The Chaser Report - Nina Oyama, Accidental Gossip Queen

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Nina has been forced to self-isolate forever after an unfortunate workplace faux pas. Plus, Charles and Zander have an exclusive interview with Barnaby Joyce, Aleksa discovers that being woke loses Olympic medals, and Covid comes to Canberra – where Chaser writer John is out of toilet paper. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of The Chaser Report is sponsored by Ruining Your Childhood. Aren't the Rold Dahl books great? My favourite's Matilda. And his favourite was Mine Kampf. Yep, old Rold Dahl was wildly anti-Semitic. Childhood ruined. You're welcome. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Friday the 13th of August, not sinister. at all, but it's not a coincidence, perhaps Charles,

that today the lockdown extended to all kinds of other places, Dubbo, extra LGAs in Sydney lockdown even harder, and it's even come to Canberra, Charles. That's right. I thought Friday the 13th was supposed to be bad luck, but it's hit Canberra. Well, one of our writers would beg to differ, I suspect. John Delmenico writes a lot of the chaser.coms or AU stories, among other things.

I think we can call him our Canberra correspondent. We can. Yeah, God. Yeah, hi, guys. it going. How's it going where you are? We're used to this shit. It's a lot. It's the first time I think I've ever seen people my age pay attention to the news. I genuinely had text asking about vape shops. And so did you go out a hoarding toilet paper yesterday? I tried to because I needed to because I do my shopping on Thursdays. Really? But the issue was I literally couldn't get to the

stores. Oh really? There was that much hoarding. There was so much traffic and then I didn't want to drive all the way around camera trying to find one shop that sells toilet paper. Oh no. In fact, what you'll find is that you'll find you sort of wanting to go and buy, go to the supermarket more often because it's the only fucking thing you are allowed to do. Yeah, it is weird that we've learnt literally nothing from every other city going into lockdown the last year. We straight away into panic buying and then we're already freaking out about stuff that's not going to be an issue. Well, if there are any Canberrans who are lacking in toilet paper, I should just plug chaser's shop.com, do sell toilet paper on that website. No, you shouldn't.

So, you should... You profiteer. You should totally... It's only 2195 for a pack of four. With last year's jokes printed on it. Very good, then it. Yeah, if you want to wipe your ass with my jokes, that's an available option.

But isn't Canbera a wonderful place to be in lockdown? There's so much fresh air and open spaces and parks. I mean, you'd barely notice, wouldn't you? With the lovely outdoors that you all enjoy, the lifestyle? I mean, barely got to notice because there's not much to do here anyway. You said it, not us. One of our main attractions is going to the Warm Wario, which is a great thing to do, but not like a fun night out.

No, I think it's a bit bleak for lockdown to go to the War Memorial. I went to the Sydney one yesterday, actually. And no, it didn't help my state of mind at all. I was walking around Hyde Park in Sydney. Yeah, it's made me think about all the death and destruction and tragedy that was largely needless, which I guess I already was thinking about. So keep up beat, John, keep up beat. I'm excited because I saw some of the footage that's coming out of people panic buying without masks on.

Generalis was literally now confirmed as one of the COVID hotspots. I thought the OCT was very efficiently run. I thought you were the one beacon of good civic government. Well, to be fair, our government can also get overruled at any time by the federal government. And that's not a power that you want in a state parliament. No, that's the one thing that has basically saved all of the states is being able to ignore SCOMO. The worst part is we were excited. because we're going to have two weeks without Barnaby Joyce.

But now we're locked down as well, so we can't go out and enjoy that. Yes. Oh, dear. So you're squandering the whole opportunity that you've got. The other thing we can do here is grow weed while we're in lockdown. Oh, what are you worried about? If Camberians can just grow weed to get through this, you won't even notice a week. Yeah, I do plan to get a lot into gardening.

Can you still stockpile fireworks? And porn? Porn, yes. I think fireworks is no longer an option. Yeah. Canberra's awesome except for the politicians, i.e. Oh, dear. Well, look, what do we say to patronise people who've been locked down in fresh?

Charles, I've forgotten. You got this, John. You got this. Oh, it's my first time getting told that. And remember, we're all in this together, okay? Oh, I definitely remember that part. All right, well, keep writing articles and channel your misery into content. That's what Charles has been doing.

Yeah, that's great. It's actually really good news. So coming up on the show, we've actually got an exclusive interview with Barnaby, So that's amazing huge. Plus Alex's uncovered some amazing, very disturbing emails from Donald Trump. And Nina Ayama has a very embarrassing story from work. But first, let's go to Rebecca Deenamuno in the Chaser Newsroom. The nation's parliament has been plunged into lockdown after Canberra recorded its first COVID case in 100 days.

With the parliament now essentially non-functional, experts say the country now runs the very real risk of being competently managed. Barnaby Joyce has slammed suggestions that the Australian government should act on climate change, claiming that money would be better spent on $80 million worth of non-existent water. Mr Joyce said that regional areas were being hit nowadays with an increasing number of droughts and bushfires,

so it didn't make any sense to burden them with a climate policy. Baby boomers around Australia have begun hoarding all the stocks of the AstraZeneca after it was decided to allow people under the age of 40 to get the vaccine. But boomers have defended their actions, pointing out that they're happy to rent out the vaccines to young people for the right price. That's the latest Chaser News you can't trust. I'm Rebecca Deunamuno,

and I'm looking forward to spending the weekend at home again. The Chaser Report is sponsored by ruining your childhood. Don't you love Lion King? I bet you love it even more when you remember that Nala and Simba are technically cousins. Hakuna Matata to Incest. Also, it's literally just Hamlet with Lines, isn't it? So Gabby, Alex has been running around and he's all very excited because he's discovered something about the Olympics that he thinks no one else knows about.

The Olympics has been around forever. What could there possibly be left to discover? Well, let's find out. What's going on? Yeah, there's a bit of a story, a secret story about the Olympics that only a few secret news channels like Fox News know about. So apparently, for some reason this year, a lot of the athletes were kind of underperforming. Now, before I tell you why they're underperforming, could you think of maybe a glaring issue about this particular Olympic Games that might be a struggle for some athletes, why they might not be in peak performance? I don't know.

Maybe like, I mean, it's a pretty far way to travel for most people to Japan, isn't it? Japan. Japan's famously far away from every other country. Yeah. Would the fact that they haven't been allowed outside for the last nine months be any sort of impediment to their training regime? See, that's what I originally thought. I was like, surely that's the reason. But no, Fox News has found the real reason.

And it's actually that they're too woke. Go woke and go broke. Or in the case of the Summer Olympics, get woke and lose. Folks, I would never root against the United States of America in any capacity. but apparently the popularized and glorified culture of wokeism and victimhood may not be beneficial to the athletic prowess or performance of our USA athletes. That is incredible. The idea is that sport has become two left wing,

and what's that? Because they all want to share the spoils of victory or something like that, there's no incentive to win. I mean, I think you're thinking about this way too deeply for Fox News. I don't think they're looking into like the repercussions of egalitarianism in sport. I think it's simply like the colour of an athlete's hair means that they're going to play with. Yes, because they spend all their time in the shower, you know, changing the colour of their hair. Exactly.

Or the hair salon. Have you ever dyed your hair? No, I've never dyed my hair. I just realised it like the way you just mean. In the shower, it's like just such an anti-good thing to do when you're dying your hair. You put on the shampoo or something, don't you? It's in the name, Charles. It's dye.

You put dye on your hair and then you wait a bit. It's irrelevant to this conversation, but that's something we have to pick up later because that's interesting to me. Well, you know, find that you to talk about hair when you've got some. Maybe a little bit of sensitivity here, Gabby. Sorry. Anyway, is that the reason? Is it because they're spending too much time?

Well, no, no. I mean, that could be the reason, but they're just interested in proof. They want to show you when someone's being woke and they want to show you them losing. So there's a perfect example here. You know, it all started with that ultra-embarrassing loss, a shutout for the USA women's soccer team losing to Sweden 3-0 after taking a knee to protest what Megan Rapino and Pals explained as racism, discrimination, and inequality. Right.

So you see, they take the knee and then they lose. It's like, it's causation. Yes, because. Because how can you run when you're sitting on your knee? Exactly. So what's the thing? Is it too distracting? Is that the thinking?

Like, they're all distracted by the racism. And if they just sort of put up with the racism... Then they'll be better athletes. They'd be better athletes. Just like all the great athletes in history. Mohammed Ali, famously non-political. Brilliant boxer. What do you reckon is the wokeest sport?

because they also have this title in Fox News. There's one sport that's just so much woker than the rest and it's really causing trouble for America's gold medal aspirations. Well, I'm guessing it's not shooting. Discus. Just because its name is weird. Discus. It'll be something like skateboarding.

It'll be something modern because they hate modernness. You'd be surprised. Here's what Fox News thinks. Same goes for USA Men's Basketball, the largest group of whiny social justice, activist the Olympics has seen in decades. Is that because a lot of them are black? That's exactly why.

Is that just code word for our mostly black basketball team? And so the idea is that the basketball is a bunch of whiny winter. This feels so much like a Firth Report. I don't know. 20 years ago I had this character. It's your fault, Charles. This is literally a script. This is a script out of that fucking.

The wingy-winy basketball team. They also won goals. These six-foot-eight giants are such wingers and whiners. That's how it becomes reality, yeah. It's impossible to satirise. That's the issue as well. They just do it so much better than we ever could. I mean, it wasn't just Fox News.

I don't know about you guys. I don't know if you've heard much from Trump recently, but I get all his emails. And he weighed in on the sporting issue as well. I want to read some of his emails. If our soccer team headed by a radical group of leftist maniacs wasn't woke, they would have won gold medal instead of bronze. The woman with a purple hair played terribly

and spends too much time thinking about radical left politics and not doing her job. I wish listeners could see the expression on Gabby's face. I don't, I never liked sport anyway. Sorry, can I just say, let's just think for a moment. Let's just enter the world of Trump and all this Fox News. God. What if they're, what if they're,

correct. What if it's true? What if everything that they're saying is true and that actually the reason why the soccer team didn't win was because they died their hair. And that is actually I mean, I suppose I spent the last three years of my high school career with like pink and red and blue hair and I didn't play a single sport the moment I died at it. Yes. I mean, I can't disprove the theory. Yes. I think there's a lot of evidence. Well, it's not just about the hair. It's just thinking about politics in general makes you a bad athlete and um you know i'm personally not a healthy human being by any criteria but i honestly blame my engagement with a chaser for why i'm not an athlete since i've been on this show talking about politics it's just it's it's ruined my chances of

olympic fame that's why we're all so unfit yeah totally right like the reason why i don't have any abs and a chiseled torso is because i'm on the fucking chaser yeah that's exactly that's the reason Although I will say the reason for your hair loss is also the chaser. Stress can cause such things, Charles. Could I just say, like, surely if this were true at all, then there would be no woke athletes in the American team because they would have all lost to right-wing brilliant sports people as they were trying out for the Olympics.

It makes no logical sense. Yeah, it's completely insane. but also like this is in retrospect like they did this during the Olympics at the end all of these teams essentially won gold so it's unless the rest of the world is more woke I mean this is something I haven't considered is well I think there's a lesson here for the Australian team which is I think we should add an extra criteria to our selection process which is that every competitor has to agree to drone strike a third world country as part of their trials and if they don't do that then they don't get in Olympics. I'm worried that drone striking third world countries is exactly the kind of incentive that teaches people to run very fast. So I think you're just training more athletes.

Suddenly the Afghan Olympic team would win everything. Oh God, we just sent like 65 emails to the company. The Chase Report is brought to you by ruining your childhood. Did you know that the boy who played Anakin Skywalker had a breakdown

because he was relentlessly bullied because of that film, as if the prequels weren't bad enough already. Still better than The Last Jedi. Am I right? I don't have many friends. It's been a big couple of weeks for Barnaby Joyce. Last week, he was accused of being drunk in Parliament, and then this week he had to quarantine and disappeared from Parliament for a while, apparently because there was an outbreak of COVID in Armadale or something.

Is that right, Sander? Yeah, I've heard a few different rumours about why he's not in Parliament, Luckily enough, we've got him on the program today, and we're going to investigate. Fantastic. Yes. Yeah, we've got the Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce on the line. Vanity Joyce, thanks for joining us. Good morning, Fran, and good morning, your listeners.

Actually, my name isn't Fran. It's Charles. Now, I've heard you're not wanting to join the parliamentary pub crawl this afternoon. What's going on? The reason why is because nobody is telling us exactly what's involved in the plan. But Mr. Joyce, don't you head the Pub Crawl Planning Subcommittee of Parliament House? Yeah, I definitely. And isn't the sole purpose of that committee to plan public laws?

We don't actually come up with the plan. Other competent people come up with the plan. Then how come last week an email was sent around saying that the plan was to drink 20 shots of vodka and 50 schooners a beer, like normal? To the technical details, which you've tried to trap me on, if you're going to just make an arbitrary claim, I will get to 2050, that's fine. But you've got to understand that as you go down this process, exactly, exactly what is the cost and who is paying us? But I thought the whole point of a pub crawl is that you should be able to drink as much as you like. Anything is moral.

Anything is allowed. Can you understand why people are very upset that you're not coming on the pub crawl? I cannot afford to. Understand I borrowed money that my children, grandchildren, possibly great-grandchildren have to pay back. Okay, but is it true that George Christensen

was offering to cover your tab if you attended the crawl? Do you have had George on your program and met George? You would know the likelihood of that is near zero. Yeah, that's probably. true. Barnaby Joyce, thanks for your time. The Chaser Report. Less news. Less often. It's time now to check in once again with Nina Ayama. And Nina, you've given up on turning

up to work in person. Is that right? Yes. I mean, I haven't given up. Partially, it is the novel coronavirus, as it were. It's been doing a lot of helping me stay at home a lot. But yeah, I am terrified of the world opening back up because I don't want to go back to work. Why? Because I recently accidentally caused some drama there. And I'm too afraid to show my face. Really? Oh no. Because that's one particular workplace. It is. I won't say where it is, although you can probably guess.

Well, I was invited back to work there recently, and I actually said no. And the reason is, is last time when I was working there is that I accidentally spread a rumor, like by complete accident, and it got back to the person. Wow. But it wasn't like a mean rumor. But there was also like another reason, which is prior to this rumor being accidentally. How do you accidentally spread a rumor? Well, you're about to find out.

This is an idiot's guide to accidentally spreading rumors. But what it happened was I was working with this person and she had kind of like done a few things that had made my life a little bit harder. She'd worked on the production side of things. And like when it came to like traveling, she like hadn't booked or paid for hotels. And she did all this stuff that was kind of like, I do think if you arrive in the middle of nowhere at like 11 p.m. at night and the company that's paid you to fly out to that place hasn't paid.

for your hotel it's like just an extra level of stress i don't think that that's um sort of unreasonable premed on a behavior to turn up at a place at 11 p.m and go yeah accommodation that'd be a useful thing to have it was very it was very stressful and then prior to that as well i had like because i've been catching the bus to work and i like sometimes had to bring costumes but this person like would not tell me what kind of costume to like she wouldn't provide she's just like bring everything and when i got there they were like oh no the costume brief was that you wear all black And so I was a little bit annoyed at this person. But that's not why I spread the rumor.

The rumor was completely incidental. So hang on, Nina. So you're there with like all kinds of Atlantic costumes. And then I get to set. And the director's like, no, just wear the shirt that you came in. So there's just like a few things like that that were a little bit like, oh, it would have been better if someone had communicated to me or like made things clear when I asked.

Charles, I think it's fair to say that this is not great. Nana's got a point. Yeah. You're not getting unreasonable. Thank you for valid it. Because I feel like whenever I talk about it, I'm like, I'm like, this is such an asshole thing to say, but also like... I presume that the person that you're complaining about

was employed to do things like book accommodation and tell you exactly what you needed to wear. Like, that is literally that person's job. That is true. I will say this person is really nice, though. It's like, one of those people that when they slip up, you're like, oh, I can't, I can't say anything. So basically, I had a few more incidents like that had happened with this person,

and I was like, you know what? Maybe I will finally say something. Maybe I'll just like kindly and, like, just, you know, patiently explain and not make a big deal of it. So I was like jeeing myself up. And on the day that I planned to do it, this girl came to work and she had the same haircut as me. And I like was talking to my friend.

I was like, did she copy my undercut? Like I just kind of said it offhandedly. But then the person that I told, then told another person like, yeah, Nina thinks this girl's copying her hair. And this rumor went around the office. and so I couldn't say anything about the small errors in the production process that she made because I was going to chat to be an asshole and then she confronted me later on the night of recording

and she was like Nina I've had this undercut for three years and I just heard from the other production person you've only had yours for six months and I was so humiliating that I can never return to my workplace ever again. I think this goes much deeper. I think this is much sinister. I think she's trying to replace you.

She wants to be Nina Ayama. Oh my God. Now that you mention it, she did have a black t-shirt on the day that I was called for a black t-shirt. Look, I must say, Nina, I think you're right to be embarrassed. I think what you did was just, you're the worst person in the world. And I really honestly, like if I don't. something like that i would definitely consider emigrating i should just end it all hey i should just

go to liverpool and lick all the hand railings and yes but um yeah i feel really awful about that situation but i shouldn't have made a joke about her stealing my haircut this is what the lesson is i think is like if somebody comes to work with the exact same hair as you and you've never seen that before don't assume that it's a new haircut see this is this is a rule that men learn very early on when they go out with women, which is that you just never, ever comment on anything. Especially in terms of books, because it will always be wrong. You say that, I was going to chip in because Charles actually copied my haircut. Yeah, well, I'm slowly copying Dom's here.

Yeah, I mean, I was the first one, you know, in the podcast to go extremely bald. And Charles is, I mean, you're trying to hide it now with a kind of overcut. Why did you copy Dom? Why'd you do it? Yeah. Why didn't you just grow hair on your hair? head. No, just kidding. Sorry. Ah, sorry. You need an Ayama undercut, Charles. That would look amazing with an undercut. Well, no, as the expert on haircuts, uh, Nina, should I just shave it all

off? I don't know, man. Do what you want. I think it's, people keep asking me this. Men that are bald and keep asking me this. And I'm like, I don't know. I'm not the arbiter of your destiny. Like, if you think you look good bald, then do it. If you don't. But you never know. You don't know. Yes, you can. You don't know. And you can never go back. Maybe you should like get a bald cap. and just cried out for a day, you know. Charles, I looked like you in the first lockdown because I didn't have a haircut for three months. Yes.

And it was awful. Shave it off, you idiot. Yeah, okay. And Nina, next time what you should do is go back to work at the ABC. I mean, go back to work at the mysterious place that we're not naming. And shave your head like Charles and then see if this assistant person then goes and saves her head. I bet she does.

You'll probably get lots of sympathy out of that if you should. shave your head. You turn up with a shaved head. Why? I think it would look like I had a nervous breakdown. Nina, on the upside, you are always very welcome on this podcast because you can absolutely guarantee that Charles and I don't even have the means of copying your hair cut.

This chase a report is powered by ruining your childhood. You ever wonder why the puppet in E.T. is so lifelike? That's because it wasn't actually a puppet. It was really a legless, 12-year-old boy in a costume. Ah, now we're all sad.

Well, it's Friday, team. So it's time to look at the reviews that have been left on Apple Podcasts. Yay. Do you want the good news or the bad news? There's bad news with this? The bad news is that there's only one. The good news is that it's five stars

from Alan Jones fan of the Australian Horizons Foundation. Love your working, great to see Alan Jones on board. Nice. Yes. It was good to have Alan. It goes either way, doesn't it? Either it's a person who loves the podcast and understands that Alan Jones is played by Dan Elich and finds that very funny. Or it's a genuine Alan Jones fan who didn't get the joke.

Well, I have a feeling that might be more lucrative because the old gullible audience. I mean, that is who advertisers want, isn't it? That's a good point. Maybe we should start a podcast with Dan being Alan, but like without ever admitting it's a joke. I don't think you have the pay bracket for that, guys. That costs money. Because not only would that be like work that's taxing, that would be emotional labour. We would be making money, Gabi, because everyone would advertise with us.

We'd have Harvey Norman, we'd have Commonwealth Bank. We'd have all those advertisers who advertise with Alan Jones. They'd say, oh, wow, there's this new Ellen Jones podcast. All you need to say to get that funding is say that we're a community radio station. How are we not a community radio station yet? Let's do that. Let's become a community radio station. Anyway, as a special treat tomorrow, now I know it's all been a bit depressing.

the last few days of these podcasts. But as a special treat tomorrow, we've actually got a very hopeful interview with Katan Joshi, who's an environmental journalist and is running us through all the results of the 3,900-page IPCC report. Wow. The IPCC report is one of the most depressing reports you'll ever read. It's basically it's all death and destruction.

But in the interview, he's actually quite hopeful about what some of the figures mean. in terms of our ability to turn the corner. It is genuinely worth listening to. And also we've got this other fuckwit on the show called Craig Rookas. Oh, yeah, he directed a movie. I mean, God, if we didn't already feel inferior enough to him, oh, Craig Whitten directed a movie.

Oh, oh, I just had a little bit of time in between the incredibly successful TV series. And anyway. Gabby, do you have any overachieving friends who you secretly hate? None. I don't really have many friends. I've got like four, and we're all equally shit. The good thing... Oh, that's good.

The good thing about working with us, Gabby, is that Charles and I are never going to intimidate you with our success. What do you mean? Intimidate? No, it fuels me. Again, this whole week, I've decided I'm taking over the company, one bit at a time. That's good.

Someone needs to. When we talk like this, it does make it sound as though we're not proud of this product. Because people are still listening to this at the end of the podcast. They clearly like it. The numbers are going great. We really appreciate it. We've had a lot of interesting guests, and I'm actually loving this job.

I just want to leave the week on a positive note. I really enjoyed it in this podcast, except for when I have to talk to Craig. Fair, fair. Anyway, you can leave a review on Apple Podcasts. We always enjoy reading them on the Friday episode. Be nice to have more than one next week. Our Gehry is from Road Microphones,

and we're part of the Acast, Creator Network. Catch you next week, and don't forget to check the feed tomorrow. See ya. Bye.