Mark Butler attacks Warren Entsch over $1.3m cancer charity grant

Mark Butler says Warren Entsch is ‘all announcement and no delivery’ after the LNP MP secured a taxpayer-funded grant for a cancer charity to buy a block of land – only for it to be left vacant for five years.

LNP MP Warren Entsch. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Health Minister Mark Butler says Warren Entsch is “all ­announcement and no delivery” after the LNP MP secured a taxpayer-funded grant for a cancer charity to buy land to build patient accommodation – only for it to be left vacant for five years.

An investigation by The Australian has found Mr Entsch successfully lobbied the Morrison government to pay $1.3m in 2019 to the Cairns Organisation United for Cancer Health (COUCH) charity to buy land already owned by one of its directors – an LNP donor and “dear friend” of the veteran Queensland MP.

But five years on from the election announcement, which said the charity would build remote patient and carer accommodation on the land, the block in suburban Cairns is still vacant.

Mr Butler told The Australian his department was now working with the charity “on options to deliver” the accommodation.

“Far north Queenslanders have been let down by Warren Entsch for too long,” Mr Butler said. “Warren Entsch is all announcement and no delivery.”

The Health Department has confirmed that it “had no oversight” over the decision to award the grant, despite it being paid out of the Morrison government’s $1.25bn Community Health and Hospitals Program.

Towards the start of the 2019 campaign, Mr Entsch ­announced the $1.3m grant for COUCH to buy the block next to the charity’s wellness centre. The land belonged to JK Woodward Pty Ltd, a company co-owned and directed by Pip Woodward, who was also a ­director and co-founder of the charity.

LNP MP Warren Entsch, third from left, and his wife Yolonde, right, with COUCH cancer charity founders Pip Woodward, left, and Charles Woodward in June 2016. Picture: Facebook.

But this connection was not declared in Mr Entsch’s public statements at the time, though Ms Woodward and her late husband Charles Woodward, both tourism industry pioneers and philanthropists, donated the adjoining parcel of land to COUCH in 2010 for the construction of the wellness centre, which opened to patients in 2019.

Property records show the second parcel of land had been put on the market by the Woodwards for $990,000 for 126 days from July 2017, but it failed to sell.

Asked why nothing had been built on the land, a COUCH spokeswoman blamed Covid.

“Covid had an impact on planning timelines for development and use of the land, with our efforts focused on safe delivery of care services given the sensitive health environment in a cancer wellness centre,” she said.

She said the charity had met its obligations to the federal government under the grant agreement to purchase the land and complete design and approval work. The Health Department says it had an expectation the ­ accommodation would be built.

Mr Entsch said he lobbied for the $1.3m in funding “just as I would any other project”.

He said it was “certainly not unprecedented” that the Morrison government had made the grant decision without involving the Health Department.