Dave Sharma: The first Indian-origin Federal Member for Wentworth, the young and dynamic political figure in Australia talks about his desi connect, his transition from diplomacy to politics, balancing work, family, and more

Federal Member for Wentworth, Dave Sharma opens up about transitioning from being a full time career diplomat to a politician, his Anglo-Indian connection, his popularity on social platforms and more in an exclusive interview with Rajesh Sharma of Indus Age:

(Special credits to Shashi Narasimhiah, Video Credit to Varun Tiwari and transcription by Nidhi Kumari)

RS: Your name is DEVANAND and you shorten it to DAVE – so why Dave and not Deva or Dev?

DS: Well, it really isn’t Dave when I write, I still write Dev but as you know when Indians pronounce it, it sounds a bit like Dave for an Australian audience. Growing up in Australia early 1980s there weren’t many people who could say Devanand. My teachers couldn’t say my name and fellow students started spelling it as Dave. But when I speak with my dad or family I say Dev and my legal name is still Devanand or Dev for short.

RS: Have you ever visited India in any capacity including personal visits?

DS: I must say I haven’t been to India in any capacity – an omission I have to correct. All my my father’s side of the family is Indian. He is part of the family, now in Trinidad &Tobago in the West Indies, so I have visited his family there many times. His family left India in the early 1900s to move to the West Indies and had to make a trip back to India. Some would probably know that his family is from Uttar Pradesh in the north. And he named me after a famous Bollywood filmstar Devanand, this is how I was named after my father.

My father was an aspiring actor at one point in his career and he did the right thing and became a lawyer in the end and followed his parents wishes. But he did wish to become a broadway actor at some point, so he named me after this Bollywood star Devanand.

RS: That’s why my father named me Rajesh on the famous bollywood star Rajesh Khanna, that’s how things go.

DS: Ofcourse, ..laughs..

RS: You are of a mixed race – Indian father and an Anglo mother. How do you identify yourself? Do you call yourself a person of Indian origin? Tell us something about that:

DS: I would say I am an Australian of Indian origin and I happily embrace that part of my heritage. The nice thing about Australia is that people don’t demand that you have an exclusive identity. You don’t have to be one thing or the other.

You could be an Indian-Australian, a Chinese-Australia, a  Jewish-Australian and people can comfortably have both of their identities.

Of course, other than our indigenous people our first people, nearly every Australian has atleast two identities from the country from where their ancestors came and to the country to which they now live. There might be Christians, there might be Muslims there might be Jews, there might be any number of Buddhists, there might be Hindus.

I identify myself as both. I think it is important in Australia that we recognize the great national  strength that we embrace as both.People from different spectrum and we say, ‘I can be just as Australian as Shane down the street having blue eyes and blonde hair, I think he is an Australian just as I am and just as Australian as you are and that is an important national trait.

RS: Give us an account of your experience of transitioning from being a full time career diplomat to a career politician. Was it an easy transition?

DS: It is an unusual transition and you would know that many politicians leave politics to  go on to become ambassadors atleast in Australia, where an Ambassador is a former politician, High Commissioner in London as a former politician. So, I have done it in reverse (laughs) from being an Ambassador and diplomat to being a politician. It has taken some adjustments.

As a diplomat, your instincts  are towards consensus towards finding a way to get along but in politics the defining of  differences and prosecuting the differences in the adversarial nature of thing is more important for that profession.

So, I had to learn a little to sharpen up the edges as a politician and be concillatory at the times of argumentive at others.

Ultimately, both professions are about getting things done for the public and on behalf of the public and serving the public so that part of the job is very familiar to me. The work of Government, importance of the public interest and national interest and the accountability towards the people who are paying their taxes. These are common traits to both disciplines.

 

RS: You received immense support from many critics like Alan Jones, even Tony (Abbott) was supporting, all of them were supporting your selection, what was it that the party saw in you and selected you to such an important seat and for the first time?

DS: I think people were attracted to someone who hadn’t come from the traditional breeding ground of politics. In Australia we had had the tendency, increasingly pronounced for the last two decades for people to do political apprenticeship on the Labor side of politics that might work for a trade union and then for a  minister and then into Paliament. On the the Conservative side, people would be ministerial staff and work for things. Perhaps, that means you are getting quite a narrow pool of people  in our Parliament.

Our Parliament to be at best needs to be as diverse as the Australian people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions but also professions and experiences.

People are attracted to my candidacy because I hadn’t followed this usual pathway; I had achieved something outside of politics first, though on my own terms. I was looking to bring that in. People saw my motives for good ones which was about continuing to find ways to serve the public but in different capacities.

RS: You have got 100% in ATAR in high school, then went to Cambridge, then you also studied medicine and then international relations. What was the reason of doing so many courses?

DS: (Smiles)…I am a good Indian who studied law and medicine (laughs).

No (smiles). When I left school I had thought that I wanted to be a doctor.When I got an offer to get into Cambridge University, I thought I am going to become a doctor, I wanted to be qualified in Australia so I used this time to study something else so I studied law instead came back to Australia still assuming I wished to be a doctor studied medicine for a year.During that year I realised I didn’t quite have the professional commitment or engagement to be  a very good doctor or a very good physician or  a very good surgeon.

I always believed that one should do something that you are really passionate about.

At that stage of my life Diplomacy was attracted to me and I left medicine after one year suspended my studies and joined The Department of Foreign Affairs as a graduate.

RS: Today the definition of politics has changed. People are voting in a different way, according to you what is changing?

DS: The change is as much that the media, the people on whom we rely to convey public sentiments, public mood, opinion and masses have become a little disconnected from the people on whom one is reporting.

It’s true in Australia, Britain and America which means that these days with social media and other tools some voices get amplified more than the others.The people who are on twitter, the people who use the social media and as a politician, I know that if I checked Twitter every day, I would think that everyone hated me but I know that the truth is that a lot of people think am doing a good  job, the government is doing a good job but they have their concerns in their lives.

I think where the disconnect has happened is when the media is gone off on a particular tangent and they haven’t stayed as close to the public as they should’ve to represent those views.

I think it is true of all western nations. I don’t know India so well, but I would expect that something similar is at work there… people are often surprised at the more conservative  nature of how public given how the media has positioned. But this has been as force that we saw in the UK with Brexit we saw with Trump as you said  and we saw it here in our own elections in Australia and elsewhere around the world.

RS: Do you follow Narendra Modi?

DS: I do. He’s amazingly a formidable charismatic, gifted politician and I have been watching with interest his trip at the United States;the huge rally he addresses in Houston.

I think President Trump looks at him with envy for the crowd he assembles..(laughs)..

RS: You were Australia’s ambassador to Isreal. You have developed deep respect for the Israelis and Israel. Tell us more about your experience there and what we can learn from the Israeli society and people.

DS: They have a very entrepreneurial, risk oriented and innovative culture. As much as anything for them, it is driven by national circumstances and national need.

They always innovate to stay ahead of their competitors and their adversaries. And that is true in their military space but that’s played out in their commercial and regular economic space as well. What we can learn from them is that we need to support our entrepreneurs. That we shouldn’t hesitate to put public money and public policy behind supporting more entrepreneurial system behind supporting venture capitals funds, protection of intellectual property, commercialization at universities and research institutions. I think, we should see in areas like national economic policy in points. Israel certainly says that their survival and prosperity is linked to the health of this sector.

Once in Australia it’s not so acute relatively fortunate and prosperous as a nation ultimately we want to remain high living standard, high wage, high skilled economy. We need to make sure that we are creating technology rich industries, jobs and attracting research and development in this space as well if we have to remain on top of the table.

RS: How Israel have managed to have such high number of start-ups?

DS: They’ve the third highest listings on NASDAQ, after the USA and China. Look, it’s a mix of things. They’ve got a mix of very talented individuals,  so do we have  in Australia , so does India. They have a very good venture capital sector, much more venture capital, dollars per individuals than Australia does. And that’s something we should do in Australia.

We have a huge amount of capital in Australia because of superannuation but it is genrally invested in a very risk-averse way in equity and Australian markets. We need to unlock some of the potential of the capital markets. And the other thing they do well in Israel which I have noticed in Israel is that they incentivize their research at University and others to not necessarily get their most papers published in academic journal but think about how this research could be done tweaked or altered to have commercial application some of the best Israeli inventions . All sorts of things, I mean have come out of University academics. University who have incentivized and commercialized their ideas. In Australia we are not yet unlocking pure research and basic research into that domain.

RS: You have acknowledged that Wentworth is a highly multicultural electorate. Has Multiculturism worked well for all of us in Australia? What more can be done to make it more meaningful and beneficial to the average Australian citizen and residents? 

DS: I think overwhelmingly multiculturalism has been a force for good  in Australia.  What a great national strength it is that we have in Australia , a population that brings with it all its culure, national assets from wherever that population came. That’s not to say it’s an easy thing. With every new wave of arrival migrants to Australia we have a challenge to allow them preserve their own culture and institution and ways of life and also to become Australian at the same time. This is a debate ever since Australian opened to large scale migration we have this debate, which ever particular generation is dominating the migration for them, we are always adjusting integrating. Generally speaking, our experience has always been that the first generation have the toughest, the second generation finds it easy, the third generation finds it easier, but it is something we all need to work at.

What I said at the start of the interview, it is important  that we don’t narrowly define what it is to be in Australia, we need to have an expansive view that we allow people to maintain their multi identities, their  home identities, their home language, their both language which as well as being  same to be as Australian. There are very few countries in the world, where this happens.

Probably the  USA and Canada, Great Britain and Australia where you can arrive from elsewhere look different from the majority population, nonetheless be accepted as Australian as anyone else, that is a real fate that we sometime take for granted. It’s an exception we need to work harder every single day.

RS : What developmental and social activities do you have on the agenda for the electorate of Wentworth?

DS: For me I am a first member of Parliament so my focus is very much on getting to know the electorate, and   getting to know all the institutions, from the schools, the sporting clubs the nursing homes the villages the churches the mosque, the synagogues, I am just getting at it balancing people  and letting them know finding out what is important to them. The most important job as a politician is to ‘listen’. People always say ‘talking’. I still listen to represent those views. Any activity that brings me closer to people I will make sure I am there. 

RS: How do you get time to be so active both on social media platform and otherwise? I follow you and I see that you’re active even on weekends posting something interesting, where do you get the energy from?

DS: I think I try and to the extent possible to include or incorporate my family in some of these events—so it’s not just ‘dad at work’.  So, whether we are doing a family outing, a picnic or a barbecue we are doing something together.

I think thing these days there is a blur division between people’s public life and private life  there’s isn’t  any same division as there once was. That’s true you need to embrace the positive elements  of the government.

I always find time during the day to make sure I still can go to my daughter’s play at school and pick her up from the school carnival or the athletics carnival and that means on the weekends sometimes doing political activities, with me which  hopefully is a fun one?

Look, you need to have passion for the job and for representing people. I think, I do.

RS: You were the first international representative to visit the casualties of Syrian civil war. Tell us about your experience and tell us also on how Australia can contribute in addressing this humanitarian crisis.

DS: Civil war in Syria is an awful tragedy. Million of people have been displaced, millions have lost their lives. It’s not an area where Australia can readily help, the country is sort of broken apart, we can’t put it back together as Australia, I don’t think any outside power can, we can certainly help it and we are by  giving our humanitarian assistance, by offering to resettle people from Syria to Australia. We have taken about their 20,000 refugees from that conflict but I think it’s a  lesson about what happens when a nation  particularly with identities within. In Syria there is Shiats, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Arabs, Jews there is a whole multi-ethnic group… that ultimately make Syria which is wonderful, but once you take the genie out of the bottle unleash differences and allow people from outside, to explore sectarian differences, or ethnic or religious differences it could be very hard to mane them reassembling them once all this blood has been spilt will take a long time and take generations probably.

RS: You are married to Rachel who is a lawyer and a diplomat. How does this mix with you now being a politician? Who is the boss at home?

DS: My wife Rachel, is ofcourse the boss at home and that would not be unusual. We are relatively a modern couple and modern family  in the sense that we don’t have traditional roles. Rachel is based more on the home front  than I do. But  I certainly do my parts as well like cleaning the house, making the school lunches, getting the kids off to school, helping with their homework and things like that. And I think that’s important I find it satisfying as a father to be involved in my children’s life.

Women these days broadly want to have a career as well as family just as men do. So, I think we work hard in getting that balance right we don’t often get it right. There are points of tensions on whose bearing the more part of the burden and  my wife is usually right there so we are like any modern family these days. We are both parents who have our professional career as well as family goals. You need to work hard at it every day.

RS: You’re rather young and you have a long way to go in Australian politics. Where do you see yourself in the next ten years?

DS: I am always a little hesitant to answer that sort of question I am not going to answer you directly but I will say that I would like to serve for as long as I can be useful responsible to the community and the public every politician say it is true to be entrust with the representation to the community to carry their views their voices heard and make it heard on a social stage. I have a lot to learn as a politician and still very new to the role and the most important thing I can do next term is to embed myself in the community, articulate their views make myself accessible and carry their views with me to camera. Beyond that let the public to decide.

Rapid Fire:

Favourite food: My dad makes a very good curry.

Favourite Holiday place: I  don’t often get to go to the same place twice. I love to travel, love spending time with different culture always interested in looking at the next destination rather than a repeat destination.

Hobbies: Sport,  staying fit and healthy, reading on history I am quite a fan, particularly ancient history it helps to understand how the world works today, spending time with my family.

Message to the Indian community:

I would love to say what an important part the Indian community plays in Australia, it’s incredible, important and valuable, Indian community has made such a contribution to the richness of Australian national love, be proud of your Indian identity, just as you are proud of your Australian identity. Never think you have to choose between the two, your Indian identity is what makes us rich as Australian. And lastly, Happy Diwali!