The man nobody expected to stare down a Prime Minister for gay rights | Warren Entsch

Warren Entsch served in Australia's federal parliament for almost three decades. He worked with half a dozen Prime Ministers and witnessed the passage of some of the nation's greatest shifts in social and economic policy.He was an entrenched backbencher with an outsized influence and outsized opinions. He stood against enraged gun owners in his own community after the Port Arthur massacre, he brushed off demands to scrap mentions of climate change from Great Barrier Reef health reports. But most famously, he stared down a Prime Minister and much of his own party to change Australia's marriage laws, a key moment of defiance that catalysed the legalisation of gay marriage. Mr Entsch attracted a fair share of criticism and controversy during his career and many have disagreed with facets of his conduct as a member of parliament. But tellers of history must not neglect the background of the endeavour to correct Australia's last great legal inequality, and the role Mr Entsch played in that crusade.