The Chaser Report - Peter Dutton is Finally an Apologist

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Peter Dutton has apologised, more spy balloons have been popped, and YouTubers cause Sydney to become less boring. Dom and Charles bring you the latest news for Valentine's Day, what did you get them? If you're our secret admirer send us a cute poem at 0419282188. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigall Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. I'm Dom Nice. And I'm Charles Firth. Yeah, you are. Why are you so uncertain about that? I have had any problems all the time.

Lots of news today, Charles. Yes. Still more balloons. Yes. We're heading to sort of the 99 balloon level. Peter Dutton apologises to the Parliament. Oh, really? Very big moment.

Not necessarily something he often does. No. And the incredibly boring suburb I grew up, North Sydney, was shut down by a YouTube star and a UFC guy earlier this week. Any virgin stories? Anyway, but first of all, we have our own apology. Oh, right. I know that Peter Dutton has one.

But we received a message from Alan after broadcasting our podcast about the Australian cricket team. And one of the things we said yesterday was we were sort of mystified about why India had been accused of rigging the whole match. Because surely, you know, if they rig the pitch, then they still have to play on the pitch. But he pointed out that the big issue with the Indian Wicked is that it was created to attack left-handed batsmen, which is apparently the majority of batters in the Aussie team. And so that's why it's unfair, because this wicked is very biased in favour of... It's rightest. It's rightest. It's ablest.

So I think that Australia has a case for the... Well, a human rights commission. Like, surely... Are you saying left-handed disability? It's abelist. It's bigoted to not allow... How do you doctor a pitch so that it only favours... one-handed batters.

How do you, it was the left side, like, all kind of scuffed. It's probably something to do with the Coriolis effect, don't you reckon? What? It would be something to do with gravity and the, you know, like, you know how. Is it a magnetic feel? Yeah. Did they bury some sort of weird ancient bones underneath that? Is it like a burial ground? I'm guessing, yes.

I think that's easy. Okay, all right. Alan, more information. Before I'm going to apologize, you can apologize, yourself. Before I apologize, I apologize. guys, I want someone to explain to me how it is that a pitch can be biased against left-handers. I understood that it was going to favour spin that they made it so that it looked like fifth day wicket on day one.

So it's going to just fall the pieces and enable their excellent spinners to beat us. But that was our point, which is then that's just biased in favour of our spinners as well. Todd Murphy took seven wickets. So that's not really, it's anti-fast bowler, but that's okay. You always know India's paying spin. That's all right. So what's the problem, Alan? Ellen, email us again.

Yeah, maybe you should issue the apology. Yeah, maybe you should be apologising if you're asking us to apologize. Anyway, so, okay, well, so we're going to cover some news. And the first one is, oh, well, you're doing it. There's four balloons shot down now. Oh, they keep on shooting them down. They keep coming down. Yeah, they keep getting them and keep shooting them down.

So this whole thing about Joe Biden being slow to react, it's over. Show a balloon, and he's terrible at children's parties. He just shoots them all down. There was a children's party at our apartment block where we live. Both Dom and I live in the same apartment block. It's very Marrow's place. Except not at all. I wonder, and there was a, because it was a fifth-year-old birthday party,

and there was this big five balloon. I heard a very loud noise and explosion. I presume the US Air Force came in and took those things out. I kind of feel like, because I presume, I assume that America also has drones that go around the world and spy and everything. Or something like that. Yeah. Is this not just China sort of going, well, if it's all right for you, it's all right for us?

Like, what is the problem with having somebody, you know... Violating your airspace? I mean, Google, like, if you go on to fucking Google Maps, you can see... Like, who cares? But also, where does it... Hasn't Elon Musk's SpaceX put... I think we can hear an American fighter overhead now. Hasn't Elon Musk's space X put internet like satellites all over the entire planet?

Yes, I think so. Is there some arbitrary limit in the sky where China's not allowed to float a drone either? But Elon can just put fucking satellites every inch over the Earth. We should probably note that this part of the podcast is sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party. And by Starlink. An amazing way to get internet wherever you. No, here's a big job. So is the problem that the Chinese have is that they haven't offered something in return for putting up the balloon?

What they should do is they should float a little Wi-Fi transponder off the top of it and then claim it's a Starlink-style service. Yeah, a little Huawei Wi-Fi box. And then you thought that they used to hack into all of our home networks, they put it up there and claim the sky. Yeah, and then Biden wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Also, these things, I didn't quite realize when I'm talking about it. We were saying it was big. They're 200 feet wide, and that's something like 70 meters. Like they're about the same size as like an Olympic pool plus one of those half-sized.

It's absolutely enormous. How were they ever going to evade surveillance? What were they thinking? What was the brainstorm? You know, like, okay. Oh, you know what it is? I bet you a billion dollars this is what happened, which is they were presenting this new piece of equipment for Shishing-Ping. for his approval, right?

And they had a little scale model of the balloon. And it would have been like, you know, like a few inches wide. Yeah, it looked really subtle. Yeah, yeah. And nobody, like everyone neglected to mention that it was a one to 100,000 scale model. I'm imagining Charles, you know, in Ghostbusters, the scene with the stay puff marshmallow man walking down the streets in New York. It's that size.

No, it's not. It's smaller. Like, the marshmallow man is smaller than the... balloons. Yes. So we saw them coming, but the only thing we can do, Charles, is Unleash, a barrage of every balloon they send, we should send 10. I want balloons.

I want every single, like, but why? What will we get out of it? Balloons are lovely. Oh, I see. You're wanting a sort of new, instead of a cold war, it'll be like a balloon war. Like children's toy. It's like, remember that novel where it was called the chocolate war, and everyone had to read it in about year nine or year eight.

And you always sort of, oh, this is going to be a great book. It's just about, you know, chocolate. Like, war-ploded chocolate, but it's actually not. That's what a balloon war is like. It's like a year-nine dystopian novel. I mean, the next stage in this conflict is going to be pillow fighting, giant pillows. My pillow guy, Mike Lendell, is really going to step up. The problem is, aren't all pillows made in China?

Oh, yeah, that's true. They'll have a big advantage. Here's the thing, though, if I'm not a military strategist, okay, I'm not at all. But if I were, what I would do is deploy a slow-moving and very, very obvious thing, like, I don't know, a giant balloon as a distraction from the real thing that I would do. It's probably some sort of nanobot. There's probably like tiny cockroaches with, like, cameras in them everywhere. No, do you think this is a false flag operation or a false balloon operation? A false balloon.

That actually these balloons are actually made by the US. to make it look like China is trying to very, very slowly invade us. It's a good theory. But if the US was doing that as a false, they'd still have to make them in China. But no, look, we can't. We've got to draw a line in the sand, though, Charles. We cannot have, we cannot have China violating our ES space and surveilling us with these giant balloons. Instead, they can surveil us for our mobile phones, follow our Wi-Fi routers.

I mean, the Israeli government is just going, oh, should we not have used Chinese security cameras and all of our sensitive military installations, maybe we'll take those ones down. Like, they already own the next generation through TikTok anyway. Yes. Like, they know everything. That's true. Yeah, they're probably really bored by the data they're getting from the balloons. They probably released the balloons over 15 years ago.

They've been floating around with solar power. And there's like, we don't need that. We've got TikTok. We know, if anything, the Chinese know too much. Also in the news this week, opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has apologised in the Parliament. An amazing moment on Monday. Is it to Indigenous people for colonising Australia?

Is it sort of like an attempt to sort of reset Indigenous? I haven't heard about the voice. No, it's related. He's apologising for being just about the only person in the Parliament in 2008 who refused to apologise to the Solent Generation. He's now saying that wasn't a great call on his part. Yes. And he said this before.

He looked at the poll numbers. He was like, I remember on the day, he was like the one person who sour-graped it. You're right. You had all these Aboriginal kind of elders who'd suffered terrible things, dancing out the front. People were in tears. It was a really emotional moment for Australia. And Peter Dutton's going, nope, not apologising. And so did this mean he's learnt from his mistake and, well, therefore,

support the voice to parliament? Oh, no, no, that's not at all clear. His position's still unclear on that. Oh, right. But he's very clear. He's setting himself up to sour great the whole thing again. Well, hang on, but that's practical reconciliation. The voice is actually making a change that will do something substantive.

He is apologising for not signing off on the symbolic thing in 2008. And one of his reasons was that he thought it would actually do something substantive. He was worried it would open Australia up to compensation. That was one of his objections. He was worried we'd have to actually pay money to the very. victims of a horrendous action that the government took, which he would actually imagine most people who inflicted trauma would actually get in compensation. But no, of course not.

No, no, God, no, this is Australia. They did get a tearful sorry from Kevin Rudd and that's all that they got, but they got to dance out the front of Parliament. Arguably, we could have done more. The other reason, now this is an interesting little argument. Arguably, we could have done more. I don't think you need to put the word arguably in there. We could have done more.

2008, Peter Duncan was arguing about it. In fact, we did the very least one could do. I love the other argument. Now, this is kind of a kind of Greens-esque objection that he had in 2008. He didn't want to apologise because he thought the apology didn't go far enough for the child. It didn't go far enough. It wasn't that he was a fucking racist prick. It's that everyone in making the apology were the racist.

That's right. It was just it was the wrong thing to do. The problem is that his argument, breaks down, where he says, because as a Queensland cop, I was looking into what the conditions they were like, and I thought we weren't doing the right things. Practical assistance was needed. Is he saying that now? Is he saying that's the reason why he affected now?

I can't remember if that was now. It was the excuse at the time. It was certainly his excuse at the time. Yeah, right. Okay. I really think, if you're Peter Dutton's media strategies, perhaps you just want to, just as a Queensland cop, it's not as a strong a gambit as he might. You want to stay within the realms of the plausible.

It's like, you know, when, you know, happy days did that whole motorbike. Yeah. With the shark and things. Like, it sort of broke the world, broke the universe. In fact, if you want to get up in the Parliament, though, to speak, and just say, look, as a Queensland cop, I'm also sorry for that as well. That might work. The Chaser Report, news you can't. trust. Now, Charles, as you know, I grew up in one of the most boring places in Australia.

Yes, North Sydney. North Sydney, which was, I mean, some might argue that I made it even more boring than it was. But no, it's basically, if you think of like a CBD, a central business district, you make it kind of fun-sized, if you haven't been there, and I imagine almost nobody's been to all. Snickers, why would you? It's kind of like a fun-sized CBD, but if you just make sure you get rid of every single sign of life, like a laneway bar or interesting cafe, Yes. None of that stuff. It is like Melbourne without the coffee, the laneways, the culture, the atmosphere, or indeed just the fact that it's a major city. That's right.

It's like if you, let's say you wanted to build the perfect corporate headquarters for your insurance business. Yes. And you didn't want anyone to be distracted from their important task of assessing risk, right? North Sydney is a place you go. If North Sydney is renowned for having all its sort of cafes and eateries close at 3 p.m each day, yeah. In fact, there's an amazing cultural life in North Sydney if you just leave it and go to the Sydney suburb. Anyway, and during the lockout laws, North Sydney didn't actually have those same lockout laws, but it didn't matter. Oh, really?

North Sydney didn't eat them. Well, the other great thing about North Sydney, which I'm sure is completely irrelevant to this, but I'm going to note anyway, because it's still true 20 years later, they don't have any bins that don't have any fucking bins Ted Mac removed the bins when I was living there that was his big move because he thought everyone

would take their rubbish home with them and they did oh really it actually worked it was annoying as hell but it works anyway so that's North Sydney those were the only things

we knew about North Sydney are the only points of interest until by the way if you could I don't know whether you can hear it but in the background you can hear a child crying that is because

they're just out in the apartment complex and his balloon has just been shot down. Terribly sorry about that. It's not an us. That's not our child and we didn't make it cried, specifically. Okay, so but North Sydney, actually something interesting happened there. I am. Because a couple of years ago, Channel 9 and the Herald, they all moved there because the rent's so cheap because it sucks. Yes, that's right.

So nine relocated all their TV studios. They shut down the big campus in kind of Atarmine. And in fairness, Sydney Morning Herald only ever reports on Sydney property prices. It made a lot of sense. And it made sense, you know, on the North Shore. It would be Rodney Mossman. They moved there, Charles.

And Logan Paul, the YouTuber and KSI, the kind of UFC fighter. Wasn't Logan Paul cancel? Yeah, yeah, he's been cancelled on. I don't think they realized. They went on the Today Show this morning. Yes. They didn't hear our podcast last week about how there's no audience. They got horribly misled.

But the amazing thing is they actually brought an audience. KSI, I saw on Twitter yesterday, said, hey, come and have a meet. up at Denison Street, North Sydney, first 2000 there get a free drink. And the numbers were absolutely huge. It was massive. There were huge crowds. Everyone, like, Brooke Boni from Channel 9 was just like taking photos at the window going, I can't believe it.

There's people in North Sydney. It was incredible. Yeah, because I saw the image of the crowd, and I thought it was, you know, National Reconciliation Day March or something like that. Like, it was absolutely massive. But it was for a drink. It was for a drink. Yeah.

A drink called Prime. Right. So can I, yeah, I know all about this because about a month ago in the UK, everyone went crazy for Prime, right? And it was only sold through Aldi. That's right. Yeah. And in Australia, it's only through Woolies. Right. And what the fuck is Prime? What is it? Well, Charles, it's a drink that is so cool. It is so cool that you can make an exclusive deal to sell it through embarrassing supermarkets like Audi and Woolies. Like, it's not even being sold from, it doesn't need to be.

It's so cool that it brings a crowd. So it's, and they're calling it the first viral drink, Charles. Right. In that it makes you deeply ill. It makes you sick. So Prime is a, it's like a, it's like an energy drink, right? It's the official energy drink of the UFC now. And there are lots of things in it like coconut water,

maybe some amino acids and shit, whatever, I don't know. But kids have been paying more than 30 bucks to get a drink. There's a sort of black market. Yeah. And it ordinarily apparently, It's about $10. It's ridiculous. But here's the thing that Prime has in it.

It has 200 milligrams of caffeine, which is more than three shots of coffee. Oh, my God. It's the same as six cans of Coke. And basically doctors are saying children should not drink this stuff. You shouldn't drink, like, more than one and drive because you'll get the jitters so badly. It's absolutely lethal. And the prime people are saying, we're not marketing it to kids, right? No, it's just Logan, Paul.

Royed up Bogans. These YouTubeers, like kids don't watch YouTube. So I was slightly worried when my 13-year-old nephew announced a plan to go in Q for several hours to get a tint of prime. Maybe to give to me. I don't know, because he shouldn't have been killed. No, well, it's not marketed at him. No, no, it's not marketed to him.

Of course. And kids, you know, historically always only go for things that are marketed at them and not for adult products that they perceive as cool and trending. Yeah, they always follow the same thing. rules. Yes. Yeah, no, very well. So he was going to go on a kiosk this afternoon,

then it got cancelled because the one in Perth had such a giant crowd attending that it was actually a safety risk. So there you go. So this is what kids are into now, shithouse, dangerous energy drinks. And surely, if it's $30 a bottle,

surely it would be just cheaper to get some crystal meth or something. Well, certainly Siggies. Yeah. I mean, you'd be, and it's probably the only risk is equivalent. I don't know.

It's probably safer to drive. I don't want to get super. food by prime. But 200 milligrams of caffeine is not great for kids. Probably safer to have. Probably safer. Just shoot heroin into your eyeballs to drive. That's right.

Perfect. So that's prime and that's what kids are into. But I must say, Charles, full credit to the Today Show. Yes. I'm finding a way to get people interested in them. Yes. That's right.

Well, presumably, that's the most people who've watched today in years. It is. Charles, I have a challenge. I just thought of this. I've got a challenge for the podcast. Yes. Okay. Now, you said,

the ratings for today is about 79, 80,000 I think per day. Okay, it's a pretty bad. All right, let's just quickly check this out. I mean, Studio 10 in fairness to what I said last week, which was that Studio 10 had, you had

studio 10 level ratings. That was back when Studio 10, you know, had used to have me on quite regularly. Oh yes, of course. And it was sort of in the 120s, 130s consistently. By the time Studio 10 got axed, I do believe, or is it still exed or is it not?

Studio 10. Yeah, Studio 10, but exited. I mean, Charles, if a show is axed in a forest and no one's watching it. Is it axed or not? Because I think Studio 10 certainly... Today show, it's doing a little bit better than you thought. It's getting 180 or so,000 viewers across the three hours. Yeah.

My challenge to us as a podcast. Okay. Oh, yes. Can we do a live stream someday between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. and get more than 188,000 viewers. No. Get more than the today's show. You don't think?

No. What if we did some kind of deal whereby we featured on sunrise for a short moment of thing? I like that, yeah. But look, we could try. I kind of feel, and correct me if I'm wrong, like listeners, feel free to email us at podcast at chaser.com. that are you if you think we're not if this is not correct but my feeling is that people who listen to this podcast are not necessarily awake before 9 a.m each day oh so you think

we're going to do a different time of the day yes I think I'll maybe start at night yeah yeah I'm certainly not one who's going to go oh yeah I would like to do a 6 a.m show just to be wrong just to just to actually it's quite hard to get 40s $8,000 Therefore, my insulting premises were wrong. I thought we cracked the 100,000 at least. If we go between Instagram and YouTube and Facebook. I think what we need to do is convince the ABC to give us breakfast. Like, no, wait a minute, they've got ABC News breakfast.

They do. But does they... We'd be very safe from getting 100,000 viewers if we were on ABC News. They're on 100,000 in the moment. Are they really? Yeah. Oh, because they've got Tony Armstrong. Yes.

I mean, with all due respect to my... my colleagues, 90,000 of that is Tone. He's the prime drink of morning TV. Anyway, look, if you've got any great ideas, I think we should at least try. I don't know how to rate more than 180,000, but if you've got any suggestions, what time should we do the live stream? It's got to be three hours at some point to outrate the today show. And then, Carl Stefanovic, if you're listening, you can come on at the end of the broadcast

and give us an award. I've got a really good way to do that, which is that we just say that Logan Paul is I'll be on our show today. Yeah, the other thing you do is just record the podcast in the back of Sunrises set. All right. Our gear is from Road. We're part of the iconoclasts podcast network. Catch you tomorrow.