The Chaser Report - Jabs For The Boys | Sami Shah

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Today Dom and Dan discuss the St Joseph's College vaccine scandal, Sami Shah walks us through the Crown Casino scandal, and Aleksa Vulovic exposes our scandalous ignorance about who the US is currently bombing. Plus, Rebecca De Unamuno reads the latest headlines from our scandal sheet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Wednesday, the 7th of July, 2021. We are still in Delta variant mode. My co-host is still the wonderful Dan Illich of the Irrational Fear podcast. Dan, welcome back. Thank you very much. I am pleased to announce that I am vaccine-free. Still one of the 93% of Australians not vaccinated dumb and proud of it.

Well, you know who is vaccinated, Dan? out yesterday, at an incredible 100% all thereabouts. Students in Year 12 at St. Joseph's College. The incredibly expensive private school, GPS, great public school, but in no way public, very much a private school in Sydney. They wrote to New South Wales Health, they asked for some sort of an exception, and they got it. I don't know whether it was because of the apparently 4% of Indigenous students that they

have or the 96% of rich students that they have. And Dan, I suspect, might be the latter. Look, and I think in this world where the liberal government is running both kind of camps, the state and federal government, they're just kind of looking after their own. They want to make sure that the future leaders of the Liberal Party are well and truly vaccinated before next year rolls around. And it's really important because you don't want these kids going to university and getting sick because then they can't join student politics and they can't rule the country. There's a lot of thinking's been going on here.

Well, it's very important. The top priority in any pandemic, Dan, going back to probably Roman times, is to just protect the ruling class, right? That's right. And the other rule of a pandemic is you make sure people from public schools can't rule at all. That is the second rule, I believe. Look at Jane Caro. She's never been in a position of power entire life.

She's always talking about it on TV. But, I mean, day by day, the anger grows at the way that the vaccine rollout has been bungled. And I can't help thinking, Dan, it's probably a good thing at this point that it's still illegal to go out on the streets of Greater Sydney, Because if not, I can imagine huge numbers taking to the streets outside St Joseph College either to protest or just get in a queue for some fucking Pfizer because they've got heaps of it. Yeah, I mean, I can do a testy pop to prove that my balls haven't dropped.

Hello, yes, I would love some vaccine tanks. Of course, I'm 17 years old. Well, you don't have to be. Dan, you could also, I mean, you're a solid fellow. You could just be the prop for their first 15 rugby team. I love a good ruck. Scuttlebutt has always suggested that they didn't really mind. some of the players were a little bit older than genuine schoolboys.

I don't want to say that that's true. This is someone who is speaking from firsthand knowledge from a private school. A little bit, a little bit. Anyway, Dan, the last thing I want to touch on before we get into the show proper is today is a big day for New South Wales. And I know it's been Sydney-centric in the past few weeks. And apologies to those not in Sydney, but we do like talking about ourselves. Decision Day, Gladys Peruglyne is going to advise this people of Sydney

whether the lockdown is going to continue or it's going to continue. That's going to be decided today. I certainly am. I set my alarm for 10.59 for the 11 a.m. press conference, and I'll be glued to ABC News 24 to find out the results. Did you? The decider. Do you think there's any chance to get out of this, Dan?

I mean, I'm really not optimistic at this point. Oh, I don't know. Look, I've got a couple of clients' jobs coming down the line that I'm not really interested in doing. So it would be my saving grace in order to cancel those jobs, that's for sure. I mean, if the lockdown gets extended, can we please at least, when it finally ends, have some sort of public shaming ceremony for this, George Illawarra? Yes. For those players who went, like, this guy, his second breach, he's been sacked now by the club,

but poor Vaughan, we need to bring back to stocks, don't we? And just in the era of COVID, like, everyone can just go and lick him. Oh, yeah, this is really shocking to hear. Or rather, it's not shocking to hear. Of course, the people who are going to be playing up, are going to be the footballers from the National Rugby League. And, you know, the St. George guys, they have all been fined, a huge amount of money. I saw the NRL slapped $300,000 fines across a whole bunch of players,

and they scaled it to how much money they earn per salary. So what's interesting about this fine list is you can see who earns the most in that list. Dan, I've got to say, I've just about had it at this point. This week we've seen rich private school kids getting vaccines when no one else can. It's impossible to book bloody rugby league players yet again having fucking parties when they're not supposed to like that every single opportunities that they get I'm finally beginning to understand why everyone else

fucking hates Sydney yeah yeah it's it's understandable uh I mean I have the fortune of of being in lockdown in Bondi Beach and there is it's it's excruciating having to walk along the beach every morning it's it's just too it's too hard you know the sun is rising the waves are lapping the dolphins are playing It's a hard place to lock down, Dom. I don't know how much more I can take of this. I'm going to move to Melbourne. In today's showdown, we're going to check in with Sammy Shah

about the Crown Casino, really Omni scandal. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, doesn't it? It certainly does. Also, Alex has prepared a fantastic way to work out who the United States will be bombing next. And there is one other event in Melbourne that is about to be shut down. But don't worry, they've replaced it with something else. But first, let's go to Rebecca Dana-Muno in the Chaser Newsroom.

Following comments describing the vaccine rollout as The Hunger Games, New South Wales Health Minister Brad Hazard has today announced a new health plan which will see Olympic Park converted into a coliseum. The new initiative from the Health Department will finally give under 25s the chance to get vaccinated by fighting for one of the country's three vials of Pfizer vaccine. New South Wales Liberal Party members have today celebrated the clarification that Sydney Siders can visit their romantic partner during lockdown with MPs flocking to their local desk stores in response.

And National's MP, Minister Barnaby Joyce, has today spoken out against criticism of Sunday's ocean fire, stating it could easily have been prevented if the Greens hadn't banned ocean backburning. The Deputy Prime Minister explained that backburning has always been the most effective means for preventing natural disasters like this, so if anything, we should be burning more ocean, not less.

I'm Rebecca Dana Muno for The Chaser Report. Today's episode of The Chaser Report is brought to you by my first ministry position, teaching you basic math so you can help all the other big boys and big girls run the country. Here on The Chaser Report, we love crossing to Melbourne. We particularly loved it during their lockdown. But now that we're still in our lockdown, it's a bit more awkward. So Sammy Schaer joins us once again. And we're going to talk about the Crown Casino scandal, which is just fascinating.

It is. It's not surprising particularly if you have paid attention to the Crown Casino investigations that happen in South Wales, which right now might seem like so far in the past for everyone. Because I know how lockdown warps time. And this might come as a shock to many of you all in Sydney, but you won't have been doing this for a little over a week. I know. It's very strange that everyone is so shocked and horrified and appalled, really, that a mecca for addiction and an entire business model built on taking people's money and then making it disappear and then convincing them that they need to give more of their money for it to also disappear is somehow morally questionable in its activities. One of the interesting things

for me as just an Australian citizen is as many of you will be going through right now, it's tax time, it's tax season. We're all sitting down and maybe trying to figure out how we can pay a little bit less and maybe get a little bit back from the government. And then you realize that meanwhile, the Crown Casino here in Victoria basically underpaid approximately $272 million in taxes, that we know off. That we know of. And let's be honest, they're going to get away with it. There's not going to be major punishments because in Victoria, there's a big justification where it's like, well, what do you do? They hire too many people. Apparently being able to hire lots of people, allows you to do pretty much anything you want,

which is why I am now floating a tender for my new Crystal Met slash cocaine manufacturing business. That's great. Well, I hear down there at Crown Casino, they do give jobs to out-of-work comedians like Vince Sorrenti. That's good. That's a public service. So maybe they should get a tax credit for that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure they're all paid in cash that doesn't drizzle cocaine the moment you wave it in front of the comedian's face. I mean, I'm hoping that everyone at Crown has been on mobbed. keep her throughout this entire period. But I heard a great story the other day, though. Someone I know quite well told me that they live in a luxury apartment building near Star Casino, here, the other casino.

And there was a loud knock on the door at like two or three in the morning. And the cops from the organised crime unit came down. And they'd used that, you know, that messaging thing that they busted, whatever that. Yes. Anon. A nom, yeah. People who lived right next to Star City had just been for years. is funneling cash through it from this luxury apartment and they got shut down. So it just seems

like wherever there is a casino and of course I wouldn't want to reflect badly on the star because this is only about Crown, people are going to use it to launder money because of course you would. One of the most fascinating things about this story was hearing just how Crown was turning a blind eye to all of the stuff that was happening on the floor. You know, like drug dealing, laundering and just constantly saying, no, that's not a problem for surveillance within Crown. That's more of a problem for the police. We just worry about people getting too drunk or stuff like that. I mean, it's really an amazing thing all that they managed to pull off.

And one of the ways they did it was they had regulators on site. They are the government appoints regulators whose job it is to go in there and keep an eye on proceedings. But the last liberal government here in Victoria basically did this really interesting thing of increasing efficiency, and I'm putting air quotes up when I say that, by rolling the crown money regulators in with the liquor regulators. Therefore, every time a regulator was about to see money laundering happening, they were told, actually, you should go and check the bar. I think they served an underage teenager.

They have to go off and do that. And the solution, it seems to be right now that is being floated, is actually now that we've seen that there's so much corruption, nepotism, and all of these things in these casinos, maybe instead of regulating them on local level, we should hand it over to federal regulators. Because there's one thing Australia does really well, it's a federal government that does not allow any corruption to take place. I mean, imagine how much they'd just invest in the car park at Crown. It'll be an amazing car park, which is definitely something the Crown falls short on right now.

One benefits of the Crown Casino, I will honestly say, and it's a very valuable service that it provides to Victoria. And that's why I would argue for Crown Casino remaining open is, you know if someone is a fuckhead or not by how much time they're spending. If you meet someone and they're like, oh, I took my girlfriend on the weekend to Crown Casino and we spent a weekend in the hotel there, just, you know, making love, doing lines and counting chips, you know, all right, this is a person that I can cut out of my life and hopefully we'll never see again. Yeah, it says a lot about the television industry that the industry awards were held there. after year. Yes, that's true. And it completely checks out that Shane Warren had his own named bar at Crown for many, many years.

But it also makes me think, Sammy, it's become very clear to everyone that basically casinos don't pay enough tax. They're all these dodgy links. It just makes me wonder, how bad of a businessman must James Packer be to fuck up Crown? It turns out the man who couldn't even convince Mariah Carey to stay with him. Mariah Carey, who at one point turned up on TV with abs painted onto her stomach. It turns out James Packer not good at making life choices. The reaction from the government, the state government seems to be,

look, there's so much corruption that we don't know what to do. It almost sounds like grudging respect where they're like, they have outdone themselves so remarkably that now we just have to let them keep doing it because why would you stop someone who's good at something? This is great. This is exactly the same reaction that we have to COVID, exactly the same reaction to have to climate change. There's just too much of it now. We've lost. I was promised a country where the tall poppy syndrome was well and truly in effect. And yet it seems that every single person who is world-class talent at corruption is celebrated,

elevated and lifted up. You know, at one point one of my aunts was telling me, when I moved to Australia, she said, oh, be very careful there. Everyone in Australia is disdivated. send it from convict. I was like, look, that's ridiculous. So, like, six five generations ago, someone was a convict. They're a convict now. Nope, turns out my aunt was right. I owe her an apology.

But I'll tell you what, though, Sammy, this does clarify one issue for me. I visit Melbourne off and I love it. And one of the things that I respect is how impressive those giant fireballs outside Crown are. You know, they do those giant, and it goes up. I didn't pay true. I thought, gosh, that's wasting a lot of gas out of the Victorian supply. Now I know it's just the tax records.

That's all it is. And you can time it, actually. Every hour on the hour, the evidence of which Chinese high roller has just gone into one of the rooms. It is a remarkable place and we will be poorer. Today's episode of The Chaser Report is brought to you by my first ministry position. If you have 12 million young people and you take away the number of young people you've vaccinated, how many are left? That's right. All of them.

Wow. Isn't math fun? Look, we're all under lockdown here at the Chaser Report. It means we can't do a lot of the things that we would like to do. A lot of things are closed off to us right now. And Alexa's been having a bit of a look, one of our interns, at some of the things we're missing out on just to make us feel even worse during this time. Welcome, Alexa.

Hey, hey, Dom, hey, Dan. Yeah, that's right. But actually, before we start, I've got a bit of a, I guess, a personal issue I wanted to raise with you guys, see before you get some help. Sure. Well, I mean, it doesn't happen so much now during lockdown. But whenever I'm meeting someone new, and, you know, I mentioned my plurricular, place of employment. Like, I work for The Chaser. They always assume I'm talking about the popular

Channel 7 game show The Chase. Do you guys, do you guys have that problem? Yeah, I have that problem all the time. A lot of people, even Andrew Keefe, I see him around the streets of Bondi. He's like, do you work for me? I'm too old to meet any new people. That's how I avoid that by being a title hermit. But I mean, usually what I end up doing is I end up and being like, oh, no, the chaser's actually this political satire show. It's getting harder and harder to spook it, to be honest. That's why I'm thinking like instead of fighting it, why don't we just like lean into it and beat the chase at their own game. Oh, with some sort of game show.

Yeah, exactly. I'm glad you said that. So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Wheel of Miss Fortune. Okay, great. Are you guys ready to play? Yeah, sure. As long as you can reassure me that Grant Denier is not hidden in some box somewhere behind you. Okay, well, I'll get rid of him. Fine. Let's go on without him. Today's topic on the wheel is

Drone strikes Yay Yes A drone strikes This is a little macaque Oh god It's not the usual kind of themes they have on Wheel of Fortune Is it?

Run with it, it'll be seamless It'll look just like the chase, trust me Okay, all right So yes Our contestants What do you think about this topic? Are you feeling lucky? I'm feeling lucky

I haven't been invited to any weddings outdoors In Pakistan any time So for our first question What two countries did the US bomb last week? Last week? Wow, nice week. I'll go out there. I'll say Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Oh, I'm sorry, that's the wrong answer. I'll go with Syria and Yemen. Some of the classic kids. I mean, both of you were wrong. Dom was the closest. So two countries border each other. So the bombs were dropped along the border of these two countries. Oh, okay.

So I'm guessing the one I got right with. Syria. Yep. Oh, I'll say Syria and Turkey. No, no. Lebanon. No. Iran.

Iraq. Iraq. There you go. But who actually got that one? That was me. It's classic hits Tuesday here at this game show. Back bombing Iraq again. That's one point of Dom, but a bonus question.

How many children were killed? Name a number. The closest one wins. Alexa, this is such a grim show. This is not going to get commissioned. What are you even doing here? I'm pretty sure I saw this on the chase two weeks ago. This is absolutely woeful.

This is terrible. I'm not sure even Andrew Keith's action would advise him to do this. Oh my God. How many children were killed? I mean, we... I'm going to guess none. I'll say 30. No, I'm going to guess none because the US is very responsible

with its drone strikes and targets them carefully. Well, actually, Dom got that one. It was only one child. This is upsetting, Alexa. Well, I guess one child is collateral damage when it comes down to things for the United States. You go, there you go. I think it's exactly what they said.

And Alexa, I feel like this format is lacking a little sizzle. I feel like you need a couple of other things in here to kind of really give it some... You need to feel good appeal. Like, what if... Yeah. What if... Okay, children do get killed to collateral damage, but other people get their mortgages paid off.

Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, I feel like you could have some sort of all-star squares kind of element to it. I feel like there's celebrities that you could probably drag in here. Well, I mean, that's why I had Grant Denia, but you guys said no to that. There's a lot of other things you could have done, Alexa. One more question, okay? So I'll be the tiebreaker. Out of all the countries, the US was bombed, which one was the number one target this year?

Out of all the countries. 2021. How about Syria? No, sorry. Sudan. I mean, you're in the right alphabetical region. Somalia. Oh, Dan's got it.

What? Dan's got it. Somalia. Alexa, I'm getting the sense that maybe we should pay slightly more. attention. It's what the US's massive army of killer drones is doing in many countries around the world. Well, I'm actually banking on people not paying attention because otherwise my game show will be a bit too easy, right? At this juncture, out of all the countries the USA has bombed since World War II, it's much easier to name the countries they haven't bombed. It's much

short list. Well, you heard it here, folks. Tune in next week as our contestants try to guess the countries that the US hasn't bombed. Well, unfortunately, the Melbourne Grand Prix has been cancelled for another year, but don't worry, Rev Heads, they are replacing it with something else. This November, Melbourne's biggest event is set to blow you away like COVID clearing your social calendar. Strap in to witness all the action at Albert Park Racetrack, like birds mating. Get a ticket to see Lakeside Drive lit up with a groundskeeper riding. a lawnmower in the distance.

And catch all the action off the track with the colour and movement of the Melbourne City Falun Gong practitioners. Melbourne is set to be silent this November at the Australian Non-Pree. A ticket will buy you a whole seat, but you'll only need the edge. Or probably no seat at all because the grass is going to. going to be pretty nice. No, that's much better. Today's episode of The Chaser Report is brought to you by my first ministry position.

If you have minus $1 billion and declare you'll have $5 billion next year, how many dollars will you have in 12 months? That's right. Minus 12 billion dollars. Isn't math fun? Well, dumb, it is time to go. But before we go, I want to go like the United States government has left. Afghanistan that is not tell anyone and turn off the lights, which is exactly what they did

when they left the Bagram Air Force Base just outside of Kabul. For 20 years, this base has existed outside of Kabul as a central place for America to come and go from the war from Afghanistan, and they left this week without telling anyone. They packed up their shit and disappeared, and the Afghan army that was patrolling outside the base, who provided all the security, only realized that no one was in there when all the lights got turned off. Oh, my God. They're like a dodgy flatmate who just like in the middle of the night just buggers off. I bet America owes some rent.

They do owe some rent. And Afghanistan folks are extremely annoyed that they didn't tell anyone. They're actually quite heartbroken. So, well done. US Army, you really are excellent at ghosting after 20 years. Say goodbye. And I'm going to do the same. Our website is chaser.com.

We put news up pretty much 24-7. You can also follow us on socials wherever you like. And you always appreciate you leaving us have five. star review because frankly it helps us get up the Apple podcast charts. And today's code word is St Joseph's College. That'll help us get to the front of the queue and we don't deserve to be. Excellent. My name's Danilich. I host the podcast Irrational Fear. You can listen to my weekly podcast by going to www.orgationalfear.com. And we're back on air next week. And yes, do get on Dan's podcast. It is a delight. Our gear is from road microphones. And we're part of the ACAS

Creator Network. See you later. Ciao.