The Chaser Prank Called Clive Palmer IRL For A Taste Of His Own Medicine
"The UAP is for one thing, and one thing only - being really fucking annoying."
The Chaser is back at it again, this time prank calling Clive Palmer in real life ahead of the Federal Election.
Their latest stunt, coordinated by intern Lachie Hodson, was inspired after seeing one of the United Australia Party’s garish yellow ads. After some light digging, he couldn’t see any concrete policies from Palmer and his cronies, and decided to dig around more.
Hodson spent his merry old time going undercover as a UAP supporter — rocking up to events to interview party members, getting ghosted by Craig Kelly, and even dressing up as a vaccine to one of their events — in an attempt to be as annoying as a UAP text message in real life.
His adventures proved — predictably — that the party’s main talking points of freedom, Australia’s “trillion-dollar debt”, and vaccinations are all threadbare. When confronted or asked to expand more, the people he came across either refused, or babbled their way through their rebuttal.
“After all my effort to find out what the UAP stood for, all I got was a few shirts, a lousy hat, and a severe case of COVID,” he joked in the video. “The UAP doesn’t stand for freedom, or lowering taxes, or making Australia great. The UAP is for one thing, and one thing only — being really fucking annoying.”
During one of Palmer’s meet-and-greets, Hodson rocked up as a walking mobile phone, and tried very hard to disrupt the leader’s speech from outside the building. “Clive! I’ve got a message,” yelled Hodson through the glass.
“What do you mean this is annoying?!” he said to a growing group of angry UAP supporters, one of whom aggressively kept shouting at the intern to “shut the fuck up” in what was nearing a full-blown punch-on. “For someone with so much money, Clive Palmer spends so little on security,” said Hodson in a statement.
The video was the Chaser’s second election stunt after colleague Aleksa Vulovic was kicked out of Scott Morrison’s office for attempting to deliver him a bag of coal.
On Monday, the Australian Workers’ Union launched a campaign against Palmer’s controversial track record as an employer — including former staff at Queensland Nickel having to chase their basic entitlements after the billionaire’s business was liquified.
“We think it’s vital that voters understand who the real Clive is — and it’s not the big smiling thumbs-up character from his ads,” said AWU National Secretary Daniel Walton in a statement.