The Chaser Report - Deep Colin-oscopy | Craig Reucassel

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Craig comes on the podcast to talk about the effect money has on making policy, which you can learn more about in his new ABC documentary Big Deal. Meanwhile Charles probes deep into the life of Colin Powell, and Gabbi takes a look at Pru Goward’s thoughts on the working class. Plus Dom has a complaint about Emma Wiggle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of The Chase Report is brought to you by the Institute for abnormally long podcast episodes and high performance listening. You're more than one third of the way through this one, mate. Do you want this? Do you want this? Only another 20 minutes to go, champion. You can do it. Come on. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chase of Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Thursday, the 21st of October. I'm Charles Firth and I'm here with Gabby Bolt. Hello.

And Dom Knight will be here later in the episode, but he's just been a bit delayed due to an incredibly embarrassing medical problem. Oh, great. He'll love us mentioning that. Well, actually, he asked me not to mention it, so we probably shouldn't. It's amazing to me that you two have remained friends for the amount of time that you have.

I know that we give off the impression that we're friends. It's all a lie. It's just the best acting of your career, and you've, like, talked to the Westboro Baptist Church and everything. This is the best acting take you've ever had. It's a long con. Well, Charles, big news. Big news.

I don't know if you've heard. No. Prue Goward has just discovered that poor people exist and contribute to society. Oh, God. Yeah. Now, Prue Gow, she's a parliamentarian, isn't she? Yeah, I believe so. Yes, she did run.

In the New South Wales upper house. Yeah. I don't think anyone would vote for her if they directly voted for her. Yeah, I remember her running around the same time that Gladys was running for Premier. Yeah, she's that sort of pompous woman, isn't it? She, that sort of talks in a posh accent. Well, I'd say, because some of the language used in the recent financial review article entitled Why You Shouldn't Understimate the Underclass is like worthy of a Dickens novel.

Well, go on. What did she say? Okay. Well, the first little blurb of the article says, they are damaged, lacking in trust and discipline and highly self-interested, but the poor are still a force that Australia needs to properly harness. It's just kind of like she intended good things. and then the language betrayed her. She's supportive.

She's supportive of the poor. That's all she's trying to say. A lot of people have focused on the use of the word prolls in this article. People have focused on the fact that she's so out of touch. But for me, I think the funniest thing, as somebody who is the daughter of a social worker, is the sentence where she says, social workers, traditionally good young men and women,

who thought it would be. nice to be kind for a living, despair of their appalling housework, neglect of their children, and notably their sharp and unrepentant manner when told to lift their game by the patronising do-gooder. Oh my God. I sent this to my mum and I said, thanks for choosing to be kind for a living. Yeah. And regretting it.

Yeah, she wrote back, oh, what the fuck. But yeah, so you heard it here first. Krugau just discovered that the working class exists. Well, I suppose, like, what's the solution to columns like this? I presume immediate revolution amongst the proles. Oh, well, I mean, you would think maybe something more constructive, like, yeah, maybe getting people who think this way out of the places where they make a decision for the many. But my personal solution to this is just getting, you know, that show Undercover Boss?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Giving her an episode. I'd love that. Where she's the boss. Yeah, and she has to go undercover and, like, live as the people. people who work in the working bus. Yes. Know what it's like to be a pro-l.

Or worse, a social worker. Oh, my God. Can you imagine? And then at the end, when she has to do that bit where she has to give back to the workers, she'd find out that they have kids and go, oh, God, no. And then the whole episode would be over.

Her daughter is Kate Fisher, of course. Oh, so she has kids. She's got kids. Oh, big fan of kids if you have money then. She's got, you know, very famous socialite of the 1990s, who was engaged to Jamie Packer. Oh. Yeah.

Well, I've been doing it wrong. I've been doing it. My mother was wrong. I grew up in the social worker working class life. And I've just got to call her and tell her, Mom, why didn't you just become a socialite? It would have made things way easier. You know, there is another solution to this problem.

Oh, yeah. Which is to not read Prue Goward's columns in the AFR. Oh, I didn't realize that was an option. No. I don't have to read articles that are the fat shit insane that, you know, promote eugenics. It's just horrible. Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't think of that before.

Oh, okay. Well, if you heard it here first, if you see a bullshit article, you don't have to click on it and read it. Unfortunately, as satirists, we kind of have to give into it a bit. But this is the best satire there is. Just don't read it. Coming up on the show, we're going to talk to Craig Roocastle about the influence of politics in money and how it links to why, you know, the national party is going so slowly on climate change the moment. And also a deeper, a deep dive.

Ooh, I've got my snorkel. where are we going? We're going to deep dive into colon pals. You can't say, you can't say deep dive into colon. Well, there's... Not a great sentence. There's a lot to investigate. He died on Tuesday and we want to just deep dive into...

Respectfully. Yeah. Into his colon. Yep. But all that coming up after this with Rebecca Deutu and Muno in the Jason Newsroom. The same government that called for Senate hearings over the ABC paying the legal fees for their journalists, has announced they are using taxpayer funding to pay for Gladysburg-Giclian's legal fees during her ICAC investigation.

The move is being referred to as one last dodgy deal for old time's sake, with hopes it will be the wrought to end all wroughts until the next wrought. Scott Morrison has signed an arms deal with North Korea after learning they've produced a brand-new submarine that launches ballistic missiles, hoping to add yet another sub to his collection, Scott immediately bid $90 billion for the submarines, outbidding all other nations by $89,99999,99999. The unlikely partnership between the two countries has been labelled Nukas. Squid Game has come under fire from parents who fear that watching it will make their children violent. The innocent parents are baffled as to why showing their children

and gory depictions of death would have such an effect and have called for the show to be cancelled or made more family-friendly. Child psychologists have stated they believe this is why our species is doomed for failure. That's the latest updates

from the Chaser Report. I'm Rebecca Deunamuno. Well, the big question in Australian politics at the moment is what earth are we going to do about climate change? Why does nothing ever happen? And someone who has an answer to this is Craig Rucastell. He's just directed the documentary, The Big Deal, which looks at the influence of money in Australian politics. Hello again, Craig.

Good to be here. But, yeah, it's kind of interesting what's going on. It does, you are. Actually, can I do something radical here? Can I contradict my own documentary not two days after it goes to it? It's already out of date. Wow. New cycle changes quickly.

I was thinking. about it, because it's fascinating. You watch the kind of the battle between the Nats and the lives right over the climate and over, you know, net zero, right? Now, the Liberal Party gets massive amount of donations from the fossil fuel industry, and that definitely has influenced their approach over the years, and it's still influencing it now, and the fact that they're still, the whole line is, yeah, we'll be net zero, but it's

not going to affect any fossil fuels. It's like, in the Australian, they said, you know, but still, we'll just be exporting just as many. Don't worry about. Isn't their master plan even for it to cost way more in 2050? So they will make even more money. We'll be increasing. We'll be increasing ourselves, exactly. So look, look, they're influenced by that.

But what I find interesting about the current debate, right, is that it does show that the democratic impetus, like the kind of having to win a seat and people's votes does matter. Because I reckon, if you look at the kind of slight panic in the Liberal Party, the fact that they're more about we've got to have a proper target, there's all these members that want it. That's because in a lot of seats around Australia, the Libs are actually facing kind of, you know,

these grassroots movements that are pro-climate or they're facing a kind of rebellion for people who said, hang on the second, you've said you're pro-climate for the last three elections, but you've done nothing on it. So it does show that it's, you know, that democratic impetus does have some effect there. So therefore my whole movie's wrong. Isn't the trick, though, that it's a sort of branding issue

and the Liberal Party will end up just going, okay, well, we sort of split almost from the National Party. We're totally climate now, and it's climate-friendly. Yes. And then the National Party will play with their own constituency. And then after the election, they'll all pash and make up. That's an image. Come here, Barnaby.

Oh, come on. Tell me that Barnaby hasn't pashed you in the place. Come on, you're a woman. We've all passion. Oh, sorry, I forgot I'm walking boobs. Yeah, my father. So they're all pass and they'll make up. And if you're wanting to really, you know, talk about the role of money,

they, it doesn't really matter whether they're successful electorally or not. Because Clive Palmer will just pay for all the sort of protest vote, you know, votes anyway. He'll get his sort of 4%. deliver them all back to the coalition anyway. And so it just sort of doesn't matter. Like I think your movie is actually more right than your analysis

rejecting your movie. I totally reject that, Charles. I'm wrong. No, but you're right. You're absolutely right about the kind of branding thing. And that is correct. But that's the problem now for those liberals in those seats where they do have it's the kind of Zali Stegel thing.

You know, Zali Stigle took it from Tony Abbott. Now, Tony Abbott obviously had a bigger profile and a lot more people that hated him for various reasons. But in those kind of seats, it gets to a point where in the past, they've kind of gone, well, I'm in favour of the climate, so I'll do my best when I get down to Canberra. And they've achieved nothing, essentially. But there hasn't been alternative,

there haven't really been alternative. So in electorates that really are never going to vote Labor or green or anything like that. And that's why the kind of voices for a movement is quite interesting. Yes. They're like grassroots movements that, if done properly, have connections in the community. And they're kind of, in a sense, they're not as left wing as the Greens. They're probably more like, you know, they're green liberals in a sense. They're all libs, yeah.

No, no, because I've got a friend who's running the focus groups for Zali Stegle. Have I, I've told this before. But I'll repeat it again, which is extraordinary. He did the first focus group for Zali Stegel, like ages ago. when she was first considering running, they only had Libs in the focus group because that's the testing is just liberal women. And they all went, oh yes, we love Zali Stegg.

No, we'll definitely vote for Zali Stegel. And I know her. You know, like they all knew her because she was known in the community. But that's the kind of challenge. And so, look, I'm not backing one party over the other, but I'm just saying it'll be fascinating to see because if there is an alternative,

if it changes that dynamic for levels. And also, you've seen all of those people that do have those movements and are the ones that are starting to be much more vocal. It's like, oh, you seem to be actually going in the media and saying we need a proper climate policy. I wonder why that is. Isn't it also going to be a little bit silly in that Albo's come out and said, OK, Labor's going to help the Liberals pass this without the nationals,

if that's what has to happen? And so Skoma is going to paper over the problem, commit to some far-off 2050 target that doesn't require us to do a damn thing now, and then Labor will lose the next election because the one problem that he has politically will have been solved by Labor. So, but what you're saying is Labor would be idiots to pass it.

Yes. Therefore, they would definitely pass it. Oh, right. I don't know if you, like I actually think, like, to be honest, I think Labor is more scared of another climate election than the Libs are, to be honest. Oh, yeah, they're very good at self-wedging. They don't even need, they don't need a sort of another party

to help them wedge. They can just do it on their own. And remember, I mean, look, Labor, when we added up the kind of fossil fuel donations, Labor and Liberal, it wasn't that much difference between the two of them. Oh, of course not. Good one. Labor still, of course, backs gas, gas. So the difference between them is not overwhelming.

There's some voices for movements actually starting in Labor's seats as well. So, fascinating to see what effect that has. Both Labor and Lib rules voted in favour of doing the gassing up the 12 apostles. they're going to do gas mining around the Twelve Apostles. And I must say, having seen the Twelve Apostles, I must say they're not as... There's not even 12 of them. There's like eight or seven or something.

Yeah, yeah. And so the idea that you'd light them up... Your problem is how misleading the Apostles are. No, but it would be all gas and they'll be all on fire. You could do really cool things for tourism if you have a whole lot of gassy sort of fires around them. What do you find fun? I'm convincing.

You're one of those people that sees fireworks and goes, ooh, fireworks aren't interesting. Charles likes his nature on fire, in which case, have a love to years ago. The Nationals love you. I've always wanted who those giant exploding fireballs outside Crown Casino were for. At first, I thought they were just sort of getting rid of all the money laundering evidence, but it's clearly for you, Charles. You're clearly the one person who likes a massive amount of natural gas being wasted. He's like a moth.

He's like an idiot moth attracted to flame. How much is the choice they have to raise to buy Australian politics? Yes. I reckon, that's a good question. You want to buy all of it? No, I just want to buy enough to do whatever we want. I think it would be much better if we just decided what was going to happen. I reckon if you, like, a couple of mill gets you pretty good, decent say in there.

That's just one dodgy water sale. That's a good return on investment. It's always a good return. Oh, this is the one thing you learnt from looking at donations, man. It's the best investment you'll ever make. You put in a hundred grand. You can't get way more out the other side. So, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're a fool not to invest, Chaser. Well, I think the Chaser bowling club is now up and running. And car park. Bowling club and car parks, society. Yes, yes. I suppose if you can't beat them join them in the worst way. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I wouldn't mind a few extra.

Yeah, just don't mention that we're into live performance. Well, won't touch us at a six-foot pole. Charles, with your love of fire, you'll be into gas very soon. I'd love it if you did end up when it became... Because Charles has always been wanting to have Chaser Airlines or Chaser or whatever. Chaser Fossil Fuble. This accidentally leads in chasing gas fuels. All right, check out the big deal on Eyeview.

It's the first episode's up now. This episode is brought to you by the Institute for an abnormally long podcast. episodes and high performance listening. You skipped through this podcast to get here, didn't you? Are you a worthless piece of shit, or are you going to go back to the start and earn those ears of yours? Get back in there, mate. And now it's time for another.

Deeper deep dive. That's right. Lots of podcasts will give you deep dives, but only this podcast gives you deeper, deep dives. Yeah, but you never want to commit to deepest, do you? Because we wouldn't want to be factually. inaccurate. What about deep-ish? Deep-ish died.

Now, Colin Powell died on Tuesday. Oh. He did. And, you know, he was a sort of former Secretary of Defence, a big Pentagon guy, around for many, many years, dating back to the Vietnam War, actually. And look, I know we're supposed to venerate the dead. You know, as Andrew Hanson said, you know, no matter how terrible they were in life. Yes, even pricks, turn into top blokes after death. And look, Colin Powell was no different.

Even Barack Obama joined the veneration parade. He tweeted out, Michelle and I will always look to him as an example of what America and Americans can and should be. Cedric, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone came out saying how great Colin Powell is. Although, I must say, there were also some takes by more conspiracy-minded people. One tweeting out, he made up fake bioweapons in Iraq

and then died of a fake bioweapon called COVID. So that was quite a good take on him. Anyway, I just thought, for the sake of balance, why don't we just go through some of Colin Powell's greatest hits? Just remember back some of the things he actually did during his career. Sure. So let's start all the way back 21st of January, 1991, when the US bombed the only factory in Iraq that produced baby formula.

Oh, my God. And Colin Power dismissed the attack saying that it was not an infant form. formula factory, which it was, but that it was, quote, a biological weapons factory of that we are sure, right? And this is, this is a running theme in the Colin Powell story, which is he is very sure of things that turn out to later not be in any way true. Why do we get a feeling that this memorial is not going to be as loving and remember and see as you've let it on to be, Charles. The thing that surprises me is that so far you've pronounced it colon,

whereas in America they say colon. Oh, colon, yeah, sorry. I think you should call him, if you don't like him, call him colon. Well, he is a bit of a colon, isn't he? Anyway, because I think the peak moment in his career was, of course, that fateful addressed the UN Security Council on the 5th of February 2003. I'm sure we all remember it. Abby, how old were you?

Great year. I was seven. I'd lost two teeth. But that was the first thing on my mind that day. So he starts out and he shows a whole lot of trucks going around with mobile chemical weapon laboratories. And they were sort of, there were actually cartoons, they were drawings of these trucks. He just got somebody to make them up. And this is what he said about.

We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. That was not true. That was simply not true. They'd just made up the pictures. I've forgotten. I've got the picture here. I'm having a look at it. It's a graphical render.

And this is in like 2003. It must have cost a million dollars to make a computer. a CGI, like, chemical weapons plant, which had nothing to do with reality. It was a hypothesis. But it wasn't just biological, because, you know, they're scary, but what's even more scary than that? Sodom Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb, right? Towards the end of the speech, very convincing speech, with his famous line.

Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his, his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. That's right. So he went in there, and look, a lot of people have been saying, you know, maybe he was foiled, maybe he was just a bit too guileless in believing the intelligence. But he was very certain, and he'd even got a whole lot of pictures made up. Like, it's just not true about all these things were wrong. Anyway, so Skip Ford, 2011.

Great year. He admits maybe, just maybe he got a little bit wrong. Like by then, it was clear the Iraq war was the total stuff up. Oh. He did an interview with Al Jazeera. And this has been seen as like, oh, and he admitted that he was wrong. But if you actually read the Al Jazeera interview, it really, he just blamed his sources for being wrong. He said it has, because it's always, you know, oh, Colin Powell, you know, it was a blot on his record and he admitted that.

And it's like, the quote is, it has blotted my record, but you know there's nothing I can do to change that plot. All I can say is that I gave the best analysis that I could, Powell told out zero. So it's sort of like, you know, I did the analysis. They got it wrong. And so, you know. That sounds like somebody getting out of a school assignment. I know. Well, that's, well, that was true.

That was true. One of the key sources for that thing was actually an undergraduate's essay. I remember there was some incredibly dodgy, because we joked about this intelligence on a show called CNNN, N, a long time ago, and how it was like it was Laura Bush's very, very vivid dream. It was the primary source of the presentation. And it turned out that the actual evidence was even slimmer than what we thought was the case back then. It was, we could not believe,

particularly given, Colin Powell was incredibly widely admired. He was a hero. He was the first black secretary of state. He was a war hero. And everyone thought, it sounded dodgy, but everyone thought, well, if Colin Powell is holding up this fake vial of anthrax, it must be real. And that's why we all went to war.

2001, 2002, simpler, simpler time. So I guess my question is, Charles, do we know if he's actually dead? Because the intelligence may be faulty. Well, I think that's right. I think, you know, is he as dead as the priests, schoolchildren and doctors that were blown up when he supported the contras going into Nicaragua in the 1980s? Is he as dead as the entire suburbs of people that were killed during the US invasion of Panama in 1989? Or indeed, is he as dead as the 306,000 Iraqis that his testimony led to the killing of in the Iraq war?

Well, no, because COVID isn't even real. He's the forest gump of tragedy. No, because Charles, I've got the quote here of what he said about the Milai massacre. He said, oh, you know, I was in charge of investigating it. Relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent. and then he went on Larry King years later and said, oh, you know, in war these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again,

but there's still to be deplored. He's just, he's, he just keeps doing the same thing. It's just a fuckweed. Like, I think that's the point. He's like, you sort of go, oh, no, but he was a real station. No, he was a fuckweed. He was just as bad as the rest of them.

It sounds kind of like somebody once told him he was good at something and then he just did that thing for the rest of his life with absolutely no factual evidence to prove that he was any good at his job. Like somebody said, you'd be pretty good at war, hey. And he went, all right, that's what I'll do for the rest of my life. And then he just turned up to all of them. Yeah. Well, he couldn't miss one.

Well, he was just following orders without ever questioning whether the orders were based on absolute lies and falsehoods. He was the Forrest Gump of War. Oh, my God. I'd argue Forrest Gump was the Forrest Gump of War. You ever seen that movie? He turns up everywhere. Actually, Charles, did you know that his parents called him Colin as a kid?

But he changed his pronunciation to colon because of a war hero that he admired. And so everyone has just been calling him colon for many years at his express wish. Who has been guiding this man through his life? Every decision he makes is wrong. Well, I mean, maybe it's a public safety that he's dead now. This episode is brought to you by the Institute for abnormally long podcast episodes and high performance listening. You're almost there, buddy. You're a bloody listening machine.

You've got what it takes to be a champion. Now, go back to the start and give me another 10 reps of this episode. Come on. Before we go, I've got a bone to pick. A couple of weeks ago, my daughter, age three and a half, discovered her new favourite TV show. Oh, yes. It's called Emma, exclamation mark.

And it's about Emma Wiggle. Emma Wiggle invites you to come into her house and play with her. Then she sings some songs and does various Monday. Dundane dull stuff like driving around in cardboard cars and stuff. The point is, it is my daughter's favorite show. It's the first time she's ever said, Dada, this is my favorite show in the whole world. I love this. It's torture to watch, right?

Like she manages to sort of scrape the word boaterful into every single sentence. Oh, have a boaterful day. No, no, Emma Wiggle. But I think sometimes when a TV show is really pitched at a certain age group, then it is boring for adults. but that shows just how brilliant it is as a text. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a perfect crack. It is crack for my daughter.

Yes. But now, how am I supposed to tell her that bloody Emma Wiggle has quit the group? What? That she's let down her fans, that she's giving the show away that there's going to be a new yellow wiggled in another skivy and that she's just going to wiggle off into doing a PhD. My daughter doesn't know what her PhD is. Morton, the daughter doesn't give a shit about Emma Watkins's academic future.

My daughter is going to be devastated, Emma? Because I was thinking, oh yeah, totally I'm bored with your grievance, Dom, until you mentioned that she was going off to complete further studies. Because I feel like that's not a bad thing. Like, we shouldn't be encouraging people to just stay a wiggle. We should. How selfish. What she did is she became the most famous wiggle by a mile.

Like, she is it. She's the Elvis wiggle. basically. The rest of them are her support back. And she's just quit. She made it all about herself. She did the spin-off solo show and then she quit. You are making this sound like when Fleetwood Mac broke up, Dom. It is like when Fleetwood Mac. It's nothing without Stevie Nix. But my point is, what are the Wiggles anymore? They're now just a joke. They're a joke. Is there any chance of you just tricking your daughter into thinking that the new Emma Wiggle is the same as the old Emma Wiggle, or whatever you call it.

Well, first of all, we might want to learn her name. This is not Emma. Oh, what is it? No. The new Yellow Wiggle sounds very exciting. She's 16 years old. She's a dancing champion. She was born in Ethiopia, child.

So I'm not entirely sure it's going to be a seamless transition from one to the other. I think, isn't it all possible that the two of you are perhaps overlooking maybe what is the most important fact, that the show is made for children. and that children are like sponges for information. So they're just going to adapt. I have no doubt that your daughter, Dom, is just going to watch the show and not notice anything different because she's three.

I mean, the one thing I will say, though, is that the show is so excruciating that if I was Emma Wiggle, I would have quit years ago. Again, I will pitch the possibility, Dom, that the show is not intended for you as a direct audience. How does a human being turn up and do that drosset? every day. I'd love it.

It must have been so awful for her. Poor Emma. Emmy, you're forgiven. I would love to see Dom be one of the Wiggles. What one would he be? Grumpy Wiggle? Hi, kids. Today we're going to learn about the reality of life.

No, I want to be the one that just is asleep. That's the best role in the Wiggles. Yeah, you'd be Jeff. Wake up, Dom. He's taken too much Xanax. I love it. Well, Emma, go well, and thank you for ruining my daughter's childhood. Our gear is from Road Microphones.

We're part of the ACAST Crater Network. Please leave us to review on Apple Podcasts, and we'll catch you tomorrow. See ya. Wiggly, wiggly, woo.