The Chaser Report - The NSW Election is Cumming | Sami Shah

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

A hilarious chat with between Dom and Sami Shah, featuring inspirational quotes to put on your fridge such as "The public demands to know his orgasm schedule." For ticket's to Sami's MICF show 'Successful Comedian' click here! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report. Dom Knight here with the 2023 return of none other than Sammy Shah. Hello, Sammy. Hello, where have you been? You guys stopped calling me, you stopped writing me, basically just left me for dead is what you did back in 2022. Where did? Charles and I decided for a long period there that doing it in

Charles's lounge room was the easiest motive. Just anything that was external to us was too much effort. Stay with us to the end of the podcast because Sammy has a ridiculously generous offer, to be frank, on tickets to his forthcoming comedy festival show in Melbourne and Sydney. It's called Successful Comedian, and he's going to reveal how you can get tickets for stupidly little money at the very end of the podcast. You could skip all the way now if you wanted to, but why don't you listen to us discussing, I don't know, the New South Wales State election in the meantime. How is Melbourne? Because I've got a theory that I know you'll actually be on board with, which is that we need to put aside the enmity between our two fine cities.

And you've been saying this for years. But the real enemy, it's clearer than ever. It's Brisbane. The enemy is Brisbane. They've got the Olympics for 2032. They've got Hamilton. They've just had Lynn Mademar Miranda down there. Everything's happening in Queensland.

It seems like it's the cultural capital. And so we need to put us. side our gripes between city Melbourne and join forces to destroy Brisbane. That's what I think we need to do there. Here's what I'll say. Here's what I'll say. I now feel like it's okay to be Brisbane. I feel like I've changed my.

Okay, no, here's what I'll say. Hear me out. Hear me out. I still think Queensland overall as a people, as a state of being, as a condition of existence should stop. Like it's not. Nothing good comes out of Queensland. It's in a blighted land. it's still a cursed land.

But if Brisbane gets things like Hamilton, a musical that has not been relevant now for several years, and the only way to find out if someone is insufferable is if they say they still love the Hamilton soundtrack, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who really at this point needs to just stop being Lin-Manuel Miranda, even more than Taika Watiti, needs to stop being Taika-Fucking Watiti. At some point, I think it's okay.

Brisbane's getting the dregs of culture and society at this point. No, that's true. We didn't have Hamilton first. Yeah, we had it first. We had it better. Nobody cares about Hamilton. Nobody cares about the Olympics. I don't, I didn't even know the last Olympics when they happened. I don't care about the next one.

At this point, the Olympics is basically a challenge to see which, you know, human rights violating countries, like crimes will we ignore as we watch them walk past. And it turns out, it's our turn. Our turn to have our own. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's the Olympics. Who cares? The most interesting thing that ever happened to the Olympics was someone once.

put a bomb in a backpack and they made a movie out of it in the night what are the 1992 Atlanta Olympics or whatever the movie is called Jewel it's a good movie watch that far more interesting than anything it's ever happened in the fucking Olympics so I think it's fine for

Brisbane the real enemy I feel the enemy that slipped through the ranks the enemy that threw Brisbane in our path and then you know while we were distracted by Brisbane has been rifling through our pockets is this city of Adelaide wow okay and I am going to

say once and for all Adelaide can go fuck itself. It needs to stop trying because I have had so many people now who are here for the Adelaide fringe, comedians, friends, performers, stuff like that, coming from different parts of the world. And they all go to Adelaide, then they contact me and go, hey, I'm in Adelaide, what should I do? And I'm like, there's a supermarket. Like, that's all that the city has. So once you do that, kill yourself because that's the only other option in Adelaide. It's funny to see Adelaide trying to get out with your preferences. Sammy. Or lack of preferences.

What's the opposite of a preference? You're discussed towards Queensland, which definitely was not distinguishing between Brisbane and the rest of Queensland, by the way. I mean, clearly you disliked, I don't know, Cairns, Charter's towers, all these sorts of places, more than Brisbane. Yeah. But yes, Adelaide is

now, so this is going to make news in Adelaide, which I think is fantastic. I mean, something has to make news in Adelaide. Sammy Char hates Adelaide. Yeah. And it's just like, the thing is that I went there during the Adelaide Festival. a few years ago during the Writers' Week thing and I went out till, I don't know, three in the morning or something

and had the best night I'd had in a very long time at the kind of festival club. And it was just weird. I just was kind of going, how is Adelaide open at one in the morning? And then I realized that there's sort of two weeks when the player switches on. Yes. And then that's it, goes to sleep for the next 50. Yes.

So it's kind of an efficient thing to do. So if I went there for that two weeks, I'd get all of my years going out done in one go, see all the shows in one go and then there's literally no point to pay any attention to Adelaide the rest of the time but are you saying even during the festival

you just think Adelaide needs to fuck off and die I mean it's just I do like the idea that Adelaide is trying to be culturally interesting you know and has for years now the festival has been something that they've been pushing on everyone for decades at this point and saying look at it look at us they call themselves the festival state

because that's the one thing right every state has a festival at Adelaide come on yeah calm down like exactly You know what? No one's got one every week. My gripe against Adelaide is that a friend and comedian Jason Chong, who is based out of Adelaide, last time I was there took me to a bakery to try Adelaide's culinary delight. The highlight of eating food in Adelaide, which is basically, I think it's a meat pie with a sausage in it,

or something. There's something that basically is like a Kranski shoved in a meat pie, fucked by a sausage roll. And then they give that to you. and I ate it and it was delicious, you know, as much as any processed meat in a pastry can be. And then at the airport, I shat myself to death. Basically, I had the worst IPS slash diarrhea of my life and that has colored my love and experience of that. I was going to say it sounds kind of like a footy food turduckin. Yes.

But clearly the turd part of it was extremely front of mind for you in your trip. Absolutely. But now that's basically, look, here's like, who cares about city rivalries? All the cities in Australia, they are largely, you know, they're similar, the same-ish, they're fine. You know, we've got immigrants are moving here from, I've got a friend moving here from Pakistan soon. He asked me, he's like, hey, I'm getting a job offer in Sydney, should I go there? I said, yeah, go to Sydney, rent's expensive, come to Melbourne, the food is better. He's like, what about Perth or Adelaide or Brisbane?

I said, just stay in Pakistan, it's fine. You don't really need to come here anymore. And, you know, that's basically been, I think, the way it works with Australia. I remember you had some trips to Perth that you quite enjoyed. I find Perth odd. I find the notion that you can go that far away from the East Coast. And it still sort of be the same. It's like we have the East Coast.

We're kind of close together, Sydney, and Brisbane. Yeah, you're right. You're right. This is an outside perspective of someone who's lived overseas as much of his life. They are, broadly speaking, similar. The differences are infinitesimally small. Like we overanalyze them. But to go that far from anywhere and still have a generic Australian city

with the same sort of boring shopping mall in the middle. and the same brands. That is weird. It's like an uncanny valley Australian city transplanted to the middle of nowhere. It's the furthest capital. I think it's the furthest city

of more than a million people from any other city with more than a million people in the entire world. It is nowhere's felt. It's like humans find a land on Mars and we get out of the spaceship and we walk onto the Martian surface

and a bogan with a mullet walks up and goes, good a day. And you're like, God damn it, here. Birth is here now? And there's a fucking boost juice that somehow was set up beforehand. You know, and the same Kmart and all the same brands ever else. Fucking Red Rooster. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We'll be there. So hang on, so you're in New South Wales. Are you guys excited about your upcoming election? Are you, are you hyped about it? I'm extremely. Yeah. I'm extremely excited. 25th of March, because that's my daughter's fifth birthday party.

There's also an election on that day. Did they do that on purpose, do you think? They matched it with your daughter's birthday as a special present? Well, to be fair. we have fixed term elections here so they were there first but um i didn't realize that by having our daughter's birthday party on that day we would get out of a deluge of messages demanding us to help the p and c with the election day barbecue it's insane every day for the past week via some whether it's a WhatsApp or the school app or an email hey hey guys do you want to like

bake a cake for the p and see do you want to come in like barbecue stuff stuff at six in the morning. And it seems as though the entire educational future of my daughter depends on the P&C Election Day barbecue. And what do they do in a year without an election? There was one last year. There's one. What do they do next year? There's no election. Are they going to have enough money to actually fund the school? This is what we're reducing. This is it. This is it. Yeah. We eat crap so that our children can be educated. So that's election day. I suggest everyone have a birthday party on election day so you don't have to help, basically.

It seems particularly galling, too, that we are providing cake just for ourselves, not for the P&C. So there will be cake. Oh, yes, lots of cake, but it's not going to raise a cent for the school. What's the issue that everyone's excited about? Is it the thing about the pokies and all the drama around that recently? Is it the vague announcement by Perrote about some kind of fund for people who have babies or whatever? I'm impressed that you're across New South Wales politics to this degree, Sammy, because the most exciting thing about election night, and it really is, I mean, to me,

it's why I'm out there drinking and celebrating is because it means that for the next three years and 11 months, no one will pay any attention to state politics at all. Right. Unless the Premier is so corrupt that ICACs them and they've, you know, we've got to get another one, which happens every so often in this state. There are a lot of issues, but it's kind of strange because, you know, You've got two very similar leaders. Like Dominic Peritaine, no one chose.

He was thrust in there after Gladys Berrigley. And it was quite popular, really, during COVID. People thought she was very competent. I know Victorians hated her. But in East South Wales, she was very popular. But she sort of imploded her entire career over the worst boyfriend ever, a guy called Daryl. And I think the warning was there on the can at the point where she was dating a Daryl.

Anyone who... Don't know to Daryl, ladies. Anyone wants to fuck a Daryl is already making poor life choices, and that should reflect in their career choices as well. And to be honest, the number of things Daryl was telling her about that he definitely shouldn't have told his boss about that he was doing that IAC might want to investigate. Like, let's just say the red flags were quite large,

which is why there was an IKAC investigation, which hasn't found anything yet. We don't know what their view is going to be, but she had to get out of there. Anyway, so Dominic Perrita arrives, and the main thing that we know, about him. And this is what they lent into at the campaign launch on the weekend. He had many kids. He had six children at first. But then that wasn't enough. So he's now

got seven, which is the biblical number of perfection. So I'm hoping he'll stop. But I doubt it. I think he's going to go for double figures, Sammy. I mean, you got to admire. I think you've got to admire a Premier who is virile. I think we've got too many, you know, you've got too many beta males, you know, out there right now running for premiership. You need, you need, you need an alpha and Perotay's got alpha and he's a big alpha energy, you know. This man comes a lot. He does. He does. Is his political platform. Seven kids' worth, certainly. So, I mean, look, I don't want to speculate about their sex lives, but we know at least on seven occasions, something's happened. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. What do you do when you've got a premier who

people don't know much about? We know that he's kind of conservative, very Catholic. They lent into him by going, well, he's the guy with all the kids. So let's give money to people with kids. And it's the most self-serving policy I've ever heard in my life. What it seems to be is everyone who's got a kid gets $400. And then if you put money in,

if you put another $400 bucks in every year of your child's life after that, the government will match you. It's fantastic for those who can afford $400 a year for the government to match. Some might say, Sammy, that the people who can already afford the $400 a year are the least

deserving of help because surely if you don't have the 400 bucks a year, that's when you might need the state to like kick in, but that's not. It's a liberal policy. I mean, yeah. What can I say? And so it's the Peritai is that $2,800 a year, $2,800 a year extra, they're getting from the government. So it's good for them. And here's the thing, here's what I will say about Dominic Perate is at least I can remember his name and I remember that he had multiple kids. I, even though I care about this subject and about, you know, regional state politics, I find it very fascinating. I think a lot of the big leaders of federal politics come out of the regional state thing, and so it's worth paying attention to. I still had to Google Chris Min's again right now in this

conversation. While you were talking, I had to look up his name. He is even less memorable than the labor opposition leader in the United Kingdom, which is, I think Keir Stama, I think is his name. I have it written down my hand now, so I can remember it every time I need to come up with it. But, I mean, Chris, I don't know how many kids Chris Minz has. How many times does he come? Do you know how many times he's come? I need to know this. The public demands to know his orgasm schedule. My guess is too, Sammy, because I think when you, if you want to know about Chris Minns, he's the most generic person possible. Right. Even his name means like minimal interest, basically. Yeah. Mint, yeah. The telegraph in their, in their unique way, went and surveyed the people in

his electorate of Coggera to find out how many of them knew what his name was. Like, who is your local member? Only 40% could actually recognize it. That is way higher than I would have thought. That is where higher than I would have thought. Yeah, but in his own electorate. The other weird thing is it's the most marginal labor seat in the whole state. So the potential perspective, Premier, is in this like 0.1% electorate.

So that's quite bizarre. So he may not win the seat, even if he wins office. but yeah I can't tell you much about him either they've been trying to humanise him during the campaign Sammy and his wife gave one of those soft pedal interviews that you give

about her man and how lovely he is they're also conservative Catholics like the Peritais but with fewer kids and the one thing she offered up to try and show what a regular guy Chris Minz was was that he eats breakfast cereal after dinner

so she'll serve dinner presumably she does all the child wearing because that's the way politics of house was work. She serves up dinner for the family. Chris means eats the dinner and then goes to the cupboard and gets, I don't know, cocoa pops or frosty flakes or corn flakes, whatever it is. Very sugary unhealthy cereal and eats a second dinner after that. Apparently, all the kids are doing it. So this man is a crusader for poor nutrition. Yeah, see, okay, here's, this is supposed

to humanize him, but instead it dehumanize him because for me that sounds like borderline psychopathic behavior. He's a bad influence on children. He only has two and he's already fucking that up by teaching them. They could be three. I don't know. Could be. I'm not interested enough time.

Exactly. Exactly. Meanwhile, Perotay is out there with seven children earning $2,800 from the government for doing seven children or creating seven children. I should really rephrase that. And then also probably doesn't have... Be very careful. Probably doesn't have cereal for dinner either.

So, I mean, you know what? I'm going to say this right now. Sammy Shah of the chaser, not the chaser, but Sammy Shah, who is a frequent guest on the chaser, officially endorses Dominic Peretti for the future premier of New South Wales. That's right. The thing that's interesting about New South House politics, to be just sort of analytical for a second,

is that they're extremely moderate. It's quite strange, given that he's a conservative Catholic. They're super moderate. All these things that they've done, all the pokey policies that have, that's probably, as you say, That's been the main point of difference. And Chris Minn's hasn't wanted to come up with any definitive policy. He's just going to have a study into the cashless gaming card.

Dronick Perotay says that they're banning cash going into pokies. So he's actually had more policies. The one thing Labor's been talking about a lot is housing. And this is the thing that they've really been getting stuck into. He's having all kinds of policies to try and more rights for renters. But no one is actually genuinely taking a huge step to solve housing in this. hellish state where no one can afford to live. I mean, anyone in South Wales under the age of 40

has absolutely no dream of ever owning a house. It seems completely impossible. And so they're doing things like making it harder for landlords to evict the tenants who know they'll have to rent for the rest of their lives because they're doomed. There are various schemes to not have to pay stamp duty and instead to pay an annual property tax. That's a peritay policy.

And, you know, Labor is talking about building a little bit of social housing. No one's doing anything. radical or compared to a country spending $368 billion on submarines, many of which haven't even been designed yet and come from Britain, which as I was saying to Charles yesterday, not a country you'd go to for future high tech that doesn't exist yet. The fact that we can't even spend any money on solving the biggest crisis in everyone's lives, it's just kind of like, it's just a bit lame, isn't it? I mean, no one has any ideas about any of this stuff. I think basically

at this point, most of the biggest fights we have in Australia tend to be culture war bullshit anyway, because everything else is too complicated. We can't really get into the housing market. We can't fix that. We can't fix anything. So everyone just gets angry at, you know, whatever's being said on social media right now. But I think it's also a sign of like, yeah, things are fine. You know, you can't afford rent in Sydney, you know, that's always been a problem. It's not like it's a new issue. It's always been a problem. Think about Dominic Perate. He's got seven children. That's seven houses he has.

to buy to gift his children. That's seven times we're going to have to read articles in the Financial Times in a few years about how, you know, I'm a real estate mogul, even though I'm 16 years old, and they're going to be each one by each one of Perite's future children or current children. Who knows how many future children you'd have. So, yeah, I think overall, look, it's an election, it's happening. You've got to have them every now and then. And then it's, you know, it's going to, like I said, I'm backing Peretay.

say his name. I've already forgotten the other guy's name. I know you said it many times to me already in this conversation. Couldn't remember if you put a gun to my head. And that right there tells you why he's going to lose. He's the Bill Shorten of New South Wales politics. I would have it. You remember Bill Shorten's name. Only because I saw him a few days ago. I was outside a... Did you really? Yeah, I was in the CBD in Melbourne, outside a Italian restaurant, waiting to get my table. And Bill Shorten and his partner walked right past me. And here's the funny thing, I'm the only one who cared. Not a single person outside gave a shit. And I was like, wow, imagine going from possibly the future prime minister of Australia to someone everyone's

ignoring. That has been... Well, demonstrably, the people of Australia on two occasions were very indifferent to Bill Shorten. There was a time just before the second election where he was running around in T-shirts saying Chloe Shorten's husband. It was like this cute thing. You know, vote won Chloe Shorten's husband. That's right. Which just begged the question. Like, shouldn't any other member of the family have run instead of Bill? Like, clearly the least delectable member of the family. But no, look, Chris Minns, I think, won't even get the... Unless he's Premier.

And the polls say that he'll win, but it's certainly true... Oh, really? The Poles are favored Chris... Oh, yes, Labor's been ahead in the polls. Just because the Liberals have been in for 12 years. Fair enough. That's the only thing. So it's basically, on the basis of personality, Dominic Perotay, would automatically win because people know who he is.

And the amazing thing is, even the whole... Nazi uniform thing didn't really stuff him up that much because he's just been like he's just always in the media cheerleading going out and spending money on the nighttime economy and stuff like that like he's just sort of always wanting us to spend more money and giving us vouchers they're constantly we just constantly get vouchers from dominic peritay to spend on things like and again helping out his own family enormously yeah yeah the premier's back-to-school voucher we also got a couple hundred bucks to spend on i don't know textbooks or uniforms or whatever in his case, many thousands of dollars.

Yeah, exactly. Per child. Now, if anyone's... Maybe that's the strategy. Maybe the real lesson here is you and I need to just have many children because that's the only way to guarantee yourself secure economic future now. It's like when I was in Pakistan as a journalist, I used to go and interview like poor people in villages and stuff.

And I went to one village once. It was the poorest village in Pakistan, which means it is one of the poorest villages in the world, right? And there was a man in the village who was one of the poorest people. people in the village. So he might be one of the poorest people in the country of Pakistan, and he had 11 children. And his strategy was, they're going to all grow up, and they're all going to get jobs, and then they're all going to support him. And I think maybe that's me very interesting. I interviewed a demographer not long ago about this. And he was saying that

it was quite funny because the one child policy ended up being completely unnecessary. Yes. Because the key point in any transition from being a poor country to being a rich country, as China has done, is that you'd no longer need to have lots of children as a strategy for future wealth. Yes. So it's true of the guy in Pakistan, but cost of living pressures is so high in New South Wales that clearly we're going in the other direction. And Dominic Peritay knows this.

And so maybe what we're going to do instead of maybe the solution to the housing crisis is just to do what the Peritas do and instead just combine families. Like maybe everyone from the chaser should just all go and live under the same roof and have, I don't know, 10 children sharing 10. two bedrooms or something, and that way we'll be able to afford a house in Sydney. I mean, that might actually... What's the current childed rate in the Chaser, in the core team? How many of you have how many kids?

There's an average of two per person. Oh, exactly. You're Chris minising this shit. You guys really need to up your game. We're total... Total minors is, no, look, everyone in the Chaser now has children, and one has three, and one has one, and so everyone else has two. All right. Average it out there.

We are nothing if not average as people who know. Well, understand. Now, Sammy, in the unlikely event, anyone's managed to wade through all this discussion about Chris Mins. You are actually coming to the state of New South Wales. I am indeed. In the not too distant a future. That's right. I'm not just New South Wales.

I'm performing in Melbourne as well. The comedy festival season is upon us. I wasn't in Adelaide because I give a shit about my sanity. But I did do a short run of shows in Perth, Fringe. Those are done now. but I am also currently performing at the Melbourne, not currently, but I will be performing at the Melbourne National Comedy Festival where I am doing a run of shows from the 30th of March to the 23rd of April.

So the full festival, like all four weeks. Bumpur. Yeah, yeah, all four weeks at the Chinese Museum, which is the venue. That's a great venue. It's a great venue. I was just past that the other night. Yeah, yeah. It's a really good venue.

It's a beautiful venue. And the show is called Successful Comedian, ironically. And then I'm in Sydney from the 27th. on the 27th of April. Just two nights in Sydney, four weeks in Melbourne. That's so sad. It is so sad the way that...

You know why? Everyone's still like, oh yeah, I'm doing. Full-runner festivals in Melbourne. We're doing four weeks. Oh, no, I'll be in Sydney like for five minutes. Have you ever tried booking an Airbnb in Sydney? They are hideously expensive and they're really bad, always.

You should have come and stayed in our house where all the people in the chase I leave. We wouldn't have noticed one more person. True. Very good point. about that but anyway so it's 30th of march 23rd of april in melbourne and 27th and 28th of april in sydney i also got a weird deal going which is really financially dangerous stupid on my part but fuck it um if you join my patreon patreon patreon dot com slash sammy sure um you get two free tickets um you get two free tickets to any melbourne or sydney show that you would like to come to yeah fuck it why not

is that true yeah so all my i'm in your patron so i can go to your show you can get two free tickets yes you can well yeah two free tickets that's an insane deal I would, here's the thing. What are you doing? I like my Patreon. I like my Patreon community and I like people who listen to my podcast News Weekly and there, a lot of them are on Patreon. And I feel like it's a weird thing to ask people to support you right now. Patreon is a weird thing.

Now, yes, some unscrupulous people can join the Patreon for like $5 a month or whatever and then bail as soon as they get the free tickets. I don't know. I have faith in humanity. I like to think people aren't that shitty. And so. This is why your show is. ironically called successful comedian. I like doing comedy for the sake of doing comedy.

I'm not going to get rich doing comedy. At this point, I'm definitely not going to get a Netflix special or win any awards or anything like that. But I said love doing comedy. I'd rather have bums on seats than money in the bank. It turns out. You literally have bums.

Bums is all that will come. There you go. Fantastic. So go and see, Sammy. If you like our podcast, of course, you'll love the show. Go and check him out and his podcast News Weekly as well. Thank you, Sammy.

Thank you for having me. Our gear is from Road. We're part of the Oconiclass Podcast. work.