The Chaser Report - Odyssey Number Five | Sami Shah

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Melbourne joins Sydney in what is their fifth lockdown, and Sami Shah is, well, unhappy. Plus, not one, but two former prime ministers donated to The Chaser this week – which, given our former hobbies, is quite surprising. And we try to lure Friendlyjordies into suing us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of The Chaser Report is brought to you by Super Spreader Removals. We'll pick something up in Sydney and in no time at all, it'll be in Melbourne. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Friday the 16th of July. And Dom, big news this morning. Turns out Friendly Jordies, who's this YouTuber who criticised a New South Wales politician and got sued. He's managed to raise $1 million for his legal defence.

What? Yes. One million dollars? Million dollars. So Deputy Premier actually claimed that Friendly Jordy's defamed him. We talked about this. He was dressing up as Mario and doing dodgy Italian accents and things. Yeah, well, that's a slightly separate case.

That was like a criminal arresting. That's right. There's several different cases going on. I know, they're using all tools of the law to get rid of this YouTuber. Anyway, so he's raised a million dollars in legal defence fund, right? So what I'm doing is I'm saying to all the politicians out there that we've criticised over the years, all the celebrities, everyone who can be defamed, why don't you sue us? Because the idea of raising a million dollars is, I mean, that's a lot of money.

I mean, how much could a defamation case actually cost to defend? Maybe, I don't know, 250, 300,000? Probably the best part of a million, but we'd still make something out of it. Well, as we will discuss later in the episode, we've been raising money from prominent people. I mean, Kevin Rudd donated to Friendly Jordies, and I bet it was a lot more than the 61 bucks he gave us. We'll hear more about that a bit later in the show. So, well, maybe, I mean, should we say some rude things about Kevin Rudd and see whether he can sue us? Oh.

Or? Yes. Or we defame friendly Jordies and get John Barilaro to give us money. money. I love it. Okay. Friendly Geordies. What a stupid asshole. Yeah. Oh, he's a journalist like my three-year-old's a journalist. Yeah. YouTube. What even is YouTube? Friendly. More like, more like Lamo Jorties. Yeah, Lamo Jorties. Come on. Time for you to sue us, friendly Jordies. So-called Lamo Jordies. And he's so corrupt. He's corrupt, Charles. He's just corrupt.

He's just the corruptest YouTuber I've ever met. He's probably using that legal defense money to, I don't know, do something fun. Joe Barilaro, if you wanted to donate it to the Chaser, just go to chaser.com. And the link, donate is right there. Thanks, mate. Coming up on the show, we're going to talk to Sammy Shah. We've been trying to find people who have it worse than us under lockdown. And so Sammy's based in Melbourne, which is still technically free.

They're still free, but I think by the time this podcast goes to air, it probably will be in lockdown, so it's all a bit of a disaster. I think he's going to be a bit angry. I'm looking forward to it. Also, Cam, the editor of The Chase is going to reveal about all the funding from previous Prime Ministers that we've got this week, a very bizarre situation. But first, let's go to Rebecca Day and Emuno in The Chase of Fake Newsroom. The City of Melbourne has today rebranded as Harvey Norman in hopes it will encourage the Morrison government

to actually give them some fucking money. This comes after Premier Jerry, formerly known as dictator Dan, had a conversation with a young disabled man who was recently kicked off the NDIS and lost his job due to the pandemic, which forced him into coming up with ways to get support from the government. Staying in Melbourne,

rumours of a snap lockdown have caused enrolments in private schools around the city to spike. Parents have begun panic enrolling their children in the hopes they will receive the vaccine before the city goes through its fifths. second wave of COVID. Finally, after the Prime Minister's appearance on radio with Carl Sandalins and Jackie O, listeners began to fantasise about a simpler time when everyone thought Scott was

missing. After enduring a potent mixture of bullshit as Morrison's attempts at being relatable, combined with Sandalins kissing the PM's ass, everyone listening quickly remembered why everything in the radio format is dead. On that note, that's the latest headlines from the Chasin Newsroom. I'm Rebecca Dayuna Muno, and my Pindon. number is zero zero six nine. The Chaser report is brought to you by Super Spreader Removals. We get it done with a smile on our face, which you'll be able to see because we won't be wearing any masks.

During the Sydney lockdown, we've been trying to cheer ourselves up, haven't we, Charles, by finding people who have it worse than us. Mixed results so far. Chris Taylor yesterday managed to get caught in both the Melbourne and Sydney. Sydney lockdowns of 2021, which was pretty crap. That was quite uplifting for me. Look, I think it was quite scientific. I think it allowed him to do a comparative analysis.

I think that's the sort of rigorous journalism that people have grown to expect on the Chaser report. That's right. That's right. But today, Sammy Shara is with us once again. Sammy, are you ready for the challenge of cheering us up? Don't Sammy, are you ready, me? Don't you dare talk to me with that cheerful bullshit.

on your voice. You, Sydney, people know what you've done. You know what you've done here in Melbourne. You sent that guy. That was a fifth columnist. That wasn't a removalist. That was a fifth columnist sent across the border to put us back in our place because you saw us having a good time out here. You saw me go in a fancy restaurants and comedy clubs. And all you had to do was for five minutes contemplating your own goddamn existence, which Sydney people hate doing unless they're paying some yoga retreat specialist to do that. out in Byron Bay. And so you sent that removalist here

and now look at where we are. Thanks very much. Well, it was a very easy call to make. It was just, you call up the removalist. You say, look, I've got something I want you to pick up and take down to Melbourne. And they did. I would have thought Melbourne would like it

because it's all about relocating from Sydney to Melbourne, which any self-respecting Melbourneite would completely understand. It's a Trojan horse, basically. The mistake was that the Sydney person who was doing the moving, who moved across the border to Melbourne, who made a good life choice for once in their life by relocating to a good city, chose a Sydney-based removalist. Because Sydney removalists have the same ethics as everyone else in Sydney, which is oh, we're in lockdown, let's go strolling around Louis Vuitton and buy a fucking handbag or whatever

the hell you crazy people do up there, as opposed to Melbourne removalists. Sammy. Had their mask on and gotten in and gotten out. Sammy, Sammy, please, let's not enter into this debate about whether Louis Vuitton is an essential service or not. It now is not the time to be defining whether Louis... For some people, there might be very legitimate reasons.

That's what the Premier says. Use your common sense about whether you have to buy a luxury handbag this week as opposed to when this is over. Right, and she's been very clear about it. It depends entirely on whether or not you're Natalie Portman and Sasha Barron. Aaron Cohen waltzing around Sydney. And I suppose that's where, why all these luxury stores are now open. No, no, no.

But Sammy, Sammy, she's been very clear about it. You're not allowed to just go in to Louis Vuitton and browse around. You've got to go in there, know which handbag you want to get, buy it, and get out of there. It's fair. I mean, I think there's pretty COVID safe. That's as COVID safe as you get in the eastern suburb of Sydney. You're right. No one who walks into Louis Vuitton to buy something is indecisive.

You walk in, the kind of people who walk in there have made a decision before entering. They know what colour their yacht is. They know that the handbag has to match the bedroom and living room paint job on their private yacht. And they know they have to make the choice before the Carnes Film Festival ends because they have to sail over there. And so you're absolutely right. I apologize. Sidney does know what it's doing. Just think about it.

They've got to have some way to use all the jobkeeper payments that they made last. You know that celebrities can still go yachting here, Sammy. They can't meet up. Two households can't combine to go yachting. But you still can go yachting if you want to. It's quite bizarre. Well, it's not bizarre at all. None of this is surprising.

The fact that Sydney gets a better job seeker, jobkeeper, quote-unquote relief payment or whatever it is, the fact that you all can go yachting. And somehow your version of Delta variant is not as dangerous as the Delta variant in the whole. rest of the world. You've got traffic going on the streets and Jerome Weimar for some reason, playing chicken with the traffic to make a point to that no one's quite sure what that point is. Sydney just does things different. And God bless you, we're so happy that we could share some of your Sydney-style Delta.

Look, I must say, I was on the government website this morning just checking out all the sort of schemes, you know, like all my eligibility. You were looking for cash, weren't you? You were hunting for dollars. Hunting for some COVID cash, right? And if you actually go through the schemes, they go, like, do you, like, on the government website, it says, do you live in Victoria or do you live in New South Wales? It's one of the questions.

And then it gives you the different, you know, packages based on that. And they're totally different. Like, one's $500, one's $600, $600. That's why we're the gold standard stations. It's because we're worth more. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's worth. That's right.

The Sydney website redirects you to a really nicely designed web page, whereas the Melbourne one goes to a defun GeoCities page with banner ads, showing rolling GIF animations. It basically redirects you to a Swiss bank, and it just says how much do you watch? That's right. Whereas the Melbourne one is just a midi file playing in the background. Because you do know that the actual eastern suburbs outbreak,

people think that it was seated in Bonda Junction, Westfield, it was actually not quite true. It was actually seated in a Cayman Islands company entity. A crude COVID interest. It just happened to have a sort of physical presence in Westfield. But it was actually in the Cayman Islands. We have actually no COVID at all in Sydney. As you know here in Melbourne, we're a very reactive state.

We are, some might call us the Avengers of lockdown. know, we strike hard, we strike fast, and we go for the head. And so... Also like the Avengers, you're all going to miss five years of your life. Oh, entirely. Absolutely. Except, to be fair, not much exciting was going to happen in those five years for any of us anyway. So it's not like much of a loss. But yeah, this is, that's where we are.

And thank you very much, Sydney. We really, really appreciate you doing it mildly a little bit uncomfortable for the rest of us. Hey, Charles, did you get out yesterday? It was 20 degrees in Sydney yesterday, in the middle of winter. Why do you even know that? You're in lockdown. We went to the park, my daughter and I. There were heaps people there.

We had a really good time flying foxes and slides and stuff. Lots of surfaces that were mixed. She was hugging strange children. I see, I've seen it was very relaxed. You know, of my kids, you know, like friends of my kids in the last few days just at local parks. And I've seen for months. Lockdown's a really great way to get out and socialise, I reckon. This isn't, by the, yes, this is true.

You do end up socialising more during the moments before lockdown than that normally I'd hardly meet anyone, but tonight I'm going to party like it's the end of the world. You should, and it is. Sammy, just before we go, can I just get your address? Because I've got, I want to send you a package and I've got these really reliable removalists. Oh, awesome. I'm really looking forward to it. Get them to really rub some COVID in their.

faces as well, you know, just to get it on there, coat their lungs with the COVID if they could. Delta variant and if Delta Plus is available, I don't know what's going on in the stores and shops, you know, maybe it's in Louis Vuitton. But yeah, definitely trying to get the good quality shit. Yes, absolutely. Well, we've copied your laneway bars. You're copying our outbreak. It seems perfectly fair to me. Absolutely. It's a quid pro quo relationship between all of us while Queensland laughs. I just want to remind everyone that the real enemy is still out there. Tragically, a mere 20 minutes after we finished that conversation with our dear friend Sammy Shah.

It became clear that Melbourne would be entering into its fifth lockdown at midnight last night. In response, Sammy has declared war on the city of Sydney. Sammy, on behalf of all of us at the Chaser Report, You've got this. God, those Melbourneians are such winches. This episode proudly brought to you by Super Spreader Removals. We don't just pick things up in Sydney and bring them to Melbourne. We'll take it on to Adelaide 2.

Absolutely free. And with none of the pesky paperwork, that's the Super Spreader guarantee. So this week, there's been some bizarre activity on the Chaser's social media accounts, particularly the Chaser Twitter at Chaser. What's happened is that a number of prime ministers seem to be giving us money and giving all the years that we've spent hassling these very prime ministers. It's a bit of a surprise, Charles. So to tell us some more, Cam is with us.

Cam is the editor of the chase, so he runs a lot of the stuff on the website. And Gabby's here as well because she's been watching this with great interest also. Cam, welcome. Hello. Why have we been getting money from prime ministers and which prime ministers are on board at this point? Is it all the living ones are only some of them? Well, I assume they're all probably chomping at the bit to join in. But you may not believe this, Dom, but strangely enough,

the chaser company isn't exactly the most financially rich company in the world. So a couple of weeks back, we decided to just really disquise every single dollar we can out of our audience. What's been the strategy at the moment to try and get donations, Cam? So we've been basically just asking people for beer money, sort of saying, hey, can you chip in five bucks here and there? But then we noticed last week, or early this week, that Malcolm Turnbull had liked one of our stories on Twitter. Someone sent around a picture of that little thing that comes up

that says he's liked your thing. So we went, oh, hold on a minute. Richie Richie-Pants over here doesn't seem to be a subscriber. So we just sent him a tweet saying, hey, money bags, how about you chip in a couple of bucks? And amazingly, it worked. Yeah, it was quite surprising that I think we worked. up the next morning to discover $60 in the account, which was simultaneously quite a lot because

it was $55 more than we'd asked for, but also not very much considering how much he's worth. We weren't sure whether it was the real Malcolm, were we, initially, and what convinced us? I can answer that. It was donated at 5.50am. And I discussed it with all the interns, and we decided that, you know, yeah, that's a very Malcolm Turnbull hour of the day to give $60 to something. I was just going to say, I was told by Charles as well. So apparently, while I was working away at the social media, he was on a phone call to the interns,

specifically telling them, do not tweet out about Malcolm having given this money, because apparently this is grossly illegal. Unfortunately, I was not on that call, so I was simultaneously tweeting out, Malcolm Terble has just paid us $60. With a screen cap, and then he replied, something along the lines of, fuck you guys. for doxing me.

And I've got to say, pretty impressive internet lingo, it must have been the real Malcolm. So at that point, we were pretty sure this was the real Malcolm, unless this was some kind of, like, elaborate scam in which someone's hacked his Twitter account as well. It's almost certainly him. So we thought the next step, naturally, would just be to tag Gabby's mate, Kevin Rudd, and say, cough up. He's not my friend. I don't know.

I mean, like, I'd like to be friends with him, but you guys keep saying he's my bestie. He's not. He's your duet partner. Yes. We sang. We had a lovely time together, all right? And then it's over now and it's fine. All right, I've moved on. You guys need to move on to you. But anyway, yes, we tagged

old mate Kev and he followed through. How much did he give? A very petty $61 just to one up Malcolm. But I just love Cam's response to Kevin because $61 it didn't seem like quite enough. And so I rang Cam and said,

you know, how do we squeeze a bit more out of Kevin? Cam goes, oh, why don't we ask him for another $8? And we did. And then Kevin replied with, um, nice try. I mean, I'm amazed that they gave us any money. We spent so many years just ruining their attempts at winning elections. But see, you guys have already closed yourself off to the idea of repairing that rift. I, on the other hand, decided to call Keating's office.

It was an interesting phone call. I called up. I found his real office's number, by the way. It's just online. You can just get it. And I called his office and this really nice lady responded, hello, Paul Keating's office. And then it sort of dawned on me that I was one person away from Paul Keating.

And I said, Hi, my name's Gabby. I'm from The Chaser. I was wondering if Paul Keating was interested in beating Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd in one fell swoop by donating $62, which is $1 more than the both of them donated. And she sort of was just like,

Sorry, where are you from? And I said, oh, the chaser. And she laughed. And she sort of said, oh, no, no, thank you. Didn't even ask. So now I'm trying to figure out how to use a fax machine. Because I haven't given up on Keating.

Well, I mean, how do you get John Howard? If the chaser has learned anything, how you get to Howard is you literally just walk up to him with a very large weapon and he will embrace you. Get the chainsaw rat back out. Mind you, there is one last twist in this story, Dom, which I don't know whether you know about, which is last night, Cam made a donation of $121, which is the total amount that we've received from Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull.

And where did we end up sending their money to, Cam? Well, we gave it to the asylum seekers centre, I think it was, which I immediately regretted because I realised that meant we lost all the money we'd made and now we're back to square one. The problem is that we're going to run out of prime ministers pretty soon. I'm not sure this is a viable ongoing funding model, Cam, particularly if you get giving the profits away. One thing we're safe of, we'll always have more prime ministers. Australia, coronavirus is on the loose and the federal government is announcing a new range of measures to help in these trying times. Small businesses and hotspots have been hit hard, which is why we're building 36 new community car parks in marginal liberal electorates across the other side of the city.

And if you're a casual worker whose hours have been cut, don't worry. We're committed to making sure there are enough car parks for people who still have jobs to park in. And for renters facing eviction, our new car parks will be a great place to park if you ever need to sleep in your car overnight. And finally, if you are worried that Australia doesn't have enough vaccines, don't be. From today, we'll be rolling out an additional 100,000 car parks a week. That means by the end of this year, every person in Australia will have received at least one commuter car park. The Australian federal government, we're here to help. Build car parks.

Okay, Charles, it's time to reveal something to our loyal listeners, which is that not every moment of the podcast is always recorded at 4 in the morning. I mean, most of it is. Yeah, yeah. Most of it is. This part here. Yeah, absolutely. It is currently 4.13 a.m.

Yes. That's definitely what it is. So the chat with Sammy, as you will have heard. from our little outro that we added was pre-recorded yesterday. I'm sorry to reveal it, but it's just obvious because he recorded it and then literally 15 minutes later, it was announced that Melbourne would be going into lockdown at midnight last night.

That's right. And so Melbourne is now in lockdown. There's been a series of super spreader events, mainly all of which Sammy has been at it during the night. We've had this last burst of super spreading events, which Melbourne's very good at, I must say. Mind you, I think Sydney had the same thing when we went into lockdown. I mean, arguably Sydney had a hand.

We're not completely blameless, Charles, in this situation. There was a small matter of removalists. But, I mean, really, is this the time to be apportioning blame, Charles? It's not. Look, I think blame is such a sort of 2020 concept. It was fine last year when coronavirus kept on leaking out of Melbourne. Yeah, when they said the crossroads outbreak, in Sydney, which we need to remind them about constantly when they get angry with us about

this. Yeah, that's right. And anyway, we're all in this together. Well, we are now anyway. Yeah, we certainly are. It's called a cluster, is what it's called. So anyway, what I think we'll do, Charles, is just I've arranged for the chase that has sent about 10 bunches of flowers to everyone we know in Melbourne.

Yes. And I'm made sure, rather than using local Melbourne florists that we're getting Fairfield, They've got a very good florist in Fairfield. They'll be there tomorrow and I just think if there's one thing we can do is to make sure that we're all in this together for months. Yeah, yeah. It's the least we could do. It is literally the least we could do.

And arguably more than we legally should do. Speaking of Melbourne, our podcast festival gig has been officially cancelled. It's completely off. We predicted for weeks that it might be and sadly it definitely is. So if you bought tickets, we will have a date later in the year. Or maybe next year, who knows where these outbreaks are going. But we still want to come down, don't we, Charles? Not at the moment.

Have you heard what's going on in Melbourne? No. In a few months. Got an outbreak down there. Follow us on the socials. Check the Jass website for more news, as always. And of course, it is Apple Podcasts Review Reading Time. We haven't done this while you're away, Charles.

There's been some great reviews, most of them about how depressing the podcast has become in the last few days. And Fair Cop. Oh, look. Nina is the funniest. That's nice. Yeah, that's fair. You're fired. Yeah, good to know others getting behind that.

Thank you to GT Sam, W.A. Olive Oil wrote literal laugh-out-loud content. I love it. Five stars. That's really nice. First time I read that, I thought it said liberal laugh-out-loud content. So either way. Put Charles in space.

Thank you, L.K. Lee. I agree. Oh, my God. Look at this. Probably the best podcast ever. Thank you, thank you for this brilliant podcast. It's so amazingly up to date and informative. I never miss an episode.

I would only complain that they are too short, but you have so much information to get through. I don't know how you do it. You must research your topics 18 hours a day. Incredible. And that's from my mum. No, Charles, have you not read the rest of that review? It says congratulations, Tegan Taylor and Dr. Norman Swan,

physician and journalist, big ups for CoronaCast. That is very well done from Alan Ben. Well done, Alan. There you go. Thank you for the reviews. Keep them coming and we'll keep reading them out. And today's keyword is, welcome aboard, Melbourne. Yeah, welcome aboard Melbourne, lovely. Aggies from road microphones, we're part of the ACAST creator network. Catch you on Monday morning.

See ya.