The Chaser Report - Dutton Bribes for Australia's Trust

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Has Peter Dutton finally done the hard work he needed to do to secure the Prime Ministership? Meanwhile, Elon Musk is changing the name of Twitter to WHAT? NOTE: This episode is so good that we had to worsen the audio quality for fear that our audience develop high standards of us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal 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. Hello, Charles. Hello, now, I just want to call it first. A little bit urgent about this. Oh, yeah, you're jumping out of your chair there, Charles. Peter Dutton is gone.

He's gone. He's gone. Really? Yes, he's gone. There is no way he's going to survive this latest. Okay. That's your big call. My big call is Elon Musk is not going to be able to rename Twitter to X.

He's going to be stopped from doing the stupidest idea. Elon Musk has ever had, and it's a very, very high bar for that. But do you think maybe his trick is that it will be something that was once called X, so everyone will call it, well, you know, the X, X, X, X. Oh, God, X, X, X, X, that is X X as is joking. All right, we'll get into those stories. In a moment. So let's start with Peter Dutton.

Now, this is a huge story. Essentially what's been reported just hours before we managed to get together. And Anthony O'Madena's been right on of this like a rash, as you would imagine. The federal police say that they briefed Peter Dutton when he was Home Affairs Minister on an investigation into allegations of bribery, right? They briefed specifically Peter Dund. Who was the Home Affairs Minister at the time? And then, one month later, the Home Affairs Minister at the time.

And then one month later, the Home Affairs Ministry, Peter Dutton's ministry, signed a contract with the guy who'd been investigated for bribery. It's not clear that he actually was responsible for the contract. But they sat down with Dutton and said, this guy is potentially bribing people. And then somehow, a month later, look, maybe it was viewed as a good thing. Maybe, yeah, look, I think everyone's reading this wrongly. They're thinking, like, when you go to Peter,

doesn't you say, hey, bribes, bribes, bribes, right? He grew up in the Queensland police force. Oh. All he hears is stand-up man, stand-up guy who pays bribes, right? And so he probably then took the next month to track this guy down and give him a job. Like, probably what was happening was he was being headhunted by the minister. I think that, I think everyone's got this wrong and going, he was warned, he should have known. He shouldn't have employed him.

So you think maybe they were trying to sign him immediately? Yes. But he was trying to get more money out of another government. Moreover, I would say the police who briefed Peter Dutton probably also love bribes. I mean, they are police after all. I mean, we wouldn't want to defame those specific police officers. But it is true, Charles, that in the long history of the police force, one or two of them have got a fondness for money in brown paper bags. You can see, it's a sort of comedy of errors, right?

which is everyone went into the meeting thinking different things. You know, the police were there, they'd probably been told by their boss, you know, warn Peter Dutton that this person gives bribes. The police have gone, oh, right, we've got to tell Peter Dutton that this guy's a stand-up bloke. Then they arrived at the ministry. All Peter Dutton hears is bribes, bribes, bribes. And then, you know, and then it probably just pushed up his price. Charles, I want to take issue with that.

I think that's a really unfair reflection. on Peter Dutton, I reckon that in his long history, nobody has ever bribed Peter Dutton. You know why? What would you get for it? No. What is it about Peter Dutton that makes you think, if I give this man a lot of money, he's going to have lots of power and authority to influence things in my favour. He's going to be able to charm people on my behalf. Is that a sensible way to spend the money?

But also, you know, you usually bribe people to do evil things, right? But I don't think there's anything that Peter Dutton's done. It could be more evil than what Peter Dutton's already done. He does it for free? Yeah, he just goes, oh, you want me to do something terrible and oppress a whole of the people who are brown? You just go, I'm your man, I'll do it for quits. I'll just do it for kicks.

Just for free. Well, that's a great basis of integrity, isn't it? So look, this is a guy called Mazamil Gulambibus. Jani, he was convicted of paying more than $120,000 in August 2020. So who was he bribing? He was bribing to now ruin government efficiency. Ah, those people have unemployed. impeachable integrity.

Including an MP and government minister for favourable deals on phosphate mining contract. The Guardians reported this. And, I mean, the thing about Nauru, Nauru famously is a country you can pay money to get whatever you want. If you want them to run a gulag, Nauru is going to give them money and they'll open a fucking concentration cap. I mean, for it to be a bribe by Nauru in standards. Who even convicted them?

I'm very confused by all this. And then, so this happened. and the federal government paid millions of dollars of taxpayer money to this guy, even though, even after he pleaded guilty. So it's not even an AFP report. They actually, he was convicted. And they went, oh, look. Well, this is probably, so the AFB come along,

they warn Peter Dutton, look, this guy might be a bit dodgy. Peter Dutton looks into it, discovers that this guy's already been convicted of bribery, and goes, he's our guy. He's our guy in Nauru. The good news is, Charles, he's not gone today. What? He's not gone tomorrow, not a chance. Not a way.

He's on leave, and his officer said he won't be commenting on the matters. That's it. That's not going to go anywhere. It's over. It's a nothing burger. Check the bank accounts of people involved. But, Dom, like, I do honestly think, since 2001, Australians have repeatedly voted in favour of people who will do horrible, disturbing things,

to people seeking aside, fleeing for their lives across the world to try and come here. It's very popular. It's a very, very popular thing. So I'm wondering whether there's not a sort of essential truth. And the reason why Petter Dutton probably can rest easy, safe on his holidays, is because, you know, at the end of the day,

you know, like there is a sort of element of the Australian condition which goes, oh yeah, we want to pretend. that we're this non-corrupt, non-horrible country. But what we also want our politicians to do is hire the guy who bribes people. So you think this is the story that's going to make Peter Dutton Prime Minister. Yes. And we're going to go, oh, this is, this guy's taking us back to the Rum Rebellion, at least the people who, he's hiring for the government, his department's hiring,

because it was simpler, wasn't it, when the entire country ran on rum? Yes. Except for First Nation. He's cut from the same cloth as some of our greatest leaders, like, MacArthur, MacArthur, you know, sheep's back, got rid of, I think, six different governors at one point. So, look, it's certainly on the government's radar. It's a wonderful free kick for Anthony Albanesey as the voice continues to founder. So I think it's going to be quite enjoying.

And I really like that the company involved is called Radiance International, because if you wanted to start a company that might be involved in paying bribes, there will be nothing more ironic than Radiance. Radiance. Sunlight, you know, sunlight's the best disinfected, except in Radiance International. So this is going to bubble away. I assume in Parliament resumes, whatever that is, they're going to at least attempt to get Peter Dutton on this. Or perhaps he will front Parliament and say, my fellow Australians, look at what I did.

Aren't I electable? Yeah, it could well be. Jeez, yeah, Alba is going to suffer in the polls, isn't he? Like, he's already gone down in the polls. Senator Marine Freak of the Greens is demanding a Royal Commission into these allegations. So there's one thing we can be certain won't happen. It's the Royal Commission into these days. Nevertheless, it's pretty serious.

Macalia Cash got up and responded. He said, I'm aware of the allegations. It's a matter for the Home Affairs Department. Shoved it sideways. Did Christian Porter run the Home Affairs Department? I don't know. It's Scott Morrison. It's certainly, yeah.

Wouldn't it be a thing if Christian Porter came back to a Royal Commission? I don't know whether it. This might be his political revival. Look, I was horrible to refugees. Yeah. I mean, I know there were all these terrible allegations in the Flash Fund and all that. But I picked on some refugees. Yeah, look, I think Albo is going to be one term PM.

This is what's going to, um, yeah, yeah. No, he wasn't. Orda was never Minister for Home Affairs. I mean, that's, that's his portfolio when he comes back, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. So, all right, so that's issue one. Issue two, the bizarre decision by Elon Musk, and he's made many since he took over Twitter.com. To rebrand it X, the everything app.

This is his, the big picture. It's not just ex-Charles. It's not just a stupid generic name instead of the world-famous Twitter. It's going to be an app that does all kinds of things. He believes that it will be able to be used for micropayments and that it will take over up to, he says, half of the global economy. Half you want of the global economy. And of all the things we would trust Elon Musk with at this point,

everyone's financial transactions doesn't seem top of the list. But the funniest thing about this, so they've already rebranded the building. They're already, I think, the app as we speak, is changing its logo. X.com they've bought. The problem is that there's two problems. Firstly, in law, X is such a generic term that you can't trademark it.

It just means basically anything. One patent attorney said that there were 900 active US registrations of the letter X. He counted in a couple of minutes. And one of them is meta, and it's specifically for social media. So the chances that everybody is going to sue Elon

over calling Twitter x pretty much certain but wouldn't the argument be well nobody owns it so therefore everybody owns it like as you said it's so generic clearly what we should do in response to this is rename the chaser x to x.com dot au yes and and just really go along for the right if it's that generic a term i've got a whole theory about eleanor oh yeah which is he's actually brought on a new mode of accumulation. So we had for 150... Watch out, Charles is going to talk about economic history.

Go on. How about it? For 150 years, we had a thing called capitalism. Where what you would do is you'd create a sustainable business model based on, say, customers being happy. Yes. And you'd make more money than you spend. And then you'd reinvest those profits in making your owners rich, but also, you know,

increasing the technology in your product and making it. better, and so you made more money, right? Yep. And I think what Elon has done is he's actually invented a new form of capitalism. What a genius. Which is pump and dump. Oh. Pump and dump capitalism.

It's crypto. Yes. What he's doing is he's, is all these short-term, so he's under threat from threads because 100 million people signed up and sure only 5 million people still use it. Pretty sure threads is about to be renamed X, by the way. But, you know, like, but he needs the next quick fix of people paying attention to the network. And that's because he doesn't actually, he's not doing something like making his advertisers enough money that they feel like it's a good idea to pay him more money, right?

Yeah. Which is the standard model for social media businesses, for advertising businesses, anything that's selling ads. You want to be a good proposition to buy ads. He can't do that. Like, he's destroyed that as a product. And he's taken, this is a. But this is another, another thing. Like Twitter, people knew about buying.

This is an even more unsellable product. So presumably the tiny number of advertisers still on there will flee at this point. But what he's done is he's made it so that, well, now that his business model on Twitter is to own half of everything in the world, the valuation of that. Like even if it's a moonshot, one in a million chance, the statistics would tell you, you might as well plow all your savings, live savings into Twitter. So it's so stupidly audacious a plan to have half of everything.

Yes. That people will back it. Inventionapolis, what can't afford not to invest in it, just in case. Just in case it was. Yes, and because he's got a track record of some things working,

is it going to be enough people to go, okay, well, I'll play, I don't know, $40 billion into thing. He makes his money back from Twitter. It doesn't have to have a good product, right?

Didn't PayPal. Well, it wasn't that one of his earlier, businesses that's actually made his money on a few things. So he does actually understand transactions, unlike many other things. Yeah, well, that's what he wanted. He wanted PayPal to be called X back in 2003. He was the CEO of PayPal.

He wanted to rebrand at X.com. And the board said, no, that's a terrible idea. Because everyone knows PayPal and it says what it does on the tin. And they chucked him out as CEO, Petitiel. Oh. Facebook billionaire took over as the head of PayPal. and Elon Musk, because Elon Musk wanted to be an everything app, he wanted to be like what we chat is in China.

Well, that's just the model, isn't it? Basically, you can do all the microtransactions you want. So you're a social network, you're a transaction hub, you're an Instagram, you're a songs thing, you're TikTok, you're everything on the one app. There's a few minor problems with that, you know, sort of Western liberal democracy. Like you don't necessarily have as much, you know,

government saying, yes, everyone's got to use WeChat because it's easier to then answer people, yeah. But, you know, like, you can iron those things out. Like, if you're Elon Musk, what you just do is you get, say, an authoritarian to be elected in the US and get rid of democracy as one of your steps in your business model to make X work. So. Oh, God, is it really going to be RFK Jr., though?

Can we have a less insane authoritarian? Like, I would happily take Trump over RFK Jr., What? That guy is absolutely insane. Can I quote you on that? Have you read what he thinks about medicine? Have you read what Trump does? I know.

That's definitely a better of the devil you know. And he is actually the devil, Donald Trump. No, mate, no. RFK is absolutely cuckoo. Okay, I love to examine this in more detail. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. But Charles, okay, so it's interesting theory. But he's done this, it's not just Twitter that he does pump and dump with.

Like the whole sort of Silicon Valley business model is based on company. And he's increasingly doing, like, and he does it with things that used to be sustainable. So, AI, so Open AI, for example, is the chat GPT company. Which he used to. Which he pretended to found. I think he just put in $250,000 at the beginning. But he, he's now set up. this new company called X-A-I.

Oh, fuck everything's X. His kids called X. Which he claims is going to be the sort of intelligence engine behind this. Now, he doesn't have to make any money out of that. All he has to do is raise a whole lot of money from the equity markets. And he's ahead. And then suddenly, he can start, the way Pumman Dump capitalism works is you have a whole lot of interlinking companies where you never really have to know if he's,

any of them are making money because they all have deep business relationships with each other. So XAI will be the brains behind all the stuff that Twitter is doing in terms of, you know, the everything app is going to be run by AI apparently. They'll have some massive contract with Twitter. So suddenly they look like they're getting revenue. Then suddenly Twitter's an AI company because it's using all the technology from XAI and they've got some exclusive deals. So suddenly that pumps that.

Hell you are. And it's just like this moving feast. It does not matter that you're not actually making enough money to sustain any of this. Because it's just, it's almost religious. Like you just have to believe that that's what's going to happen. But isn't at least one of the big problems at this point that an increasing proportion that the world thinks he's a dick and wants nothing to do with him or his barrocks. One of the other narrative is about what's happened with Twitter, which has been doing the rounds on Twitter, ironically.

and which has been quite convincing is that basically the whole point of why he wanted to buy it was because he hated it because it was where the left were. It was basically the little playground of the left online and the woke and the liberal

and all the people he seems to despise and he has essentially turned it into a right-wing propaganda machine now. He's now set up a thing where a lot of the sort of right-wing commentators are getting money like they're getting payments and part of the transition to X is

he's paying people if you even look at their profile as long as they've got the blue tick. So he's going to be pumping money to one part of the kind of speech ecosystem. And that is going to push vast numbers of people away. So how can it be in everything app when he seems only particularly to want to make it one form of speech and an increasingly kind of marginalized and authoritarian and frankly fairly scary speech? Isn't he going to just sort of, Twitter so far hasn't been pump and dumb, but it's been destroy and leave as a massive failure.

So two things. Rupert Murdoch has been on this right-wing tilt for most of his life, but certainly since he launched Fox News in the mid-1990s, he's made tens of billions of dollars out of playing in that exact space. Yeah, but it's a niche, though. Well, it's a niche, but it's by far the most profitable cable news network in the world. And he's sounded by polarising America and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And that's fine, but it's atomising. Isn't that the opposite of what Elon wants to do and put X in? every, insert into every transaction. But isn't the point that if you're like Rupert Murdoch, like we may all hate Rupert Murdoch here in Australia, but 70% of our media is generated by Murdoch, like if you've got a business model,

like you don't need everyone to force everyone to be, like if everything that you buy is on the X app, and so, and that's the only way you can transfer money between people. And then suddenly, like, yeah, sure. It's a right-wing hellhole. It's also how you buy your toilet paper. But also presumably, if the 10% of hardcore Elonistas or 20% or whatever it ends up being, use it,

that will be enough to be a massively successful business. If you can actually use the name, which I don't think he's going to be able to. But we will see. But I think the point being, what I find most interesting is that it never has to have a system. You're right. There's a sort of element of destroy and disassemble. He never actually has to reach the point at which it's a sustainable business model for the community. It just has to look like one of the many cells.

And it just needs to keep going. It just needs to keep having more and more pumps pumped into it. And I think it's very Trumpian. Like I think you're right. Every time he has to keep pumping it up, it has to get more and more extreme. And that eventually unravels. But it can be decades before that happened. Yeah.

We can all be dead. The really tough thing about this is that, I know I shouldn't, but I still really want a Tesla. What do I do about that? I know, I know, it's terrible. It will definitely, it'll sense your left-wing leanings and it'll crash. You think the left indicator will stop working at some point. Yeah, I think it'll just take you into a wall.

That's a cheerful note to enter on. How curious from Road. We're part of the Acon Class Network, and is the Jason paying for a Twitter Blue account any time soon? No fucking way. So I should think.