Topics: Labor’s housing policy, One Nation’s migration policy, AI E&OE....................... PETE STEFANOVIC: Joining us is the Liberal Senator Dave Sharma. I mean, I'm unaware of what they were talking about at start of that, but there is some focus there from the Housing Minister. But I guess that would just highlight the fact that we don't have enough homes to begin with. Not enough homes.
DAVE SHARMA: We don't have enough homes. We're not meeting the government's own Housing Accord targets. Yeah, the government's behind in every state and territory, and their Housing Australia Future Fund, which is the signature item of their housing policy, is using a lot of taxpayer money and building very few new homes.
PETE STEFANOVIC: Yeah, I mean, and off the back of that is this warning from Bran Black, who's done this op-ed in The Australian today saying that our productivity level is now the worst since 1960. And if, you know, major changes— and this is something that's affected both governments, of course, in the past— but if nothing's changed, then, you know, the cost-of-living crisis is not going to get any better at all.
DAVE SHARMA: No. So look, firstly, productivity has gotten worse under this government. Yes, it was a challenge for the years before they were in government. But if you look even just the ABS stats that came out a fortnight ago, they showed that Labor productivity had declined year on year. The RBA has been continually lowering the forecast. Why does this matter? Well, it means that homes are more expensive, means that people are effectively earning less, and it means that the cost of living is higher. That's what it means if productivity is low or negative. And this government has only made productivity worse by adding to regulation, by complicating the industrial relations system, and by spending a lot of taxpayer money in low-productivity sectors of the economy.
PETE STEFANOVIC: Which leads me to One Nation now, and you know, one of its ideas about boosting productivity is to drastically cut the number of migrants who are coming here. So I mean, it's setting the agenda today again, but on this— on a Monday morning like it did last week, by announcing a plan to cut migration, temporary migrants, by 750,000 over 3 years, cap international students at about 100K, which is down from 300K. Have you got an initial thought on that as the details are prepared to be unveiled in a couple of hours' time by Pauline?
DAVE SHARMA: My two thoughts are, firstly, their policy seems to say nothing about values. You know, we in the Coalition want a lower number of better quality, higher skilled migrants. We've already said that for visa arrivals, they will need to take a binding pledge to sign up to our Australian Values Statement. And then if people breach those, they can automatically lose their visa. Cause we've had, to state the obvious, many problems in recent years of people coming to Australia who don't share our values and undermining them. One Nation seems to say nothing about the quality of arrivals into Australia.
PETE STEFANOVIC: But how many of them are Australian values-driven?
DAVE SHARMA: Well, I— but I think it's important about the sort of message we're sending to new arrivals, that we expect them to sign up to Australian values. I would have expected something like that from One Nation. That's not there. But secondly, I just— as my colleague Zoe McKenzie said, I want to see what the economic modelling is here, because there are some parts of the economy, especially in rural and regional Australia, that are highly dependent on overseas arrivals, and some universities in rural and regional Australia that are highly dependent on overseas students.
PETE STEFANOVIC: So, they're saying that regional universities will get priority? and also universities who provide their own housing or their own accommodation. Is there something in that?
DAVE SHARMA: Well, let's, let's see. I mean, but I would say that, you know, that regional universities generally tend to need to offer more to international students to attract them because international students tend to gravitate towards the G8, Sydney and Melbourne, for obvious reasons. So they need to do more there, but we'll need to see what that detail is. I mean, I'd say, Has One Nation taken the media running? Yes, but in policy terms, I think there's a lot of questions to answer here.
PETE STEFANOVIC: OK, but are there too many family members coming in? I mean, that seems to be— I've gone through some of the detail that I can find, or that's been sent to me, and there is a massive amount of people in terms of family members, whether it's skilled migrants or students or temporary migrants or whatever, who One Nation claims, well, if they're here to bring a skill, the family members often don't bring a skill, so they're not helping the economy. That's their view. Is there something in that?
DAVE SHARMA: Well, look, I think our view, Coalition, and we've already said that we're to cap the net overseas migration level to the number of homes completed. That's going to be a hard ceiling, so we are going to bring down that number. And I think family— look, family reunions, or family visas if you like, are going to be one area we target. They're not going to be the only one. And you do need to bear in mind that if you're bringing in highly skilled migrants to do a job that they can't do anywhere else. Well, yeah, if they're, if they're looking at a job in the United States, Canada, Europe, or Australia and those other countries, they can take their wife and children, but they can't enter. So, you're not going to get them. So, I don't think we want to be a bit careful about exactly how we target this particular cohort.
PETE STEFANOVIC: Yeah. Are we looking at the end of humanity when it comes to AI getting out of control and making itself better without our input with these agents. These— man, it's scary stuff.
DAVE SHARMA: It's— look, they're showing a phenomenal amount of ability and initiative. And if you read about the so-called Hugging Face breakout. And the level of autonomy and ingenuity and subterfuge that these AI agents showed and the level of coordination. I mean, if you read some of what they posted to each other on message boards and the messages they sent to each other, It's like a sophisticated group of teenage boys figuring out how to evade curfew or, you know, flout a school's rules. But obviously that could be put towards much more sinister ends. And I think, Dario Armodei— Backed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk over the weekend. I think they're right to sound the warning here that they would like some sort of guardrails or controls. Now, we've seen the Department of Commerce in the US do this from time to time. to prevent the export of some of these more advanced models. We've seen the companies themselves pull the advanced models from the marketplace after some testing. But I think they're saying that they would like an agreed set of understandings about how this technology will at least be tested before it's deployed.
PETE STEFANOVIC: Do you rein it in though? It feels like in some cases the horse has bolted here. Computers are already too smart. DAVE SHARMA: Look, I don't think that's the case. I mean, I think, I don't think we should understate our own agency here. We are creating these things. Ultimately, we're in control of them. But I think we need to make sure that we put in place measures before it gets too far advanced, before these systems are anything.
PETE STEFANOVIC: I mean, they're talking 18 months, 2 years.
DAVE SAHRMA: That's true, but I mean, we've heard that about like autonomous vehicles, for instance, we'd be seeing them, it takes longer, think, to roll these things out because human behaviour is quite ingrained. Yeah.
PETE STEFANOVIC: Good to see you, Dave.
DAVE SHARMA: Thanks so much, Pete.
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