Topics: Inflation numbers, Iranian Women soccer team, NYZQ High court ruling

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STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Time to talk quite a bit of stuff, federal politics, with the Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury, Senator Dave Sharma. Dave, good morning.

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DAVE SHARMA: Good morning, Stephen, glad to join you.

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STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: And you too. I want to talk about the fuel crisis in a moment, but we've had Treasury estimates that inflation could hit 5% before long. Do you get the sense that the Treasurer has finally woken up to the fact that government spending is part of the problem?

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DAVE SHARMA: Well, I think what, what, what this external shock has revealed is that the government is basically, you know, should have been using these good economic times to get inflation down, get government spending down and restore some of the shock absorbers in the economy. But instead, they've been busily shredding them. And now a shock has hit and there's nothing left in the tank to respond to it. Monetary policy doesn't have much room to move because inflation's too high. You can't cut rates when inflation is high. And the government's budget is already overstretched, and so there's no opportunity to provide relief to consumers because the government spending is already too high. I think, you know, what this external shock has done is just basically shown the hollowness of Jim Chalmers' economic strategy.

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STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Now, this government has a real bee in its bonnet about alleged price gouging, and they keep talking about the supermarkets despite the fact that the share price and profit margins would indicate that there's no gouging going on. We are seeing petrol prices and diesel prices go up at the pump exponentially and earlier than they probably should have, given where the oil crisis was at the moment. But the government's at great pains to tell us that they've got the ACCC onto this. The impression I get is that the ACCC, as always, has been a paper tiger, and they don't want to talk to us about what they're going to do and enforce it, because I imagine they've actually got nothing that they can do.

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DAVE SHARMA: Look, I mean, the ACCC's powers are limited here. They can effectively monitor and name and shame if a petrol station is engaged in misleading conduct, so it's telling a different reason about why prices are up. They're saying it's because of an oil crisis, but that actually just increased their profit. The ACCC can go after that, but that's difficult to amass the evidence and take the time. I think, I mean, what we need to be mindful of here, that Part of the reason that fuel prices are going up in Australia quicker than other countries is because our fuel stocks are so low and our reserves are so low. So again, we've got less of a buffer against the shock. And it means that the flow-through of higher oil prices on seaborne crude oil, the stuff that we're buying, pass through to the pump much quicker in Australia. So, here the average rise in prices has been about 50 cents a litre since the start of the month. In countries like the US or Canada or Japan, with much bigger reserves, closer to 20 to 30 cents a litre.

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STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Dave, one of the things that I lament here— and this is, I guess, a crack at all sides of politics— apart from Matt Canavan, who is now talking about long-term fuel and energy security, but not in any detail— we can't fix this overnight. I mean, that's the fact. We've let our stores run down for decades now. Why isn't anybody saying, "We need to fast-track the building of new refineries, we need to fast-track the building of new storage facilities, we need to—" fast-track exploration of oil on our own soil. These are the things that we should be expecting from our political leaders that we're not getting at the moment.

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DAVE SHARMA: Look, I agree with you there, Stephen. I think we do need to be fast-tracking that. I mean, look, we took the first steps when in government back in 2021. We passed what's called the Fuel Security Act, which basically provided the mechanism to rescue those two refineries we still got because they were going out of business as well, and provided a scheme for basically the government to make incentive payments to bring more refineries online. And it also allowed the minister to set up what's called a minimum stockholding obligation. Basically, how much fuel do we have in storage? Now, Chris Bowen hasn't used those tools in the 5 years since. They're there. The Parliament's given those to the minister to use. Parliament's given the government the ability to basically incentivise new refinery construction. And to state the obvious, the world's changed pretty dramatically in the last 5 years. We've had a major war in Europe and a major war in the Middle East. should That be causing us to think that maybe global supply chains that we've been able to rely on for the last 60 or 70 years are not as reliable anymore.

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STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Yeah, indeed. I want to talk about things that are kind of related because they're related to the Middle East. The High Court has now delivered another blow to the government over this whole NZIQ fiasco where we saw hardened criminal illegal immigrants released back into the community because the 'Apparently our own legislative framework doesn't allow us to do anything.' Well, the High Court has now struck down the government's attempts to monitor these individuals who have been released from indefinite detention. What is the fix here?

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DAVE SHARMA: Look, it's a real fiasco, to state the obvious, and the government was warned some time ago before the NZYT case was first decided that they were at real risk in the High Court, but the government chose not to prepare responses to that and seek legal advice. Then when the decision was handed down, the government rushed legislation through. The court has now found that the regulations made under that legislation are unconstitutional. It is a mess. I mean, my understanding is there is scope within the court's judgment to make sure that we can protect the community from these very dangerous people that we can no longer keep in detention, but the government has kept continuously botched the legislation, the regulations, the implementation of this because they've always been playing catch-up, I think, by and large.

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STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: One of the other things that is, obviously since the war in Iran, it was no surprise that a number of the Iranian women's national football team wanted to defect to Australia, didn't want to go back to Iran. Of the 7 that originally wanted to stay, it now appears that 5 of them have returned home. This is a— I mean, did we do enough to protect these women? Because there was the suggestion that they would be treated, well, at the very least badly when they returned to Iran, at the very worst probably killed.

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DAVE SHARMA: Yeah, look, I'm very worried about this and I find the whole set of circumstances quite troubling. So we had, as I understand it, 7 players who claimed and were granted asylum and Tony Burke posted pictures with all of them, which I think was a bad idea, to be honest. I think that adding more publicity was just basically poking a stick in the eye of the regime and making them put more pressure on their families. 5 of those women decided within about 24 to 48 hours that they no longer wanted to claim asylum and go back to Iran. Now, it seems obvious to me, and I think parts of the Iranian diaspora here have said as much, that those women were pressured in the intervening period, either directly through people who were in Australia with them who were sort of acting as agents of the Iranian regime, political commissars if you like, or through the regime putting pressure directly on their families at home who were then messaging them. And they've been returned to Iran. Iran's sort of treated it as a propaganda victory, put it on Iranian state media saying these women are wonderful patriots. I think that's for the cameras. I worry about what's going to happen to them subsequently because they clearly chose to seek asylum in Australia for a reason. They just didn't want an extended holiday, right? They were being told you can make your life here and they said yes initially, but then they said no. And I worry that the publicity that Tony Burke gave this elevated this as a priority issue for the Iranian regime. Meant that they put more pressure on their families and they changed their mind as a result.

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STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: It's a sad, sad affair all around. It's an indictment on our government too. Dave, always appreciate your insights. Thanks for your time this morning.

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DAVE SHARMA: Thanks so much, Stephen.

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