The Chaser Report - Tony Abbott Is Starting A Podcast

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Ex PM Tony Abbott is starting a podcast, no surprises what network it's with. Meanwhile Dom has the update on new social media platform, Threads. Plus Charles pitches some ideas for Christmas merchandise. 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 with Dom and Dom. I've got absolutely terrible news. Really? What's happened? You look sort of slumped over the table here. Yes. Looking sad. Well, we've got competition. Oh, no.

Yeah. Tony Abbott is setting up his own podcast. Really? Yes. Because Malcolm Turnbull did that. and he had all this sort of worthy defending democracy interviews with world leaders. I don't think anyone would listen to me. Who would do a podcast with Tony Abbott? Is he doing it with like, is he doing it with Mayor Friedrich?

That'd be an interesting combination. They might disagree on a few things. Well, they live near each other. No, he's doing it with Peter Creadlin. Peter Credlin. What a surprise. His former Chief of stuff. Is there anything that they would disagree on?

Oh, good point, Peter. Oh, well said, Tony. That reminds us when we were briefly running the country for two years and then got kicked out. Oh, that was a, we didn't a good job, didn't we? So, let's have a chat about that after this break. It's a complete disaster. I think it's time to get out of pocket. When Tony Abba gets into something,

I think that's the signal that you should get out of it. By that or it's finally become a mass medium, or it's the only medium that will have him. Is that possible? Do you think he's tried to get to chat show jobs? Because he's very keen to share his opinions these days. I don't know if you remember when they had the past. parliamentary inquiry into the voice.

Yes. Tony Abbott was just very keen to give evidence to it and they're kind of like, Tony, it's fine. We kind of know what you think about it. As the former minister for indigenous affairs. He was very keen to get in there. So is that what this is for? Is this simply going to be him and Peter Credlin agreeing that the voice is terrible every episode forever?

Well, it is true. It says he's going to talk about the voice and gender issues. Oh, wow. You are absolutely right. So the two things he was minister for, women and. Aboriginal affairs. So is he or Peter Credlin indigenous? I don't recall Tony Abbott being indigenous.

Perhaps Peter Credlin is. Otherwise, that sounds quite like, I don't know, doing every episode about the voice without having any indigenous perspective on the voice, which I suppose is what he wants, right? Yeah. So I'm just having a look here. This is in the Australian Financial Review. It is true that Malcolm Turnbull did a total of eight episodes of his own podcast.

But he introduced quite interesting-sounding people. Oh, really? Like Theresa May. Theresa May. Yeah, failed PM. So was a sort of form of flop prime ministers convention. Wow. Filipino journalist Maria Resa.

Oh, she was, didn't she win a Nobel Prize or something? She's genuinely a big deal. Yep. And Went with MP Allegra Spender, which is quite interesting. Oh, right. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Might have got a little bit of a help from Malcolm. Do we know whether he donated to her campaign?

I bet he did. Yeah. Well, we'll find out. In the podcast, yes. You can go and listen to that, but you won't. But Julia Gillard's got one too called a podcast of one's own, if I recall. Oh, really? A witty title.

See, I just wish podcasting had been around when Bob Hawke was around because... That's true. He would have been a master of the pod. Well, also, he would have done them drunk, which... It would have been basically drunk history. It would have been... It would have been basically the Chaser Report. It would have been very entertaining.

Paul Keating, I don't think you won't see doing a podcast. No, he wouldn't sally himself. It's not his thing. His thing is just angry letters. That's what he does. He wouldn't want to speak. It'd be great, actually. If he just read out every angry letter,

perhaps you could pitch it to him on our new network that we're making. Just Keating, no one talking with him, of course, because he wouldn't want to chair the mic with anyone. No, yes. Just Paul shouting that the current Australian government doesn't respect China enough. A bit of a disaster from our perspective. Sure. Do you think they'll take our ad revenue?

But, well, yeah, I think we're going to be edged out of this lucrative podcasting. There's not enough room for two people in podcasting. And they would be the direct competitor. In terms of making fun of Tony Abbott, it's quite hard to be a podcast actually hosted by Tony Abbott. Yeah, that's tough. That's very tough. But the thing is, the other disaster commercially for The Chaser is that there's this new social network that we talked about last week. Oh, yes.

Threads. Threads. You know, it's completely. destroyed Twitter already. Well, I mean, to be fair to Elon Musk, that was already well underway before Threads launch. But 70 million users in the first three days.

Wow. And if you log on to Twitter, I don't know about you, but my following page has tweets from about three or four days ago. Like no one that I followed has bothered to tweet in the last three or four days. But also, what it means is the Chaser

has to start again. We accumulated, like, hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter. Oh, that's annoying. And now we've got like, I don't know, 30,000 on threads. And it's going to be, we've got to do this whole slog again. And we've got at Chaser on Twitter. And at one point I registered at Chaser on Instagram and someone somehow stole it. So we've got Chaser War, which is a really, which is fucking shit bad.

The handle. Yeah. I don't know how to get Chaser back. If anyone knows, let us know. But no, so we've got to get our following again. But the other thing about, about threads is it's not actually, the more I use it, the more, it's not really a replacement for Twitter. Oh, really? Because it's not in real time.

This is the whole thing. The people who run threads are going, yeah, we don't really want to do news or politics particularly. So you can't, the whole thing to find out what's happening now when there's a coup underway or something. Yeah. Oh, is there a coup underweight? We're talking about burying the lead on this podcast.

I just know, if there was another coup underway, let's say January 6th. Oh, yes. Let's say Scott Morrison tried to, you know, aggregate most powers in the Australian government to himself. You can't find out what's happening in real time. Yes. So it's basically what my experience of it is people who you follow on Instagram who you don't really want to read what they have to say.

Yes. You have to follow them because it's sort of automatic. Yes. And you can't unfollow them because then it's awkward. No. So I think it's not going to be very interesting. That's my theory. It's not actually going to be as good.

What you do, and I've done this because I follow you on Instagram, but then I saw you all threading or whatever it's called. So what you do is you mute. Oh, you mute? Did you mute me? Is that what you did? Yeah. I've only done one thread, I think.

Is it a thread or is it a post? I don't know what we're calling this. No, look, I don't know how well it's going to last, but no, it's going to kill the chaser too because the whole point of us on social media is just happen, he's a joke about it. Yeah, because then the joke doesn't have to be quite as good as a timeless joke.

There's a dedicated team of people, from what I understand, Charles, who whenever something happens, immediately make all possible appalling jokes and then delete the ones that people say, you shouldn't have said that, that's horrible. Isn't that right? That's correct. That's how it works.

Whereas on threads, that's just not, there's nothing topic. I looked at it. It's actually, it is weirdly not topical. So perhaps it doesn't matter so much to us. Well, we'll just have to go into timeless comedy. Or we'll just have to stick with this podcasting thing if we weren't being edged out by fucking Tony Abbott.

What is the deal with airline food? Anyway, no, we should actually listen to the Tony Abbott podcast and review it because something tells me a lot of people are not going to listen to it, given that it's on Skynies, which already has laughably few listeners. Do you reckon it all right? Worse than us, I suspect it will. Oh, for sure, definitely. Yeah, we're actually quite a high rating.

It is quite high rating. Should we invite Tony Abb and Peter Creadlin onto the podcast to promote it? Yes, a bit of cross-promotion. Ah, wouldn't that be a not at all awkward conversation? But I imagine that even so, they're being paid more than us. Oh, definitely. You know, it'll be one of those Sky News things where Murdoch just shovels money to... Well, what is Tony Dundee?

doing for money these days. Didn't he have some bizarre UK trade invoice job? Like, wasn't he actually being paid by the UK government to promote UK trade, which seemed like a very odd choice at one point, yeah, I think so. It was the idea that by him basically staying in Australia and being part of the Australian media, people would just want to trade with any other market to avoid Tony Abbott. He might, I'm sure he does a bit of DoorDash and Uber Eats and stuff. You reckon?

Yeah. For a few deliveries on the bike. Bit of job. He'd definitely do it on the bike, wouldn't he? Yeah, because especially in this market, there's not a huge call for... Because you can sort of do a Tony... You'd probably be able to just put Tony Abbott's speeches into chat GPT. Oh, for sure.

And then regurgitate his opinions about gender and the voice. They would be a lot better. There's nothing new to say, is there? No. But I guess part of the problem, Charles, with the very tumultuous period we've had in Australian politics in recent years, there's too many XPMs. There used to be, I don't know, two or three at any one time. Yes.

But now there's, like, Post Howard, who's the oldest, they're all still alive. There's just an absolute glut of them. We managed to get Kevin off to Washington and get something useful to do. That was good thinking by our own. That was good thinking. And also, the great thing about Kevin being the ambassador is that he can't say anything. He can't share his opinions on every single news story the way every other XPM except Julia Gillard does. Oh, really?

Yeah, he's got to represent Australian government. government so he's got to give albo's opinion not his own which frankly is a huge release so that's why he quit the the anti-merdoch royal commission yeah and all that sort of stuff he had to do it because he because albo's not against him at the moment yes oh jesus okay so we just need to give tony abbott some sort of diplomatic couldn't he be the ambassador to the vatican or something i mean that was what tim fisher was doing at one point and that had absolutely no consequence i think he should when the voice gets up he should run it

he should be on the voice well he'd have more experience than anyone else wouldn't he as a former Mr. Frindigenous Affairs and as he never tired of reminding us he would occasionally go and spend up to three days on country in time just to hear all their problems and then go back to Canberra and do absolutely nothing about them

or he could I mean what else could he do he could the commissioner is there an anti-discrimination commissioner for women or something like some sort of yeah there's a sex discrimination commissioner yes there is he'd be well positioned to know he'd be very well qualified he would definitely be able to say that there was no

sex discrimination in every single thing that crossed his uh cross his desk I think maybe he should get involved in the brittany higgins affair I think it's the only way that it could possibly get worse Tony Abbott somehow just getting involved and trying to host all thing down the chaser report

news you can't trust oh the other thing is I thought you might be able to help me, Dom. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, heading towards disaster. We've got podcast competitors. Yes. Threads happening.

Treads is happening. This is the point at which, like, July is when I've got to work out what merch to do for Christmas. Oh, no. Are you going to try that again? Yeah, because the whole, I've actually got a whole lot of ideas. Do you want me to run you through some of the ideas? Because this has been a very incoherent episode. Yeah, because, well, the whole thing is, it's all a disaster.

Sure. Why don't make the same inflatable avocado in a different color? No, no, no, but I want to avoid disasters anymore. But given that all the other business models, I think we're going to have to really rely on merch this year for all our income. Yeah, sure. So, I'll pitch you, just in no particular order. He's got a notebook, dear listener.

He's actually written notes in a notebook with a pen. So I think we should have some PWC merchandise, you know, profits without conscience. type sort of things. Like, you know, and what about a notebook, which just says on the front, secret notes to leak to the highest bidder or something like that? Yeah, not bad. Will people still care about PWC in December? Oh, absolutely.

They're not going to be ethical by December. I want to turn it around. What about a series? So you can buy little toy submarines quite cheap. Oh, that's good. In China. I'll see a little set of eight orcas submarines and sell them for $368 billion. Why didn't we get our submarines?

from China. Yeah. Because... Oh, that's right, because they're designed to provoke China. Yeah. Yeah. But the whole thing is that even if you only had one buyer,

the profit, which I think you would, which should be the Australian government, the profit margin on that, because you could get like a pack of eight for, say, eight bucks or something, sell them for $368 billion. Well, you could put the price that's $368 billion on the website and then discount it to $29.95.

And the thing is, the box could say, arrived 23 years before the August subs and the great thing is each sub can be named after something that it could otherwise have been spent on so I see like health care education that's good

child care literally anything else yeah literally anything else that's good homelessness yeah then I was seeing you know how they always do those sort of novelty books where it's actually just a notepad's just a blank

oh yeah the PWC code of ethics and you just have a blank notebook Oh, that's not bad. What about Guess Who? You know, that classic board game, board game, guess who? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they're all Scott Morrison in different jobs.

It would sell, though. It would be quite hard to play because the answer would, you'd say, is it a self-satisfied looking dipshit in glasses? And you have to put down every single time. What if you're, is it the Minister for Trade? Oh, yeah, okay. The next one, it's funny you mention board games because I had my own idea for a board game, which is Ospoly

instead of Monopoly And the whole idea is Do you want me to run you through it It's quite involved You've moved out in quite a bit of detail Yeah yeah Like I've got Mayfair and Park Lane would be the teals

Oh yeah Old Kent Road And that other one would be the UAP The United Australia Party Yes Regent Street The Green Strip would be The Libs I reckon

Then the yellows would be the Nats The Reds would be Labor Wouldn't the Greens be the Greens? Well no but don't you think just in terms of like if you're looking at sort of demographics don't you want you pour them all your posho ones or that who's posha now the teals or the libs i'm not sure probably the tails yeah the fucking wentworth and warringa and kiyong yeah okay um then the orange ones you know the sort of ones the best ones to get would be the grains oh okay

yeah you should do this apparently it's incredibly easy to get your own monopoly board Any community organization can basically get thrown in Monopoly. I've seen heaps of fundraising ones over the years. Oh, really? Okay. Well, then, because I was singing then, you know, like the stations, they could be two, seven, nine and ten. Oh, the TV stations.

The utilities could be fossil fuel lobbyists and say, I don't know, the tax office or whatever. Jail could be the new anti-corruption commission. That's good. Go to the NAC. Go directly to the NAC, do not pass go, yes? Free parking could be sent to. link, maybe, I don't know, or is that too unsound. Free parking could be something, or it could be a think tank.

It should be a think. Oh, yes, of course. It should be the Menzies Institute, doesn't mean? Yeah, the Australia Institute, it would be. And then, and then the whole idea, like with community chess, there'd be things like, you know, your properties are negatively geared. Take $50 from the poorest payer on the table. Oh, yes, and chance could be full of leadership challenges.

Yes, exactly. So, don't you think, like, there's something really quite, and then the houses would be how many MPs you have and how many senators you have. Like the hotels would be senators and the houses. You buy houses, you buy the MPs. Oh, you buy an MP. Yes.

And then you get a senator if you get, no, that's good because it's green and red. Yeah, if you get four MPs, you get a senator. That's very nice. Yeah. Yeah. It was very obsessed with Peter WC. I think that that's going to be where all the anger comes from this year. P.D.W.C. themed chaser wine.

Oh, yeah. Called secret sold. And it would be like a sort of, the idea would be it's mushed up secrets that have fermented. I'm not sure about the metaphor on that one. Tones of disappointment and betrayal. You know what I meant? Like, you know, it's sort of. Bad blood.

Yeah. Bad blood. Oh, I love that. It is. A no brand brand of earmuffs for supporters of the no campaign. Oh, yeah. To block out all the noise and like anyone trying to explain to you. Yeah.

And if it gets up, the actual voice. Yeah. If you don't know, don't bother finding out type thing. What about, I was seeing, how do we tap into that Craig Rookastle style, you know, environmental. Oh, smart green, yeah. You could release a chase or electric car. Oh, yes. Like that, yes.

Shaped like an avocado. Put some wheels on the ones. I was thinking like a carbon cap. Oh, that's... So you just have a cap with carbon on it? Gosh, that's... Yeah? I believe the kind of people who like that sort of thing

would probably love that pun. As opposed to my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then should I keep... I've got tons of stuff. I was singing how to get into the, like, you know, the parenting,

like early parents, Mark. Well, that's my market. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm seeing like oversized wine glasses called Mummy's Medicine. Oh, yeah. You can't tell me that hasn't been done. Sure. That's pretty good.

I think it's good. Oh, yeah, yeah, like sexy bedtime cards for new parents. And they all have things like, I'll put the baby to bed tonight. And you can sleep in. That would go down very well at my house. And then I was thinking, actually, you could have a whole range of little baby. clothes and like cleaning products called the futility range from baby care like bibs because you because it was yeah yeah well why don't you know with like mess printed on it

already so that it's already got pasta and tomato sauce and whatever spilled all over it yes I like that you can't look any worse you can't inevitably gets dirty oh that's very good yes oh and something I can't remember my handwriting is a bit sort of I can't actually read it But something about how you got lost dreams. What a great point in the podcast. Yeah, I had some thoughts about lost dreams, but I can't articulate. It's just too sad a topic for me. Well, that's probably all we have time for today,

except to say that we haven't actually hit the 6,000th listener yet. Six million. We haven't actually hit the 6 millionth listener yet. And that'll happen probably in the next week or so. It will happen this week. We're getting very nearby. So thanks to everyone who emailed in. There's no chance any of you are still listening,

but you can be at this point in the podcast. But if you are, we will work out who it's going to be very soon. There's been some very strong applications. Yeah, and so email podcast at chaser.com.com. But also, if you've got any other merch suggestions for Christmas, please let me know because I do have to organise that this week. Exciting.

Our gear is from Road. We're part of the Iconic class network. Dom, unfortunately, I'm going to see you tomorrow. See you then. Or on the Tony Abbott podcast. Can't wait for that one. It's going to be epic.