‘Redneck’ MP Warren Entsch in hot water after colourful 20 years

There’s a mythology that has developed around maverick MP Warren Entsch that has spread across the country. Like all convincing legends, there’s a kernel of truth at its centre.

Warren Entsch defends himself in parliament this week. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Warren Entsch defies convention. The long-time far north Queensland Liberal MP is a former crocodile catcher, has a luxuriant handlebar moustache and a gruff voice, and liberally injects interviews with words like darlin’, bloody and arse.

But Entsch’s redneck exterior belies a progressive soul. Some in the equality movement believe the only reason gay marriage is legal in Australia is because of Entsch, who defied internal party pressure to successfully move the marriage equality private member’s bill in the House of Representatives in 2017.

“Far northern Queensland, crocodile farmer, Liberal. Mate, I’m an absolute redneck on all the boxes you tick,” Entsch told the Star Observer, the nation’s longest running publication for LGBTI communities, nearly a decade ago.

“I’m glad to be a redneck LGBTI advocate. I’m more than proud of that … (but) I refuse point blank to give any sort of confirmation as to my sexuality and for that matter whether I’ve got a red, green, blue or bloody purple neck.”

Liberal MP Warren Entsch lifts up Labor MP Linda Burney as they celebrate the passing of the Marriage Amendment Bill in the House of Representatives on December 7, 2017. Picture: AAP Image/Lukas Coch

Now, as a result of an ongoing investigation by The Australian, Entsch is facing the prospect of an inquiry by Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission. In July 2021, at a time Australia was desperately short of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccines, Entsch allegedly helped a property developer party donor mate jump the queue to get the jab on Thursday Island, in the far northern reaches of his electorate.

His “good friend”, Soviet-born billionaire Alex Sekler, was over 60 and not eligible to receive Pfizer on the mainland, where Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation rules had slapped an age limit on the brand. Authorities feared Torres Strait Islanders were particularly vulnerable to Covid given the proximity to Papua New Guinea, where the disease was wreaking enormous damage.

Entsch instructed one of his taxpayer-funded electorate office staff members, Tamara Srhoj, to jump on Sekler’s privately chartered jet to show him where to go.

Cairns-based Labor senator Nita Green doesn’t mince words when asked about the trip. “It doesn’t pass the pub test,” Green tells Inquirer. “This is just the latest example of Warren demonstrating that he believes he is above the rules that apply to everyone else.”

His wife, Yolonde Entsch, is the LNP’s candidate for the must-win state seat of Cairns. There’s also scrutiny on grants she has received from the Morrison government and from Entsch’s own electorate.

So how did we get here?

At 73, and in and out of federal parliament since 1996 as the member for Leichhardt, Entsch has developed a reputation for being fearless – for fighting for his electorate and gay rights causes in the Liberal partyroom in Canberra – for being indispensable to the LNP’s political fortunes in far north Queensland, and for being a little reckless.

He has always marched to the beat of his own drum and walked close to the edge of propriety, weathering integrity snafus through the years for failing to declare personal business interests. Entsch is the last man standing from the Coalition’s class of 1996, which ushered in John Howard’s four-term prime ministership.

Rising in parliament for his first speech on June 20 that year, Entsch explained he was an MP with “very few academic qualifications” after leaving school at 14 and following his father to work on the railways. He was “chief toilet cleaner” at the Mareeba railway station, on the Atherton Tablelands west of Cairns, until he joined the air force as an aircraft engine fitter.

After a decade, he embarked on the most varied career of just about any MP: maintenance fitter, truck driver, real estate salesman, nightclub manager, metalworkers unionist, wild bull catcher, crocodile trapper and grazier.

Warren Entsch on a crocodile farm in the 1970s

Entsch’s sprawling electorate is one of the largest and most diverse in the country, stretching from Cairns in the south to the outer islands of the Torres Strait in the north, taking in the remote Aboriginal communities of Cape York and the glamorous Port Douglas on the way.

In the wilds of FNQ, there’s a mythology that has developed around Entsch that has spread across the country: he’s the only conservative who can hold Leichhardt. Like all convincing legends, there’s a kernel of truth at its centre. When Entsch retired for the first time ahead of the 2007 election – citing the need to spend more time with one of his sons, then a teenager – Leichhardt was swept away in the Ruddslide to Labor. In a 14 per cent two-party preferred swing the seat fell in the lap of the ALP’s Jim Turnour.

Turnour lasted precisely one term, until Entsch decided to un-retire, and in a nearly 9 per cent swing at the 2010 election Entsch easily won back the seat. It’s no wonder successive prime ministers have thrown everything at convincing him not to retire, in 2019 and again last year.

Then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison is greeted like an old friend by Member for Leichhardt Warren Entsch on his arrival in Cairns in May 2021. The Federal Government announced a $10 billion guarantee for a Northern Australia reinsurance pool at The Woolshed. Picture: Brendan Radke

Scott Morrison, then prime minister, went so far as to offer Entsch a $10bn deal to cancel his retirement plans at a meeting in his Canberra office in February 2021. A Coalition source said the conversation was frank.

“Entsch walked into Morrison’s office and said, ‘I’ve decided to do it (run again), on one condition. What’s in it for me?’ Morrison said: ‘There’s not too many people in this building who can walk into a prime minister’s office and say something like that with any level of credibility but you’re one of them; what do you want?’ ”

He asked for a $10bn cyclone reinsurance pool for north Australia and $20m to build an electricity microgrid to deliver power to people north of the Daintree River. Morrison delivered, and the LNP held Leichhardt. Just.

Sources from both parties confirm Entsch was trailing Labor’s Elida Faith in internal tracking polls until just days before the election in May last year, with the gap stretching as wide as 56-44 two-party preferred to the ALP.

That’s why Sekler’s donation was crucial. Entsch and his wife had wooed Sekler and his wife – life coach and Instagram influencer Violetta Sekler – for years. Sekler had given a modest $13,000 to the LNP in January 2019, ahead of that year’s poll, but finally Entsch organised an election-winning donation.

Alex and Violetta Sekler, announcing a $650,000 donation to the Far North Queensland Hospital Foundation in 2020. Picture: Stewart McLean.

At a Christmas party at Rattle N’ Hum Bar and Grill in Cairns in late 2021, Entsch told dozens of gathered supporters he’d secured a $300,000 donation from a mystery benefactor.

“The election’s paid for, we don’t have to worry about fundraising,” Entsch said, according to someone who was at the event.

When disclosure returns were publicly released, one of Sekler’s companies was confirmed as the single biggest donor to the LNP in Queensland for the election, giving $304,000.

Entsch insists there was no “quid pro quo arrangement” with Sekler, on whose behalf he also lobbied for Australian citizenship and secured a private Canberra dinner with Morrison and other senior ministers.

“There are no favours, I can assure you of that … absolute unadulterated nonsense. There was no conditions on anything that he asked me to do, or I offered to do for him, absolutely no inducements or suggestions otherwise.”

Neither Sekler nor Yolonde Entsch have answered questions from Inquirer.

Warren Entsch has indicated he will retire, for real, at the next federal election.

A Queensland Labor source says the party isn’t kidding itself that Leichhardt will become a safe ALP seat once Entsch departs, but “the year he didn’t run was when Labor won”.

Liberal MPs Trevor Evans and Warren Entsch celebrate the passing of the Marriage Amendment Bill in 2017.

Former LNP member for Brisbane Trevor Evans, Queensland’s first openly gay federal politician, was the MP who seconded the marriage equality laws in parliament. Evans describes Entsch as the “original advocate for the LGBT community in parliament” and a master of the “lost art of being able to express the needs and wishes of your electorate” even when it tested the patience of his LNP colleagues.

“Warren Entsch has had a longer career than most, but also a much longer list of legacies than many MPs who have been there for decades,” Evans says.

“Being in the car with Warren, driving around Cairns and the Cape, is like having a tour of recent history. ‘I helped them get that, I fought that PM to make this happen’, and he can do that block by block. You’ve got to give him credit for the strength of his advocacy.”