The Chaser Report - Unexpected Optimism, and How To Improve WA's Culture | Sami Shah

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Dom is joined by the legendary Sami Shah to talk about, of all crazy things, where to find some optimism in this messed up country. Is Australia as bad as we all think, or does Sami have the secret to seeing it new again? Plus, how does Sami think you could add a little extra culture to WA? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigul Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and without Charles. We've upgraded today. We have Sammy Shah with us once again. Hello, Sammy. Hello, I'm Melbourne's Charles. I'm the Pakistani version of Charles, the knockoff, Charles.

You are so much more than the Melbourne version of Charles. But we'll take it for the purposes of this podcast. Have you been so? What's been happening? Oh, so much. Absolutely so much. I don't know the last time I was on. Did I tell you that I'd had a baby? Had I had the baby then? Probably not, right? I'm aware that you've had a baby because, of course, I stalk you on socials, relentlessly.

Yes, yes, yes. Yes, congratulations. Yeah, I've had a baby. I now have two daughters. One's 14 years old and one is four months old. And, you know, it turns out at the ripe old age of 45 is a great time to have a kid if you want to develop lower back pain. It is, I was missing that aspect of my life and, you know, just chronic pain and now I've got

that introduced into my diet as well, yeah. Funny thing, I too, had a baby at the age of 45. Funny thing, completing my set of two daughters, doing my bit to try and fight the patriarchy, that's what I say. A tone for a life spent largely working with annoying men. Well, yeah, the way I argue it, I'm like, who could be more feminist than me? I mean, there's some women who were, like, out there fighting for the, breaking the glass ceiling. I'm out here making women.

So clearly, I am the most feminist of them all. We'll qualify that and possibly cancel, Sammy, after this. Of course, yeah. I know, you're a shining beacon of male feminism, and I applaud you for that. But the lower back pain, no, it's absolutely real. It's a lot. Our child has just started screaming regularly throughout the night. And the problem is, I can't argue with her.

I mean, it's not an unreasonable response to the world right now. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. To just wake up every 20 minutes and just scream for a bit and then go back to sleep. I think it's teething, but it may be existential angst. And I don't know, which is harder to solve. Yeah, for us, you know, the debate is either, it's either the fact that we're, you know, trying to switch her from breast milk to bottle milk that's causing me screaming, or it's because she's seen some of Alan Joyce's recent press conferences

justifying why quantities should keep the billions of dollars in, you know, job seeker money that we gave them, and that's causing her to have rage. So, but it's amazing, isn't it amazing how the billions of profits that they made tally up almost perfectly with, with JobKeeper? But the good thing is, Sammy, there's no need to worry about any impropriety. It's not as though the Prime Minister's son got a chairman's lounge, but, oh, no, he did. Oh, sorry, sorry. I do like the fact that we're at that point now, because you and myself and Charles, we've been waiting for the luster, the shine to come off the Labour government and for everyone to go, oh, wait, they're also corrupt incompetence who also just do everything to benefit each other. And now we're entering that phase of the Labour government. It's fun. It's fun to be like, oh, thank God. I was sick of all the happy, happy joy joy optimism that idiots had there for a while.

Well, Charles and I, particularly Charles, having grown up very much in the Labour Party, with several family members who are actually Labor Party politicians. He knows all too well that the sheen is never really there. We called it, I think, on day one of the Albanese government on this podcast, that the disappointment would be inevitable. Look, at the same time as this is all going on, I'm still seeing headlines coming up like, you know, big plan to deal with gig workers and give them better rights and so on.

There are things going on that counters change. But anyone who thought it would be just sort of, greatest hits, wins for everybody, without any worries about, you know, immediate members of the Prime Minister getting free shit from Qantas, politics as usual reasserts itself, I guess. So I do have one thing that I've had a very interesting experience recently, all right? So one of my friends from Pakistan is migrating to Australia. Now, this is a guy in his 40s like me. So in Pakistan, things have gotten so bad that we've always had what's called the brain drain.

It's something that you study in economics where, you know, the young and the viable and the, in the intelligency of a country, leave the country because things are bad in that country. The semis. We get the semis. Absolutely. And they come in. And we're very lucky to have it.

Thank you very much. You might be the only one who's saying that, but, you know, let's go with that. And so, you know, Pakistan's brain drain is so extreme now. There's no longer even the young. It's people in their 40s. It's people in their 50s. Even it's anyone who can get out is getting the F out. Now, his choices were Canada.

America is obviously not an option because you don't want to go from one third world country to another third world country doesn't make sense I think the other way would make sense Yeah yeah absolutely And there's actually something connected to that over there I want to get into it a bit as well We'll talk about jailing leaders

In a little while Because that's definitely worth a consideration That is happening in both America and Pakistan So we've got America wasn't an option But Canada was one option And then Australia is the other and he rejected Canada because everyone we know who migrated to Canada is fucking miserable.

Well, look, Sammy, I can jump in on this because my wife grew up in Canada. She was born in Canada. She left with her family at the age of nine and hasn't been back as yet. And I think she had a lovely childhood. But I'm putting words into her mouth, but I'm imagining that once she realized that there were other parts of the world and that nearly all of them were much less cold. I mean, a country can be as nice as it wants to be, but the concept that the entire country is colder than New York City

every single year, you know, it's just miserable. It's just, why would you, unless you're some sort of abominable snowman, you would not want to live in those conditions, just miserable. Yeah, and they all have seasoned effective disorder, and they're all wearing duck feather hoodies or whatever the hell they have to do to survive. So he was like, no, and then he came to Australia recently. And he just came to kind of check things out and scope it out. And he spent a week in Sydney and then a few days in Melbourne.

And it was interesting for me to see Australia through the eyes of someone new. Oh, good. Less jaded than yourself. Less repeatedly disappointed. So that's just I've been here long enough now that I winge as a true Australian does. Yeah, excellent. It's a long-held Australian tradition is to winge. And I winge with the best of them.

But he was here and he was going, you know, he's a true. He was watching the news, and he's like, it's so funny, there's a news story about someone killing someone else because one person killed another person. On a granular level of one-on-one, that's unthinkable, right? Yeah, and he's like, that's so crazy that that made the news. Like, someone getting murdered in Pakistan is not the news because that's happening so much that you, unless there's, like, many people getting murdered, who the hell gives a shit? What if there was a day with no murders?

Would that make the news as a, like, end of bulletin good news story? No, because everyone's already dead. That's the only way that's happening, right? It is the end of the world. But, you know, the idea that... And because, like, you know, we complained about... He's like, look at the roads, they're clean. Look at the traffic.

It's good. And I see, he's talking about all of these things, about how amazing Australia is. Meanwhile, my brother's visiting, and my brother lives in Los Angeles. Oh, what? I have an idea of vision in my head of L.A. being something like, you know,

like you see in... Like, in what's like a show called... Entourage, you know. Entourage, yeah. Yeah, well, celebrities driving around in cool cars. Everyone's got lots of Botox and plastic in their tits, and that's kind of how everyone lives their lives. He makes it sound like Gotham City without the Batman.

It is just fentanyl everywhere. They're just zombies roaming the streets. There's homeless people have taken over the entire, and I think they call unhomed or something now, taken over the entire footpaths. And, you know, it's really not a safe place. He was walking around at night over here, and he's like, you can't walk around at night in L.A.

Like it's just not an option anymore Well, you can't walk at all I think isn't walking banned by city ordinance Yeah, yeah, probably Exactly And then the public transports are completely horrifically unsafe And every part of America is just in a fentanyl crisis And you know, the red versus blue states and blah

And he was going, oh my God, Australia's amazing It's incredible, it's wonderful, it's so peaceful It's so safe, it's so clean And then I had that moment Where I was like, what the fuck am I complaining about all the time? Like, yeah, I'll enjoy stole a lot of money for Qantas And yes, most of our political class are absolute intellectual midgets with the IQ of a dot and don't really have any worthwhile contributions to society or culture. But things are working fine.

We should probably just be grateful sometimes. That's not a bad point. Well, I mean, the thing about entourage, Sammy, and I did enjoy that show. And I've had a couple of brief experiences in my life of being in L.A. and staying in kind of West Hollywood and going to the Shadow Marmont and all the places where celebrities hang out. And it is fantastic.

It is like entourage. But the reality is they all live. Like the reason why Vincent Chase in that to show lives in the Hollywood Hills is because you literally look down on the rest of the city, right? Like you're not seeing the rest of it at all. At one point we went into the kind of CBD area of LA and yeah, it was fucking confronting.

My brother went there to do kind of an art project. at a cool hotel, like one of the really cool hotels in LA, this sort of place where you would imagine a celebrity might come in. And he was there for a week doing this amazing artwork at the front. And I thought, oh my God, that's so cool. Wish I'd gone with him. The week after he came back to Australia, someone went into the foyer and just shot the place up and killed four people or something. Yeah, he missed it by a couple of days. And that was just like L.A., going to L.A., basically. So it's true. But what about the UK? I mean, this is a place I spent a lot of years growing up in the UK, and certainly, you know, for the kinds of things we are involved with

comedy and whatever, it is an amazing scene there, as shit as the weather is. But that's a hell hole. I mean, well, this is the thing. We can't, Australians cannot look to the UK anymore with a cultural cringe, I don't think, as much as some of the cultural aspects of the UK are amazing. But the overall sense of being inferior, I just don't buy anymore. So the one thing I will argue, and this is not going to go down well, and I appreciate what I'm saying about to say, it's a real dick thing to say. But I would argue that the UK and US are still culturally, by which I mean entertainment, popular culture, literature, theatre, the arts in all of those are still miles and miles above Australia. But we have a national cultural policy, Sammy. Tony

Burke said so. No, you're absolutely right. And when you think about who's actually genuinely world class and would be known in the other country for sure yeah yeah um but yeah the cultural cringe is all about us thinking we're shit and that only things in britain matter oh no no that's the thing i think we've got to let that one go absolutely yeah i'm not i'm not comparing our bands to tell us so my question then is are we headed that way because i mean i'm sure if you ask the the liberal party or no conservatives or anyone they'd be like yeah any more immigrants and we're going to go that way or um are we safe and insulated and And we can just kind of watch their decline from the distance.

I hope so. I hope so. Because it's very satisfying. I mean, I must say, I'm British, right? My heritage is British, and I've been accused of being an anti-British racist on this podcast, which I'm not sure is possibly true, but also they started it. Yeah, to be fair. Both in terms of the whole stealing the country thing, but also specifically when I lived

in London as a child and was bullied for being Australian. Like, you know, that you can't, there's no right of appeal when you're being beaten up for being Australian where you can say, excuse me, and technically speaking, I'm the same race as you. Right. They don't accept that logic. There's no court of appeal with that one. But yeah, it's, it is satisfying to see Britain tying itself up in sort of hateful knots over and over again.

Yeah. But would I rather read the average novel published in Britain versus Australia? Yeah, absolutely. Let's admit it. Would I rather watch a TV show made in Britain than made in Australia? I mean, I think absolutely, right? Yeah, there is that point where I know we must be making some good TV shows in a Australia, but I don't think I'll ever watch them.

I've got friends who are making great TV shows in Australia. And they're always like, oh my God, my new TV shows out. It's fantastic. And I'm like, that's great. I'm probably not going to watch it. And I would not expect anyone to watch anything I make either, to be very honest. Well, you've got a, you've got a child. This is the thing.

My media consumption is almost non-existent. You just can't. Yeah. I mean, my wife and I tried, we tried to watch only murders in the building, which is exactly the sort of show we would both love. Yeah. We got to episode one. And then our children started deciding that their bedtime was going to be 10,

30 p.m. And yeah, I'm, I'm years away from watching a damn thing at this stage. So I figured out the life hack for that. And this is only, I'll tell you, only because I've already had, like, you know, 14 years of raising a child. Yeah, so I've got that weird thing where I, you know, I've got two only children technically. Um, you know, that's kind of how they're being raised as a science experiment that I'm doing for, for a psychology university in Canada. But, well, So the thing that I've discovered is A, you cannot watch it together. Forget about that. You and your partner, you and your wife cannot watch anything together.

That's our myth. That's gone for a few years. Watch it separately. Now, the trick I have found is I watch TV shows with the subtitles on and the volume is irrelevant at that point. And that way, when I'm rocking the baby to sleep or she's screaming or whatever, it doesn't matter. I can since watch the story. That's good. And I, so I've watched most of season two, that's currently ongoing of foundation, which is very good T-Biche. Oh, Asimov. That's very

you, sci-fi. It's such a good show. Can I highly recommend. What we do in the shadows, I'm caught up on that as well. I love what we're in the shadows, yeah. Exactly. So, and I would not have been able to do this if my wife and my partner and I had waited to watch it together. Although wouldn't, wouldn't that lose something without the New Zealand accents? To me, it would. What we do in the shadows? Is it the American one? Yes, the TV show.

Oh, I'm forgetting the TV show. Yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. No, I saw the New Zealand one in the presence of at an event which had Jermaine Clement had to go up and talk to him. But it was just so funny. So is the TV version as good as the movie? It really is.

He works on it, right? He wrote it, didn't he? Yeah, yeah. I would fight anyone who says it isn't great. All right. Reist Darby's saying where were werewolves, not swear wolves. Yeah, it's one of the highlights of cinema, of course. In cinema history.

Okay, so it's a good tip. So watching with the subtitles, it doesn't quite work for podcasts. But you can have an earpiece in. That's what I found. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can have, particularly if you have sort of AirPod type things, you can have one. One ear in it. So that at least you look like you're having an ear free for the child.

Yeah, you know, whatever. Most of your attention. What are they going to do? Cry? Oh, what I haven't heard that before. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Well, Sammy, Sammy, we've been accused. blatantly on this podcast of not having anything optimistic to say.

And you've actually done it. I really appreciate you having a positive note. And not only have you just observed that other places are even more shit than here, but you've got fresh-faced people who are coming in and going, you've got it pretty good. Honestly, I think it's one of those things where, because I'm an immigrant, obviously, and so there is a reason I migrated here in the first place. And you kind of, once you get into the day-to-day and you,

You see the rental crisis and you see the, you know, the, what's it called, nepotism in government. And you see the way the direction of the voice campaign is going with the no vote, you know, most likely going to win, given the fact that, you know, Australians for some reason thought for five seconds that they weren't bigoted to its indigenous people and then remembering, oh, no, actually, that's our entire history. So why would we ever change? Now, when you see all that stuff, you kind of lose hope and you sort of get it down in the doldrums. But it is worth every now and then walking outside the door and being like, oh, air's clean, not too much traffic. I'm not going to get stabbed by a fentanyl addict. There's no suicide bomber going to blow himself up when I go down to this new concert or rally. And those are things to be grateful for.

I know it's a low bar, but trust me, therefore, some people, those are huge things to aspire to words. And in your book, I mean, you made a strong case for living in cities without an ongoing danger of suicide bombers. I related to that. I related to that a lot. Yeah. I could very much imagine moving to a country where there were no suicide bombers. I mean, you did overdo it with the rural W-A thing. I think...

Yeah, I went too far in the opposite direction. Yeah, going to where there were no people at all. I mean, maybe some would argue they could do with a few suicide bombers. They're just for culture. Just for a little bit of noise, just for a little bit of excitement, you know. Put the place on the map, wouldn't it? Also, the other thing is, let's be honest, the chances of the said suicide bomber having any collateral damage at all would be very low.

I mean, where would they find a built-up area? Well, I mean, so do you know there's, this is a true story, you can look it up in, and by the way, I say this, it might turn out to be apocryphal, but there was the Om Shinrikio cult, the Japanese cult that released a siren gas in Tokyo, exploded or tested a nuclear device in rural Western Australia. A nuclear device. A nuclear device that they assembled and exploded in rural Western Australia. And we know roughly where in terms of, you know, within these 100,000 acres of farmland that they bought. But we're actually not sure exactly where to this day. Because W is just that big and empty. It is very big and empty.

Although, Sammy, are you telling me that a potential racist panic went unexploited? That's, I find that shocking. That is grist for the mill that has gone unmilled. It is very true. That's very true. We need to catch up now. We need to, it's time to give the Japanese a hard time. They've had it too easy for too long.

Peter Dutton's warnings about, you know, migrants in African migrants in Melbourne, which proved to be entirely unfounded. Why wasn't he going on about this thing that you say actually happened? Yeah, it did happen in the 90s or maybe even 80s. I'm not sure anymore. But, you know, it's still something he could bring up, I'm sure. He's not above.

Oh, I mean, I guess it's embarrassing for the then government, right? I mean, if someone managed to set off a nuke without anyone realizing or stopping it, it's a bit of egg in the, you know, egg on the face. I would view that if I were running some sort of national security apparatus and someone detonated a nuclear device in Australia, I'd be like, yeah, okay, my bad.

That probably shouldn't happen. So, yeah, because I read about this years ago, I was researching a TV show idea which involved them doing the nuclear test and then a Japanese demon making its way into Australia. Long story, short, if I remember correctly, the only reason we know that it happened is because seismologists registered the telltale signs of a nuclear test.

So, yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Which, of course, I mean, if you're monitoring rural W.A., anything happening at all, you'd have to invest there. Like even a footprint. Yeah, which is, I guess, us going back to our original argument of rural W.A. needs suicide bombers. I suppose it's how we got down this road. I'm very glad, though, that you retrospectively added some sort of a claim that might have had some sort of basis to it.

So justify that. Sammy, it's been so nice chatting to you. What can we plug besides your excellent News Weekly podcast? Well, I mean,

there is News Weekly, of course, and it's spelled W-E-A-K-L-Y. It's my 15 minutes a week of the round-up of the headlines that podcast

that comes out every Saturday morning. So you can subscribe to that, wherever you get your good podcast. I've also got The M-S-E-D, the M-S-E-D, the M-S-E-S-E.

I don't know how to... Well, that's a problem, right? Because I say M-S-E-S-T, is it a pronunciation? issue on my end or is it? No, no, they sound, they're the same. Right, they're homophones, I believe.

It should be the misod. So that's how I'm going to pronounce it for it. Oh, if you put it a little e-grave, the misod. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, that's good. Too late, but yeah, I know. Yeah, thanks.

I'm not good at choosing titles for audio. Even use weekly requires the spelling to be. That's true, actually. It's just like, that's a very straight title. Oh, that's how you spell it. Not smart on my part. I see what you did there. But yeah, the misid is available on audio.

still it's my eight episode not true crime crime noir fiction series that I wrote and produced with a full cost so that's a very full cast the problem I guess if you say the missid is that yes I completely understand how to spell it I'm remembering kind of Shakespearean pronunciation

but the problem is I think you're a wanker and wouldn't want to buy your thing like who says the missid that's been a career constant with me anyway right that's the thing you've got to work out people not knowing how to type it in or not wanting to. That's been a hurdle I've been trying to overcome in my career in every aspect. So I don't worry about that. The great thing, Sammy, though, is that you have a young child who will give

you years, years of uncritical adoration and think you're the best person on the planet along with your partner. Like my other daughter who's now stopped doing that. That's right. Until the inevitable outright hatred comes to pass. Thank you, Sammy. Thank you for joining us. It's always a pleasure. our gears from road we're part of the iconic class network catch you next time