Mark Vaile (Lyne, National Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me pleasure, on behalf of my colleagues in the National Party, to support the condolence motion moved by the Prime Minister on the passing of the Hon. Don Chipp. One of the hardest tasks in Australian politics would be to create a new political organisation out of nothing. Don Chipp will be remembered as one of the few politicians in our history who was ever been able to achieve that, and he did it very well.

At first he did not even have a name for his new party. Some of the suggestions he got from well-meaning supporters included the Dinkum Democrats, the People for Sanity Party and the Practical Idealists of Australia. Chipp was an idealist, but he had been in the parliament for many years—in fact, since 1960—and he had served five years as a minister. He hoped that the name that he chose for his new party would be spoken of in parliament and recorded in its history books, as it has been. So his steering committee avoided the cute and quirky and called the new party the Australian Democrats.

Don Chipp had what he described as a ‘boisterous dislike’ of the National Party but he had a healthy respect for its leaders. He made that very clear on a number of occasions. In one of his books, he recalled a joint party meeting in 1967 when he was the Minister for the Navy. The Prime Minister at the time was Harold Holt and the leader of the then Country Party was Black Jack McEwen. At the time, the coalition backbench was becoming increasingly critical of the government. Menzies would not have tolerated it for a second, but Holt was unwilling or unable to control his backbenchers. Chipp remembered that McEwen got more and more angry, not just at the backbenchers but at Holt for allowing the abuse to continue. According to Chipp, McEwen leapt to his feet—I cannot repeat everything of what McEwen said—and said in part: ‘Okay, if you want leadership, I’ll give you’—blank—‘leadership. This is what the government has decided and that is what we are going to do.’ Chipp recalled that it had a remarkable effect and there was no more abuse.

I am sure that Don Chipp remembered McEwen’s easy command of the coalition party at the time, when he wrote about the qualities needed by the Leader of the Democrats. He said that the leader had to:

... command the character to manage and contain the egos of fellow Democrat senators, all of whom are sensitive, highly intelligent, caring and generally prickly personalities. It is not an easy call.

And he was right.

It is a task that Don Chipp achieved from 1977 until his retirement in 1986. He later despaired of his party’s future, but its possible fate will not affect his place in Australian political history. Don Chipp will be remembered for having made a significant personal contribution to Australian politics and as a person who was devoted to his beliefs and who was very passionate about prosecuting those beliefs and arguing on behalf of them. I join the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in offering my condolences to his wife, Idun, and his six children.

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