxpayer's data was caught up on this service. So the funny thing is that Move It, which is the piece of software that was hacked into, build itself as a secure way to transfer files. Well, I mean, PWC built itself as an expert consulting firm that provided confidential advice. So, you know, you can't always read what it says on the label. And Peter Dutton builds himself as being the head of a liberal party. Liberal, he says.

So there you go. That word doesn't mean what he thinks it means. No, I don't think he does. So there you go. Harts go out to PWC, but they'll find some way to make money out of it. I just want to look at the website for Move it. I'm trying to log in to move it. And look, if you fear your business might have been caught up in this, by the way,

if you've got to move it, it can't. Call PWC and get them to do an emergency audit on your security. Or you can use our auditing, our security auditing. thing, which is your email, podcast at chaser.com.com.com. And just send us your username and your passwords. Yes, we're not secured. And your data, or your sort of like date of birth and stuff like that. And we'll look into it for you.

We'll look into it, seeing how quickly we can tell it on the dark web. That's right. But look at this. This is amazing how many. So the file transfer system, it's called Moverd. Right. They have won like six awards this year for their secure transverse. transfer protocol, which is, it's the leading secure managed file transfer software, right?

Did they win those awards or did a hacker ironically place those badges on their website? Yeah, I'm just trying to find out who the awards are from because they seem to be from the company itself. Like it's from the Russian government. No, I think they've awarded themselves the leader in spring 2020. Oh, right. Okay. That's very good. They're just literally top 50.

Wouldn't you make yourself top tier on top three? I wouldn't boast up being the top 50. I'd decide a song out, frankly. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. And then the final bit of news we want to touch on. Now, this is troubling, Charles. This is very troubling. Look, how are Harry and Megan to live?

How are they to live? They had a $29 million deal with Spotify. And it's been axed. It only resulted in one podcast, which is Megan Markle's podcast called Archetypes. Oh, yeah? Where she got on a bunch of incredibly famous people like, you know, Serena Williams to have very earnest conversations by the sounds of it. I don't think, the thing is, I don't think anyone listened to it.

I think that was the problem. No, my understanding was that it initially got huge numbers of downloads. Oh, it would have, of course people would have tried it out. People tried it out and then people stopped listening to it. Decided that under no circumstances, so they're going to listen to episode two. It's also worth noting, Charles, that the head of podcast innovation and monetisation for Spotify,

a guy called Bill Simmons, has on his podcast, called them fucking grifters. He has. He's called them fucking grifters and said, look, we would have done much better doing a podcast about how they grifted all this money out of Spotify and Netflix. But Prince Harry's done so much in his life.

Well, the thing, is the awkward thing is that people were interested in their story. People wanted to hear all the dirt about the royal family. The problem is no one has the slightest bit of interest in hearing any of them do anything else. Right? Tell that story. I mean, the documentary did very well, Harry's book did very well. But the notion of Megan interviewing anybody about anything, it turns out to not be very appealing. It doesn't actually have, okay, so it says here, this is Bill Simmons's thing. I've got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and tell him to help him with a podcast idea.

It's one of my best stories. Oh, he's going to do that. He's going to have to do that. He said, shoot this guy to the sun. I'm so tired of this guy doing about Prince Harry. What does he bring to the table? He just whines about shit and keeps giving interviews. Who gives a shit?

Who cares about your life? You weren't even the favourite son. Ooh. Stinging. Ouch. That's pretty quick. I'm going to say that to my least favorite son, I know. I mean, that's a very good subject for a podcast.

To be fair, you're not the favourite son. Did Power 4 incredible series of succession. That's true. You live in Funky, you live in fucking Montecito and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and no one cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the royal family and you just complain about them. Yep, that's pretty much the business model of their company. So what long term, if this is a case and they've only got a few more years of grifting, you know,

deals from big media conglomerates. What's their long-term play here? It's easy. Because it's expensive to be making it. It's very expensive. There's only a couple of things they can do. But the path is very clear. They need to marry into more royal families and complain about them.

That's their core skill. Yes. It's an important part of business strategy, Charles, to profit from the core. You don't try and diversify. No. You just do what you do well. Their unique selling proposition is massive trauma with their own family. So what we need is for them to divorce.

Yes. And then Harry needs to marry a Kardashian and get into that family. The American Royal Family. Yes. And Megan was still a part of the series. She'd insist on that. Yes. She'd come along and tell everyone about their wellness and their glow-ups and stuff.

But Harry would then have strife with the Kardashians and release another book about how awful the Kardashians were. Yes. Which would be very popular. Yes. I mean, if another part of his body could, or maybe his penis could get burnt this time, that'd be good. And if, if Megan could have an affair, which leads to their initial divorce, right? Yes. Then Harry could do a follow-up to spare, which would be called Affair.

Oh, very good. Yeah, very nice. And I'm not sure what Megan would do in the next series. Well, I mean, there's plenty of other royal families. What about an Arabic royal family? She could. MBS. She could marry MBS.

MBS, yes. She could have Elon Musk's next child. That would be an upgrade from Harry. Yeah, MBS is. Although I just bought golf, didn't he? Yeah, he bought. He's doing very, he'd buy Megan. Yeah, but I think that aren't there all these stories of people who were married to MBS in those sort of semi-married relationships and...

That didn't survive. Horrific details. Well, I mean, look, it's not like the Royal Family hasn't got form in that department. And also, that would make great content. I mean, it would. It wouldn't be good for her personally, but for the Empire. Yes. So I think future Royal Family, I mean, he could marry into the Kennedys.

They love this new Kennedy. he's running for president is a total scruble. No. And I think Megan and Harry would fit beautifully into the Kennedy clan. I kind of feel like that's probably the Kennedys aren't rich enough anymore. Oh, like I think you're wanting to upgrade. Well, she should have Elon Musk's next child. Yes.

Megan Shrew. And there's lots of money in that. And you get another wacky name. What about an Australian? Like Clive Palmer? Does he... Is it a Ryanhart somewhere? What a Turkey Forest?

A Twiggy Forest could pay Megan to play. to make podcasts. Yes. But isn't, I think he's married though, isn't he? Now. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, okay.

What about, oh, Charles, it's obvious. Who? Rupert Murdoch. Oh, yes. Yes, he didn't. He pulled out of marriage number five. Yes.

Harry marries a Kardashian. That's nice. Megan marries Rupert. And it just keeps on going. I mean, to be honest, Rupert already makes a lot of money out of Harry and Megan. I mean,

most headlines in his publications now are about them. It would be a bit of a 180 for all their publications because all their publications, because all their publications are completely anti-meagued. Yeah, they've done that before. Remember when they used to support Labor in the UK? And in Australia, Kevin Rudd, they support it at one point.

That's all fine. So that's another problem solved. Okay, good. All right. So Harry and Megan, I think, what's a reasonable percentage for that advice? 10%. Yep, 10% of the advice. And in the meantime, maybe Harry, like if they're grifters,

maybe Harry could get a role with PWC. That would be very good, actually. Yes. I think that's, well, it all fits in together, isn't it? It does. Yep. You fix it. Our gear is remote.

We're part of our iconoclast podcast network. I'll catch you tomorrow. See ya.