The Chaser Report - Federal I-Cuck? | Michael Bradley

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Lawyer Michael Bradley joins the podcast to hypothesise about what would happen if certain federal ministers were ever to face an ICAC, and Zander has the latest scoop on the Facebook outage directly from the source. Plus Dom looks at some surprising new coal projects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode of The Chaser Report is brought to you by sexting. Yes, I am definitely wearing that super expensive lingerie and not an old button-up flannel I found at an op shop and $8-dollar boots. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Wednesday, the 6th of October 2021. I'm Dom Knight. Hello, Charles Firth and Gabby Boltz. Hello. Hello. I have a quiz for you both.

Hey, Ann. Ooh, I'm not going to do well. Guess how many coal projects the Federal Environment Minister, Susan Lee, has approved in the past month? None. Ten. None. How about three? Yesterday she gave approval for a third project, 52 million tonnes over eight years, for Mangoola coal.

The point is the Morrison government is committed to climate change, in that it's committed to changing the climate with coal emissions, it seems. But what in what world? in 2021. Are we... These are long-term projects as well. This means... The eight years. Yeah.

So this is an expansion of an existing mine near Muzzlebrook in New South Wales. This is all to do with the election. This is just them peddling false hope to those communities pretending that they're on their side when in actual fact,

they're just shipping them off a cliff. Because I thought we're at the point now where further coal plants was just economically insane. Like, it just didn't make sense. There weren't going to be enough customers. You were just going to lose money because renewables are cheaper. Am I wrong about that?

Am I missing some detail about why coal is now wonderfully profitable, quite apart from the environmental devastation that it causes? I'm almost more confused about why they haven't just channeled all of the so-called jobs that they're giving people in power stations and coal mines and give those people jobs in renewable energy. It's not like renewable energy can go. unmanned. It has to be monitored. But their donors don't have investments in renewable energy. Oh, I see. So it's all about appeasing the rich people. I should have seen that coming.

I forgot that that's how the world worked. My favourite nuance in this, and you like this, Charles, is that Susan Lee, you might recall there was a court case that found she had a duty of care to protect young people from the climate crisis with potential carbon emissions. How do you think she justifies this new expansion, given that court fond? I know this, which is that by having more coal, you can have more electricity, which means that you can turn on the air conditioning, thus protecting young people. I disagree. I think by having more coal and contributing more to global emissions and climate change

than probably any other country at this point, she's just going to kill off all the young people. Then there's no one to have to protect. You don't have to protect a dead person. And young people generally don't vote for the coalition. So it sort of works as an electrical strategy as well. Just kill them off before they get there. That's right. Yes.

Both very good ideas. But no, Susan Lee's justification was, look, this coal's going to be burned anyway. There's no indication that the 52 million tons of coals won't get just dug up by someone else and burned. So it will make no difference to emissions if we do it and sell it. That is what the federal environment minister responsible for protecting the environment has to say in approving 52 million tons of coal emissions. I got to say, Susan, I'm fucking disappointed. You know why? She went on a bit of a spree earlier this year

where she declared a lot of indigenous sites in regional areas as sacred, as in particularly the one that I know about is the go-cart track debacle in my hometown of Bathurst. She actually was the Environment Minister that came down, listened to both sides of the story and declared it 10 years untouchable. So I don't get how an environment minister can get away with doing that And then turn around and be like, But it's fine, because we'll just keep digging up the fucking earth anyway And we'll just destroy all the cultural sites.

I presume she's going to have a go-cuts that are powered with coal. In other news, I have decided I'm going to go on a murder spree. But it's all right because they would have died anyway. If you didn't kill them, something else would have. If I didn't kill them, somebody else would have died. It's either we kill them quickly or they kill us slowly, and I would prefer killing them quickly. Can I just clarify for the Australian federal police

that Charles is not capable of killing anyone or organising any sort of a spree unless it's ordering crap products from China with the chase a logo on them. On today's show, lawyer Michael Badley takes a look at the ICAC affair in New South Wales and what would happen if there was a federal ICAC with the current government?

Plus, we've got to cross to the Facebook server room where Zander has actually gone to report from on the scene of Facebook. All that coming up after this with Rebecca Dayunamuno in the Chaser Newsroom. A massive crash of Facebook and Instagram yesterday has caused major disruption to the world's stalking community. A spokesperson for creeps, weirdos and advertising executives said that they had been forced to resort to traditional forms of stalking, such as peeping through people's windows, thanks to the outage. Meanwhile, MySpace also crashed after being inundated

with three users following the Facebook crash. Dominique Perritte has won a party room battle to become New South Wales Premier. At the age of just 39, he is officially the youngest fuckwit to ever lead New South Wales. Scott Morrison has told reporters that the federal government will never adopt a New South Wales model for an anti-corruption commission.

The Prime Minister said a federal ICAC wouldn't work because then they wouldn't be corrupt. That's the latest news you can't trust. Remember to like and subscribe to The Chaser Report in your podcast app. I'm Rebecca Dayunamuno, and I'm not the premier of New South Wales. Today's episode of The Chaser Report is brought to you by sexting. Kissy face, kissy face, water droplet, eggplant, carnival tent? I don't really know what that one needs.

With Gladys Berrigley in resigning under a cloud of corruption and still debate about the federal ICAC and whether it should happen, we thought it would be good to talk to a lawyer, because I'm sure other people are. Michael Badley is the managing partner at Mark Lawyers in Sydney. He's written a piece for Crykey this week about what would happen if there was a federal ICAC, given some of the shenanigans in the federal cabinet. Hey, Michael.

Hi. So what are the charges against Gladys exactly? What are ICAC looking at? Well, no charges as such. That's not what ICAC does. What they've announced is they're conducting an investigation into possible breaches of public trust by Gladys in relation to very large amounts of public money that were given to Clay Target Association and Music Conservatorium in Wagga Wagga a few years ago at the time when she was in a secret relationship with the local MP, Darrell Maguire. And they're also looking into. whether she knew or suspected that Maguire was engaging in corrupt conduct, which it's already found he was, and failed to report it because the ICAC Act obliges ministers to report any suspected corrupt conduct that they know about. I said charges, but you just reminded us the ICAC doesn't work like a court, does it?

It's an extrajudicial process in a way. That's right. It's a standing Royal Commission, and so its remit is to investigate and inquire into possibilities, or allegations of corrupt conduct. And so it conducts an inquisitorial process, unlike what courts do, and then it makes findings as to whether public officials have engaged in corrupt conduct, and then sometimes it will then refer them on to prosecuting authorities if it thinks that there's criminal conduct involved.

So there's no direct consequence of an ICAC finding. Nobody goes to jail or anything like that. But it can ruin Carey's, can't it? I mean, like, I've got friends who are lawyers who actually think the whole thing is a bit of a kangaroo court and that it doesn't actually afford natural justice. That's certainly what the Murdoch Papers are saying. Yeah, I know, I know. But it's interesting because it's not just the Murdoch Papers.

Like there are sort of lawyer people who sort of think, oh, why is ICAC useful? Shouldn't it just be done through an actual judicial process? Yeah, look, there are definitely lots of schools of thought. Certainly some people, including some lawyers, thinks that ICAC's powers are too broad or that its processes are too public. And because certainly, you know, if a public figure is called before ICAC in the way that Gladys has been, then, you know, automatically there's a big cloud hanging over them. And although in legal terms, there's no consequence to that because nothing's been established or proved, in the public mind, of course, yes, you know, there's a direct, immediate negative impact on

that person's standing and an ability to continue in public office. Certainly, it seems that parts of the Liberal Party think that Gladys's public life isn't necessarily over since she's already been recruited to stand for a federal seat. When the last set of hearings about this came out, there was a whole lot of recordings of Gladys Perrigley in talking to Darrell McGuire where he would tell her, of these deals that he'd done and she'd go, oh yeah, and her defence at the time was well, I wasn't really listening

but you listen to the tape and you go, she was listening, she's saying, yay, you know. Well, she says, I don't need to know about that bit. Oh yes, and she even said that, yes, which is clearly guilty. That's as guilty as guilt guilt. Allegedly, allegedly, we do not have the money to be sued right now. It's just a finding of corruption. This is not subjudicity because it's not a judicial process.

I'm allowed to say whatever I fucking like. You can still defame her, surely. Karni and Michael. Is that defamatory, Michael? You know about defamation law? No, that was grossly defamatory, yeah. But I guess the thing is that the investigation itself has become the punishment, hasn't it? If IAC is investigating the Premier, if the Premier has to stand aside, after the design. Well, I don't think anyone would argue that it's not unfortunate that we have to have an anti-corruption body at all. If public figures didn't engage in corruption ever, then we could repay on the criminal justice process and the courts to, you know, retrospectively deal with anything that went wrong.

Unfortunately, you know, that's not the way the world works. So the reason ICAC was created was because New South Wales is one of the most corrupt jurisdictions. And the reason we need an anti-corruption body, for the same reason that we occasionally need raw commissions, is because all this shit happens undercover. And the only way to address that is to expose it to sunlight. And the criminal justice system is not equipped to do that because of its structural arrangements, you know, the presumption of innocence and proof beyond reasonable doubt and all that, which means, you know, if that's all we had, then most corruption would never come to light.

So it would be great if we didn't have to have this problem where innocent people can be dragged in front of it, have their reputations tarnished, and, you know, be dragged through something like this, have to stand down from their role and suffer all of that, that, you know, personal harm and humiliation and so forth, like, seriously unpleasant and not optimal, but if you consider the alternative, which is what we have in the federal sphere, nothing, then, you know, that's not better, and that's worse. Can we dive into the examples, Michael, because you've put them all out and cry, It's quite a list, I've got to say.

Yeah, it was an incomplete list. I was doing it in a rush. Plenty I missed. I mean, the thesis I put in that article was, well, okay, if we had a federal body with equivalent powers to ICACC with retrospective powers, yeah, there's quite a list of them who, on the sort of Gladys standard, have to have stood down while those matters were investigated. Angus Taylor has benefited from the last recent. shuffle, and he's a top of the list.

Yeah, he's, I mean, you know, there have been some very serious allegations leveled at him unproved, but haven't been tested by any credible independent inquiry or investigation. And so, I mean, the reason I put him at the top of the list is because they're probably the most serious allegations sort of that are hanging over the head of any currently serving federal minister. And isn't one of the advantages, though, if they did have a federal Ikech, is that, you know, because some of those allegations have been hanging over Angus Taylor for years, you know, if he is actually innocent,

then having a body that can independently say, yeah, yeah, no, nothing he did was untoward is actually a clean bill of health. It's actually in the interests of innocent politicians to have a body that's able to say that. And that's one of the advantages of the state ICAC, isn't it? Exactly right. So why do you think Morrison doesn't want to have a federal ICAC?

I can't believe Christian Porter didn't deliver it. Yeah, I mean, look, Porter did deliver a bill a year ago, which sort of got laughed out of Parliament. The fundamental design of that bill was that the only person who could refer a minister serving MP to the corruption body for investigation was the MP themselves. Oh, an honour system for corruption. They could only do it if they reasonably suspected that they'd committed a crime. What do you mean?

If they committed the crime, as if they're going to be like, guys, you know what? I've committed a crime. Look, that's a cynical view. But that was the design of it. And the commission itself couldn't institute any investigations and they couldn't be received from third parties. And all the investigations would be conducted in secret. There would be no public hearings.

And if they made a finding of corrupt conduct, they couldn't even publish that. So they've promised a new bill before the end of the year with a redesigned anti-corruption body. But judging from Morrison's comments this morning, it may even be, you know, more amusingly ridiculous than their previous attempt. I think my favourite item on your list is Barnaby Joyce claiming $5,500 of expenses as overseas study for him and his wife to fly by a private jet to India for the wedding of the grandchild of Gina Reinhart's business associate. I want to hear an inquiry into that just because it sounds extraordinary. He didn't claim the cost of the whole trip. He actually claimed part of the expense of, I think it was return airfares because he came back via Malaysia and claimed that he'd been conducting a study and there's a hilarious

report that he filed because when MPs go on these overseas study junkets, they have to file a report which are always like, you know, sort of years. school project report. What I did on my holidays. The science of Lunar Park. I had to do that in year 10. Yeah, exactly. And he put in this report saying things like,

oh, yeah, you know, Malaysia is, you know, it's full of Muslims. And, you know, the food's great and stuff, you know. So in your professional opinion, with all of this evidence that you've stacked up, how confident are you that we will, in any way, in one day coming soon, get some sort of federal body? Yeah, we will get one eventually. I mean, certainly Labor has stapled itself to that as a commitment,

so it would be very embarrassing for them to back out on it when and if they ever achieve government again. It won't happen before the next election, obviously, because whatever the government produces won't get through because it'll be a joke. And they have no intention of producing a body that actually has any functional use. Can't they pay a company that Angus Taylor's invested in 80 million bucks to come up with a draft?

That's an unsubstantiated allegation that I think you just made up on the spot. Yeah, no, that's not a truth claim. That's just a joke because I know that Angus Taylor is a man of great integrity who would never do anything like that. That's why it's a humorous suggestion and not effective. Well, fortunately, he has a keen sense of humor and we'll pick up the satire. Michael, that was both fascinating, very amusing and incredibly depressing. Thank you so much. Any pleasure, any time.

Michael Bradley's piece is up at craiky.com.com. Check it out. We'll call you when we have our next defamation case. Yeah, talk to you in 10. Today's episode of The Chaser Report is brought to you by sexting. And just a quick reminder that it's not sexting if you're just sending unsolicited dickpicks to women you don't know. Instead, that's a fun thing most people call the crime.

yesterday the worst possible thing in the entire world happened Facebook went down along with Instagram and WhatsApp which they also own not just for a short while for hours on end the world did not know what to do we were beside ourselves fortunately we have a reporter on the scene in the Facebook server room hello Xander yes Dom I'm live here from Facebook HQ and it is a mess what can you see look I've seen Mark Zuckerberg running around with a personal troop of guards, there are workers being whipped into submission, and it is absolutely explosive down here right now. Is there any indication about what happened, what went wrong? It actually

looks like the source of the breakdown is linked back to one Charles Firth, who was late last night was on Facebook and was trying to post an ad for his new chaser to her, and for some reason it seems like he's accidentally used a credit card that was overdrawn, and the Facebook system sparked into haywire trying to work out how a credit card could be so overdrawn and the whole thing shut down that's right it doesn't deal with numbers that long no it was trying it was trying to process the bank statement and then it was that it didn't understand how someone could be trillions of dollars in debt has anyone thought of turning their computers off then on again they definitely tried turning them on and off again however something went wrong in the

process and every piece of junk got deleted off Facebook marketplace making the website critically unstable and then suddenly Mark Zuckerberg's robot army came out and then stopped any workers touching the systems any further. Are we at the beginning of Skynet in the Terminator movies? Are these computers going to destroy us all? Look, we certainly could be facing a certain kind of tech apocalypse here. I mean, if any machine wanted to embarrass you to death, it's definitely Facebook. They know everything about you down to the photos of Charles's feet he shared last night. So it's hard to say what's happening next. We just don't know.

But, you know, if Facebook's AI decided to take everyone down, well, I don't think we'd have much chance of stopping it at this point. Zanda, how are influencers coping without access to Instagram? I mean, there's a lot of food going unf photographed right now. Now we know that all the time people posting photos of their kids, photos of their food, what they're watching on Netflix. And there is big concerns here that we will just not be able to know what happened in these five hours of history for the end of time. You know, what happens to the world with such a great tragedy of not being able to document every single second. Mind you, I think there's a lot of New South Wales politicians who are very grateful for that five-hour undocumented amount of time. Yes, because it's happened during the numbers, hasn't it?

They haven't had access to WhatsApp. No, I mean, democracy dies in darkness and who gets their news from anywhere, apart from Facebook right now, these are the end days. But on the other hand, the politicians might be quite sad because these people can't share conspiracy theories. You know, they can't advertise their political parties or hock their anti-vaccine post. What's going to happen to humanity is, well, the world potentially going to get better, is advertisement companies going to lose revenue? There's all these scary thoughts about what could be happening with Facebook being down right now. And, you know, what if it's a new normal without Facebook?

How could we possibly cope? Is there any indication that vaccine rates are soaring now that? Yeah, this could be our chance for a global utopia. without Facebook and Instagram, I just think we might be on the verge of humanity actually finding happiness. Look, that is possibly true, but at the end of the day,

we know that what comes first is these companies' profit margins, and they are through the floor. And whatever will we do without poking our friends, waving, and seeing our grandma's post memories from 10 years ago. What will you do? Hang on, Dan, my Facebook is actually working again. I think Digiope is not going to happen.

Can we wrap this up? because I want to just get better. There's this really interesting Craig Kelly post that I want to share with my... Well, that's good to hear everyone. It looks like there's no new normal. We're back to the old ways. Yeah, when you come back from the States,

could you bring us some hydroxychloroquine, please? Oh, definitely, definitely. They've actually got some in the Facebook staff room for testing it out. Actually, isn't it ivermectin? According to this post, it's ivermectin. Oh, they've got a whole range of drugs here. I was actually testing out a snail enlargement pills earlier.

Are you telling me, Mark? Zuckerberg is like posts now enlargement pills. Look, I think I would get shot if I confirmed or denied that information while still being in the building. The Chaser Report News you can't trust. Guys, I think I've fallen down.

What do you mean, Facebook? Yep. Yeah, I've definitely fallen down. Twitter, can you help? I'll send Instagram and WhatsApp to come get you. now they've fallen down too what the fuck um is there anyone else that can save you can we hit up my space they're probably not doing anything

no no they're owned by news corp now they're not in the business of helping anyone but you're the biggest social media platform in the world how long are you going to be out a while how long's a while well i don't know they have to fly in a special person to press the special on off button this is ridiculous hey you try being used day in day out by boomers, anti-vaxes and minion memes, all right? It takes a toll. What about you, Instagram? How are you coping down there? The light in here is terrible. I miss Golden Hour.

Wait, wait, hold on. Who else is down there? It's telegram, but that's nothing to do with me. Oh, everybody, look at us. We have the four very, very big social media platform. All of us falling inside a well at the same time. It's crazy. It's crazy. What about your Twitter? Can't you help me? That chance. You know, this is the only time I get any web traffic. Now, Dom and Gabby, I know this has been a heavy show, but I've got a bit of breaking news.

Yesterday afternoon, the Reserve Bank of Australia, I know this is a pretty sexy, gossipy sort of news. Yeah, juicy, Charles. Held interest rates at 0.25% for the fourth month in a row. I don't know what any of those words mean. Gabby, do you have a property investment? I don't have a property. I don't either. I will never have a property.

I'm glad you don't have to pay more interest for the property that you own. Well done. No, not just me. Oh, that's what that means. All property owners, all investment property owners, people who are negative gear. I mean, there are people from Bondi to Bellevue Hill celebrating this news that came in this afternoon. I mean, you're probably thinking at this point, couldn't they just stop recording when we say no? This argument has to be teased up.

We're just stumbling on. Yeah. I mean, you can stop listening at any point. Clumsily pushing through. All we've got after this is the bit where we plug like our sponsors and ask you to write a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That's all the only bit is to come. Yeah, and also remember to subscribe and like the Chaser Report in your podcast app of choice.

That'd be handy. And I agree with some road microphones. We're part of the ACAST creator network. We're on to it.