Entsch’s wife gets Indigenous arts grant, as donor jab is referred to corruption watchdog
The non-Indigenous wife of MP Warren Entsch got a grant from the Morrison government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts program to teach pottery.
The non-Indigenous wife of Liberal MP Warren Entsch received a $213,725 two-year grant from the Morrison government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts program to teach pottery in the remote Queensland Aboriginal community of Doomadgee.
A company wholly owned and directed by Yolonde Entsch, now the LNP candidate for the must-win state seat of Cairns, received the funding in 2019-20 and was not required to declare her relationship with the veteran LNP MP during the grant application.
It comes as Queensland Health referred to Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission allegations that Mr Entsch organised for his political donor and friend, billionaire property developer Alex Sekler, to jump the queue and receive his Pfizer Covid jab in the Torres Strait in July 2021.
At the time, Soviet-born Mr Sekler, 65, was not eligible to get Pfizer in Cairns, and appealed for Mr Entsch’s help. The politician called local health authorities and ordered his taxpayer-funded electorate staffer to accompany the billionaire on his privately chartered plane.
Less than a year later, on the eve of the federal election, Mr Sekler donated $304,000 to the Liberal National Party, of which $300,000 was spent on Mr Entsch’s successful campaign to retain the seat of Leichhardt.
A preliminary Queensland Health investigation at the weekend found the matter met the threshold for referring it to the CCC on Monday.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler seized on the matter in question time and said Mr Entsch had “very serious questions to answer” about organising the jab for an ineligible person when Australia was “desperately short of Pfizer doses” in mid-2021.
Mr Butler said the advice from The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation in July 2021 was that people over-50 not be given Pfizer, and said there was a lot of concern about the allegations.
“Concern that it was clearly understood across the nation that this man was not eligible, on ATAGI advice for the Pfizer vaccine, concern that he was taking a dose that was intended to protect the vulnerable members of that community on Thursday Island, and concern that unnecessary travel to First Nations communities exposed those communities to a risk of infection,” Mr Butler said.
Mr Entsch accused Mr Butler of “grievously” misrepresenting him, and claimed Mr Sekler, who had previously given $650,000 to the Far North Queensland Hospital Foundation, had been “invited” by the Torres and Cape Hospital and Health Service seeking a donation of an MRI machine to the Thursday Island hospital.
He denied there was a “quid pro quo” arrangement and also said he thought Mr Sekler receive a Moderna vaccine, which had not been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration until a month later, in August 2021.
He told parliament he called the hospital and asked if it was available. “They said yes, and I said, ‘what is the protocol?’ They said ‘if you present, we’ve got plenty of it, in fact we’ve got quite a bit that’s going out of date’,” Mr Entsch said.
This was a different explanation to that Mr Entsch offered in an interview with The Australian last Thursday, in which he said Mr Sekler was “quite anal” about getting his preferred jab.
Mr Entsch did not say Mr Sekler had been invited by the Torres Strait officials, and said the property developer had approached him asking where he could get the Pfizer jab.
“He asked me where he could get it, and I said I heard it is readily available up there,” Mr Entsch said. “I made a phone call and asked them if it was possible if he went up there.
“My understanding was he was also looking at making an additional donation (to the hospital) into anything that they wanted. I don’t know what happened.
“There’re 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.” Mr Entsch also lobbied for Mr Sekler to get Australian citizenship and arranged an exclusive private dinner with then-prime minister Scott Morrison and senior ministers Bridget McKenzie and David Littleproud at a Canberra restaurant in February last year.
Separately, records show the Department of Communications and the Arts gave YLE Enterprises, trading as Empowering Women, Empowering Communities, the $213,725 – including GST – grant for the Doomadgee Pottery Studio Project, to “provide a series of pottery and ceramics workshops to the Doomadgee community” in 2019-20 and 2020-21.
Ms Entsch and her friend, Cairns pottery teacher Felicity Bury, received the grant to support “new and innovative forms of Indigenous expression through art” and support the “transmission and development of Indigenous cultural heritage and knowledge through languages and arts projects,” despite neither being Indigenous.
Doomadgee is an Indigenous community in remote northwest Queensland in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and is outside Mr Entsch’s far-north Queensland electorate of Leichhardt.
A federal arts department spokeswoman said the program’s guidelines and online application form did not require Mrs Entsch to declare her relationship with Mr Entsch, and he was not involved in the awarding of the grant.
Ms Entsch did not return calls from The Australian, but Ms Bury said her friend had asked her to travel to Doomadgee and think of a business idea. “She asked me if I could go up and think of a business idea, so she could – because she’s married to Warren – apply for a grant for her company, which is called Empowering Women,” Ms Bury said.
Ms Bury, who had not been to an Indigenous community before the Doomadgee project, said the program had been very well received in the community, where she spent five days a month during the two years the studio ran.
Asked how the program supported “the transmission and development of Indigenous cultural heritage and knowledge” as the grant guidelines required, Ms Bury said: “Well, we just, we didn’t make money out of them.
“We didn’t take their works out of the place and sell it on the black market. We were running a free service. We’ve got the grant to give you something to do, to give you a taste of the arts. We were totally there for them. We weren’t there as a side hustle for our own benefit.”
Doomadgee local Andrew Ned, 25, who did pottery at the studio and made an ashtray, said he felt the program should have been run by locals.
“I really wanted it run by Indigenous people, from the local community,” he said.
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