Topics: Liberal leadership, Inflation numbers, Royal Commission on Home Affairs reorganisation

HOLLY STEARNES: Joining me live now is Liberal Senator Dave Sharma. Good morning to you, as always. I mean, the Nat saga continues, but is the Liberal Party settled on its leader? Because it certainly doesn't feel that way.

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DAVE SHARMA: Look, I obviously don't have a crystal ball, Holly, but yes, as far as I'm aware, the Liberal Party stands behind Sussan Ley. There's no leadership challenge I'm aware of that's taking place, and it's important this week with parliament back that we focus on the main task at hand, which is holding the government to account, not our own internal machinations and scheming.  

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HOLLY STEARNES: Hmm. Well, I've got to say, these whispers of Angus Taylor having meetings over the weekend doesn't really help that fact. I mean, people do just want the party to get on with the job, but instead we're talking about this back and forth and secret meetings and so on, possible leadership challenge. It's getting pretty draining, to be honest, and I mean, the longer the split goes on, the worse it gets, and the polls out today don't look good either.

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DAVE SHARMA: Yeah, look, I, I don't disagree with your analysis there, Holly. I mean, I think the, the polls are bad today but that's not surprising given most of the last two weeks has been about internal leadership and other political speculation. Look, we have a government that I don't think is doing a good job for Australians or by Australia. Last week we had inflation figures come out which show that inflation is rising again, alone amongst the developed world. We've got the Reserve Bank meeting this Tuesday. People's living standards are stagnant or going backwards. The country is not in great shape and that's what we need to be talking about as a credible opposition, and we need to be putting forward policies about how to make that better and just last night, the leadership team and the Liberals announced a whole lot of policies to better track red tape and regulation in the economy. That's more of what we need to be doing.

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HOLLY STEARNES: Absolutely. I mean, public spending is around 28% of GDP at the moment. Of course, this is well above the long-term average. At some point, the government needs to recognize its contribution to the problem here. The Liberals, as you say, have unveiled a plan to get Australia's economy moving again. Has this been through a policy committee?

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DAVE SHARMA: Look, as far as I'm aware, yes, it has been. I wasn't involved in the design of that policy myself so I'd defer to the architects of that. But it's something... Look, it's obviously something we've been talking about for some time is the growing burden of regulation on the economy, the growing burden of red tape and it's a lens through which we look at every policy decision that Labor government announces, but also through which we formulate our own.

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HOLLY STEARNES: So talk us through, I guess, those announcements by the Liberals. what would it do differently? What would it... It talks about cutting red tape, but how?

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DAVE SHARMA: Well, look, I think the first part of this challenge is to just calculate how much of this we've got and how much of a burden has been added to it. I mean, just to give you one example, I think there's been 787 pages added to the Fair Work Act, which has complicated employment law, especially for small business, but there is a number of other burdens and regulations that have been added in the financial sector, in the housing sector. Well-known that frequent changes to the building code have pushed up the cost of constructing new homes, but also building infrastructure. tracking those to begin with and then seeing what has changed in the last five years, how we can get back to where we comparing that to benchmark competitive economies that around the Western world are are grappling with this problem and trying to reduce regulation and make it easier to do business. I think that's, that's the first part of the task at hand. I think the second part will be saying these are the specific regulations or laws that we will seek to repeal or undo.

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HOLLY STEARNES: Okay. I want to ask you before we finish our conversation today, it's about the Bondi terror attack and I sort of want to talk to you about some of the events leading up to that. Did the government's decision to move the AFP in 2022 and then ASIO in 2024 out of the Home Affairs Super Department weaken intelligence in your view? And do you support the royal commission investigating this?

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DAVE SHARMA: I very much support the royal commission investigating this. This was a significant machinery of government change at the time. It was one that we in the coalition opposed. The reason for putting all these agencies, the AFP, ASIO, into the, a big home affairs department was to make sure that intelligence collection and, the passage of that intelligence was not stove-piped, that operational arms and intelligence and other monitoring arms were working closely together. And that was driven, as you would be aware, by the, the growing risk about homegrown terrorism inspired by ISIS. Now, what we've seen at the Bondi massacre is homegrown terrorism inspired by ISIS, and so I think it's a perfectly legitimate... one of the most important questions that the royal commission can be addressing is what impact did those significant changes to the operations of government have on the ability of our agencies to detect, monitor, and analyse the threat environment we were facing?

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HOLLY STEARNES: Dave Sharma, thank you as always for your time on Sky News.

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