Mr Sharma said he was "disappointed but not devastated" at the result given the challenge of holding the seat after the Liberals dumped Mr Turnbull as leader in August, leading him to resign from Parliament. “I do have to have a few more discussions with my family. These things are pretty testing on families and we’re still recovering,” he said. “If the party thinks I can be useful to them in the general election then I would be keen to be of use, but I wouldn’t want to discuss any specific opportunities or roles just yet – that still has to shake out a little.” Some Liberals blame Mr Turnbull for not doing enough to help Mr Sharma after an initial tweet to endorse him as the candidate, amid wider concern about the former prime minister’s appearance on ABC TV this Thursday night in an interview that could put him at odds with Mr Morrison and the government. Mr Sharma said he appreciated Mr Turnbull’s endorsement and his time on the phone during the campaign.

“Certainly the more support he felt able to give, the more I would have appreciated it, but I understand, because of what he’d been through, his desire to steer clear of Australian politics and to spend time with his family,” he said. Loading “Given the bruising experience he’d been through, I can understand his reluctance to get any more involved than he did – I don’t blame him for any of that.” Asked if he asked Mr Turnbull for more help than he offered, Mr Sharma said, “I think I made clear that whatever help he was prepared to offer I would gratefully receive, but I wouldn’t go any further than that.” Dr Phelps campaigned strongly on the need for action on climate change, an issue Mr Sharma said played into broader community concerns at the government’s division on energy policy.

“Climate change is the most obvious issue where the government has been divided, and I think that is why it became such a potent issue in the byelection, as a proxy for the anger at the disunity and infighting versus getting on with the process of governing,” he said. “The single biggest issue that we were facing in Wentworth was that people were fatigued, annoyed, frustrated and angry at the political class." "The government bore the brunt of that because the government has been in office since 2013 but peoples’ anger goes beyond that, it’s part of the revolving prime ministerships and the inability to prosecute long-term policy in the national interest because of the political instability in Canberra." “Both sides of politics have been manifestly guilty of this, and if you wanted to draw a lesson it would be in the rise of support for minor parties, bleeding away support from the major parties, which is a national trend." Mr Sharma expressed concern about the leak of the government’s religious freedom review, sparking a debate that hurt his campaign, and an ABC news report about an email that denigrated Dr Phelps as well as himself.