Warren Entsch

Warren Entsch is an Australian politician, a member of the Liberal National Party of Queensland who sat with the Liberal Party in federal Parliament. He was the member for Leichhardt, in far north Queensland, in the House of Representatives from 1996 to 2007 and again from 2010 to 2025. He was born on 31 May 1950 at Babinda, Queensland, and was Chief Opposition Whip from September 2010 to September 2013. A news report in July 2024 said he would not contest the next election, after nine election victories, and his term ended with the dissolution of Parliament on 28 March 2025.

He enters this record because he put the 1984 killings of Sikhs before Australia's Parliament.

Key moments

• 29 October 2012: a media release said he would table a petition of 4,453 signatures, organised by Daljit Singh of Cairns. It described this as the first time the 1984 killings had been raised in the Australian Parliament.
• 1 November 2012: he tabled it in the House during the adjournment debate, with up to 300 Sikhs expected in the public gallery. The petition's text, on the House's petitions record, asked the House to recognise that an organised campaign of violence, rapes and killings took place in India in November 1984; to recognise those killings as genocide under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; and to urge the Government of India to bring those responsible to justice through criminal prosecutions following due process.
• In the release he said he was "horrified" by the treatment of Sikhs, compared the 1984 killings with the genocide at Srebrenica, and hoped the petition would "raise awareness".
• December 2017: SBS reported that he asked the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, to address the safety of 47 Sikh detainees held in Punjab, to monitor abuses against minorities in India, and to recognise 1984 as genocide, and that he called for the release of the British citizen Jagtar Singh Johal. Asked what had changed since 2012, he said no government or party appeared to hold a firm position.

What he is remembered for: tabling the 1984 genocide petition in the House of Representatives, which the organisers' release called the first time the issue had been raised in that Parliament. He told SBS in 2017 that he hoped Australia would follow Canada in recognising it, and that he had not yet had a reply from the Foreign Minister.