Our Take: Penny Wong for PM?! A celebrity intruder & Christmas beetles

Sacha Barbour-Gatt (0:07)

Hello, welcome back to Our Take after a hiatus.

Chris Spyrou (0:13)

Very brief.

Sacha Barbour-Gatt (0:14)

It was a one week hiatus. This is the episode where me, Sacha Barbour Gatt and my wonderful co-host Chris Spyrou.

Chris Spyrou (0:22)

Oh, you introduced me.

Sacha Barbour-Gatt (0:23)

I'm introducing you.

Sit down. We loosen our non-existent ties, take off our shoes, but not really. Lights are on today.

Chris Spyrou (0:31)

So bright.

Tessa Randello (0:32)

So very bright.

Sacha Barbour-Gatt (0:33)

But it's a more relaxed sit down and look at the week that was in news. Now we also like to talk about something that maybe we haven't covered in headlines or a deep dive. That's our deep brief, which we're going to get into in a minute. This week, we're also cracking into the inbox as always, where we hear from you listening about what you thought about and stories that we covered or people we had on. We have a couple of general kind of questions, comments this week, which will be fun to get to as well. Then we've got the weekend quiz play along as always. This week, it's Nath from Todayfm's Breakfast Show in Sydney who's joining us and we have a lot of fun with him.

And then before we finish up, it's the list. And again, Nath is going to headline the list for us today. So why don't we get into all of that now? Now, Chris, we've got a different route for the debrief this week.

Chris Spyrou (1:23)

Mostly because this is a topic that I have a lot of knowledge of in my brain, but I don't have the intricacies. And I thought it would be a disservice to our listeners if I even attempted to explain all the complexities of what this story is. But essentially, you are going to step out for a few minutes. If we're creating that image of that, this is all recorded in succession. You're going to step out for a few minutes and stepping in your place is Amanda Copp. Amanda Copp is the host of Politico's Canberra Playbook podcast.

She is someone that is in the, what's it called, the press gallery? The press gallery in Canberra.

Sacha Barbour-Gatt (2:02)

Not the galleries as you called it.

Chris Spyrou (2:03)

I did. I was like, she's in the galleries.

She's someone who knows a lot about Australian politics. She's always talking to politicians. She's like kind of the person that, you know, when people say, oh, I've got a labour source, labour sources say, a minister that I can't quote on the record. Like this is who we're talking about when we're talking about Amanda. And we get into a story that we haven't touched on in headlines at all this week. It's a story all to do with the treasurer Jim Chalmers and labour politicians leaking information about him behind his back. And it all kicked off earlier this week. Now I'm about to play a bit of audio for you. After that audio, it's going to be my chat with Amanda.

SPEAKER_4 (2:44)

As sharks circle the Federal Treasurer, a senior labour minister has leapt to his defence, warning people within his own party to stop undermining Jim Chalmers. Murray Watt publicly addressed the newspaper leaks of growing tension between the treasurer and his colleagues, calling for an end to labour MPs revealing confidential information to journalists.

Tessa Randello (3:06)

There's all sorts of people making all sorts of comments. My view is that whether you're a member of the government as a backbencher or as a minister, your responsibility is to work together.

Chris Spyrou (3:14)

Amanda, thank you so much for sitting down with me and helping me piece together this story because what I just played for our listeners was that press conference with Murray Watt earlier in the week. And effectively he said the quiet part out loud, right? Like, it's not usual for a senior member of government to come out and say, hey guys, stop leaking shit about the treasurer.

Amanda Copp (3:37)

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I think that everyone was actually quite surprised that they actually got a response. Because I think here in Canberra, where we're so used to asking questions that we almost know the answer to or we suspect what the answer is, but being met by talking points or denial or actually everything's fine, there's nothing to see here. So it was quite interesting seeing Murray Watt himself almost admit that, yes, there were people who were saying mean things about the treasurer or there were, yeah, there was disquiet amongst the ranks. So that was definitely an interesting thing to see.