"Trump, Gaza & Liberalism" with Senator Dave Sharma

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Australians go to the polls in a few months. It looks surprisingly grim for the first-term, centre-left Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

As part of Uncomfortable Conversations' election coverage, Josh invited a select handful of prominent politicians who are likely to be the most interesting figures for listeners from all over the world to enjoy.

Senator Dave Sharma is one of them. He's a member of the Opposition centre-right Liberal Party. He was a member of the Australian House of Representatives in the last government but lost his seat to an independent, Allegra Spender, when the conservatives lost power in 2022. He made a comeback the following year to become a senator representing the nation's most populous state. Before entering politics, he was Australia's ambassador to Israel, although he himself is of Canadian-Indian descent.

Senator Sharma and Josh discuss populism, Trump, Gaza, nuclear power, and whether liberalism will survive the 21st century.

Watch this conversation on YouTube. And you’re missing out on our best ad-free content if you haven’t popped over to the Uncomfy Convos Substack page.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gatay, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And dangerous ideas are exactly what we need to talk about during election campaigns to figure out where politicians stand, what we think about them, how they're going to address the biggest issues of the day. And yet, of course, uncomfortable conversations and dangerous ideas are precisely what political
0:22.6	candidates tend to avoid.
0:25.0	That's why it's so refreshing and so constructive to speak with someone who is not actually technically
0:29.9	up for re-election at the upcoming Australian federal elections.
0:34.6	It's been a huge spate of elections in democracies all over the world in the past
0:38.8	12 months. South Korea, India, Mexico, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States,
0:45.3	Germany. Now we've got the end of Justin Trudeau in Canada. Next up, it is Australia's turn.
0:51.3	Ozies will be going on the polls in the first half of May. The exact date is not
0:55.5	yet confirmed because the Prime Minister only has to give 33 days notice to the opposition
1:00.7	and all of a sudden you have a poll. He's got a certain window in which he can call it and they
1:06.0	usually leave it up until the very last minute to leave the opposition scrambling.
1:09.9	Today's guest is a senator from the opposition center-right coalition party, the Liberal Party.
1:16.0	He's not up for re-election this time around, as I mentioned, because in Australia, much like
1:20.1	the United States, Senate terms are twice as long as the terms for non-senators.
1:25.1	But Dave Sharma is an interesting and controversial figure with a lot of fans
1:30.1	and a lot of enemies in Australia. He was originally part of the Scott Morrison government.
1:35.1	He was a member of the House of Representatives of the lower house in the last government
1:39.3	that lost power in 2022. And he was swept aside and swept out of his seat by a sort of anti-incumbent surge of
1:47.4	what we called teal independence, meaning a collection of independent centre-right, mostly
1:53.2	female, mostly business people who came in to address what they regarded as being stale and tired
2:00.7	and sort of sexist and vaguely climate-naive government,
2:05.8	targeting potentially vulnerable moderate conservatives in moderately conservative seats.
	...

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