Dave Sharma comes hardened for Wentworth battle

At 42 years of age, Dave Sharma is no stranger to war zones and times of crisis.

Scott Morrison greets a Bronte beach local during a walk with Wentworth candidate Dave Sharma yesterday. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

At 42 years of age, Dave Sharma is no stranger to war zones and times of crisis.

After losing his mother to cancer at 12, he spent time in his early 20s as a diplomat negotiating a peace agreement in Papua New Guinea. At 37, he became the youngest ever ambassador for Australia — to Israel.

Now as the Liberal Party’s endorsed candidate for Wentworth, he faces a new battlezone.

He must persuade an electorate, still hostile that the local member, Malcolm Turnbull, was torn down as prime minister, that he should be sent to Canberra.

If he gets there, he will join a divided party — something illustrated by the push and pull surrounding his candidacy where Scott Morrison’s forces were pushing for a woman while Mr Turnbull and John Howard were backing Mr Sharma.

Telling the story of his life in a marathon preselection speech on Thursday night led to Mr Sharma winning the race to become the Liberal candidate against Richard Shields by 119 votes to 83.

Mr Sharma gave a frank ­account of his mother’s death from breast cancer aged 46.

He grew up quickly after this, raised by his father, a barrister who hailed from India, and twin sisters aged nine years older. He is now married with three children.

“I think (my mother’s death) got me quite independent, quite self-reliant, quite attached to family because you realise ... you can’t take it for granted, it’s not permanent,” he told The Weekend Australian yesterday.

“And I guess it probably just gave me an empathy with people who are doing it hard for whatever reason because I’d been through something like that myself. So I’d rather it hadn’t happened, but I think it shaped who I am today.”

Mr Sharma studied at Turra­murra High and in 1993 was one of 14 HSC students in NSW to achieve the maximum TER score of 100.

Heading east, Dave Sharma with his wife Rachel and daughters Diana, 11, Estella, 9, and Daphne, 5.

Mr Sharma went on to study at Cambridge. He began with science and ended up completing a law degree. When he returned to Sydney, he studied medicine for a year before deciding he did not like hospitals.

At 23, he joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through its graduate program.

“I picked some tough jobs — that sort of got recognition. My first stint was in Bougainville with a peacekeeping force ... and then went to Port Moresby and worked on the political settlement ... to end that civil war. There were a lot of guys with machetes all wandering around ... nothing too hairy but it was a pretty tense place.” He said Port Moresby kickstarted his career, “got me recognised”. A mentor of his was high commissioner to PNG Nick Warner, now the director of national intelligence and a former head of ASIS.

Mr Sharma served in Washington under ambassador Dennis Richardson and worked for former foreign minister Alexander Downer for two years.

Mr Sharma showed his sense of humour several times yesterday as he began his first day of the campaign to win the seat and keep the Coalition’s one-seat majority.

“Most people go the reverse stretch and leave politics and become an ambassador so I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong,” he said as he waited for his appearance with Mr Morrison at Bronte beach.

He joked to The Weekend Australian of his time as ambassador to Israel: “I didn’t bring peace to the Middle East, I made sure that was never in my performance agreement.”

But he was proud he had got the “100-year anniversary of the battle of Beersheba recognised and memorialised in a big national symbolic way” and improved “linkages in the technology sector” between Australia and Israel.

As Mr Sharma and the PM passed scantily clad bathers at Bronte, Mr Morrison, who grew up and bought his first house in Bronte, met a fish and chip shop owner who said he had contributed to Mr Morrison’s paunch with whiting and chips.

The Prime Minister then staged a press conference where he enthusiastically endorsed a candidate his lieutenants had been urging to pull out of the race a couple of days ago, because the PM wanted a female candidate.

Mr Sharma said that even if Mr Turnbull and Mr Howard had not urged him to stay in the race — as they did on Thursday — he still would have hung in there.

“I took the view that I put myself forward as a candidate with the qualities I’ve got. I had a lot of people keeping my spine stiff.”

The next key challenge for Mr Sharma, who lives on the north shore near his ageing father, is moving house to Wentworth as soon as possible. Estate agents have already been in contact.