John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House record its deep regret at the death on 28 August, 2006 of the Honourable Donald Leslie Chipp, AO, former Federal Minister in the House of Representatives, the founder and former Leader of the Australian Democrats and Senator for Victoria and place on record its appreciation of his long and meritorious public service and tender its profound sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

The Australian community has already had an opportunity, at a wonderful state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne on Saturday, to pay a deserved tribute to the late Don Chipp. Don Chipp was the eldest of four boys, born into a working class family from Northcote, Victoria on 21 August 1925. He was educated at Northcote High School and at the age of 18 joined the RAAF, where he served for two years during World War II. Always a fierce competitor after the war, he became an accomplished sprinter, footballer—and he turned out three times for Fitzroy in the VFL—and cricketer. In that last mentioned capacity he claims to have been the last person ever to bat with Don Bradman in a cricket match. He played for Robert Menzies’ Prime Minister’s XI and is recorded as having been the non-striker when Don Bradman, aged 54, was dismissed for the last time, for four, in a game against the touring English side at Manuka Oval in February, 1963. He studied commerce at the University of Melbourne and went on to work as a management consultant. Before entering federal politics he served as a councillor for Kew City Council for six years, and he was chief executive officer of the Olympic Games Civic Committee and was chairman of Victoria’s first doorknock cancer appeal.

As many will know, he entered federal parliament in a by-election as the Liberal member for the seat of Higginbotham. After a redistribution, he later became the member for Hotham, a seat he represented in the parliament until his resignation to contest a Senate position in the 1977 election. He was appointed Minister for the Navy in the Holt government—the beginning of many years service as a Liberal Party minister, serving in the Holt, Gorton and McMahon governments as well as briefly in the caretaker Fraser government late in 1975. He was Minister for Customs and Excise under John Gorton in 1969, a position he held until the defeat of the McMahon government in 1972. He was Deputy Leader of the House of Representatives from 1971 to 1972 and Leader of the House for a short time in 1972.

In opposition, during the years of the Whitlam government, he was a member of the shadow ministry and was responsible for social security and welfare matters. As mentioned, he served briefly as a member of the caretaker Fraser government until the election on 13 December, 1975, and it is fair to say that his non-appointment to the Fraser government after the election of 13 December, 1975 was a very significant moment in his political life. In March of 1977 Don Chipp resigned from the Liberal Party to form and lead the Australian Democrats. He was elected as a senator for Victoria and he served from 1978 until his retirement from federal parliament in 1986, after 25 years of service. In 1992, Don Chipp was made an officer of the Order of Australia for his service to the Australian Parliament.

It is likely that Don Chipp will best be remembered for his role in founding and leading the Australian Democrats. It was very difficult to typecast Don Chipp. His position on a number of issues was counterintuitive. It is fair to say, however, that he had a very strong commitment to a number of things, including an enduring commitment to the Australian environment. He did believe—and he acted this out in the last years of his public life and during his career in this parliament—very strongly that there was an important place in Australian public life for a third force. The validity of that proposition will continue to be the subject of debate. It is fair to say that in my lifetime two parties claiming that mantle have had a significant impact on Australian politics, in their different ways—namely, the Australian Democrats and the Democratic Labor Party, and probably the Democratic Labor Party greater than the other.

In my view, Don Chipp’s most enduring quality was his relentless passion and his commitment to issues. What I admired most about Don Chipp was that he really did believe in something. He did not go into public life simply to be there, to be a participant—he was a true believer. As my former colleague and friend Andrew Peacock remarked after the state funeral on Saturday in Melbourne, he had not met anybody in public life who was more passionate and more committed to the issues in which he believed than Don Chipp, and I think that encapsulates the character of Don Chipp.

I did not agree with many of the positions Don Chipp took, and I did agree with quite a lot that he took. He was a passionate opponent of compulsory unionism. He was a very strong defender of the Australian Constitution. On the other hand, he took some positions on foreign affairs and defence that I certainly did not share. But, whatever one thought of his views, you knew what they were. He put them with passion and he put them with conviction. He was a very decent, committed, passionate Australian and we will miss him. He made a great contribution to public life in this country. On behalf of the government, I offer my sincere sympathy to his wife, Idun, and to his children, Debbie, John, Greg, Melissa, Juliet and Laura.

Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and support the remarks of the Prime Minister. The opposition joins the Prime Minister’s expression of condolence to the Chipp family on behalf of the Liberal Party and the government. We extend our deepest sympathy to Don’s wife, Idun, their daughters Juliet and Laura and his children from his first marriage, Greg, Melissa, Debbie and John.

It is probably a shame for the memory of Don Chipp that there is no representative of the Australian Democrats in this House to analyse his life and his contribution. Suffice it to say that those of us who are not of his political party nevertheless recognise, in his passing from life, the passing of a very substantial Australian political figure. All political parties draw great comfort and strength from those who, in their lives and in their performance, become their party icons. We in the Australian Labor Party draw great strength from the memory of people like Ben Chifley and John Curtin. They are powerful influences on the lives of all those in the present parliamentary Labor Party, although of course none of us met them.

The Democrats are able to draw similar sustenance from the life and example of Don Chipp. He was a figure of considerable substance in the Australian political scene. He was a figure of substance before he became Leader of the Australian Democrats. He had had a substantial career, both as a member of the House of Representatives for some 17 years and as a minister of state in the then Liberal government, and he made a major mark on Australian politics during that period. He was Minister for the Navy at a point when, generally speaking, it was a terminal career appointment. Most ministers of the Navy subsequently found themselves no longer ministers as they struggled with the consequences and the difficulties that were experienced in the Navy, particularly the issues associated with various royal commissions on the collision between the aircraft carrier Melbourne and the destroyer Voyager.

Don Chipp survived those inquiries; nevertheless, they had their impact on him. In his book Don Chipp: the third man he wrote of the Voyager story. The whole Voyager story indicates how a parliamentary system can be abused for personal aggrandisement, revenge and pointscoring and to destroy reputations. It also shows how decisions not in the public interest can be made by politicians for expediency. One thing you can say about the life of Don Chipp was that he learned from every experience that he had in the parliament. His views were a work in progress. While he held those views very firmly, he changed as a result of the experiences he confronted when he was in public life. He listened to what people were saying to him.

I suspect he will be best remembered, from his ministerial career point of view, for  his role as Minister for Customs. As Minister for Customs he pursued what might be described as a liberal agenda. It was probably one of the reasons why he ceased to be a minister in the Fraser government, which was elected in 1975. In a period of time when Australians were thinking through the social institutions which governed them, his position was that Australians ought to be in a position where, within reason, they could see, read and think anything they chose to. He was within the strand of tradition in Liberal politics that most associated with 19th century liberalism. Mungo McCullum wrote of him:

He was an idealistic liberal. Nowadays that would be a contradiction in terms. He never lost his belief that idealism was the only real basis for politics in a civil society. To the end he played the game as he played his cricket—determined to win but always within both the rules and spirit of the code as he saw it.

I recollect as a youngster visiting parliament, sitting in the chamber and watching him debate with his Labor counterparts. It cannot for one moment be said that at any point of time Don Chipp had a flirtation with the notion of being in any way, shape or form favourably disposed to my side of politics. He was a vehement advocate of the government’s position against us—vehement and annoying.

I can recollect Jim Cairns, when he was Don Chipp’s trades spokesman counterpart, standing up in the Old Parliament House and being constantly heckled by Don Chipp to the point where Cairns was finally fed up with it. In personal debate, Jim was in many ways the most gentle of men but he leant across the table to Minister Chipp and said, ‘The honourable member knows nothing about this subject’—it was a trade matter they were discussing—‘as I have occasion to know, having had the dubious pleasure of marking his papers at Melbourne University.’ That would not have fazed Don Chipp for a minute. I suspect that when he experienced strong ideological disagreements with his colleagues confronting his liberalism with their conservatisim, he ultimately decided to go down the road of a third force. In his resignation speech in 1977, he said:

I wonder whether the ordinary voter is not becoming sick and tired of the vested interests which unduly influence the present political patterns and yearn for the emergence of a third political force, representing middle-of-the-road politics which would owe allegiance to no outside pressure group. Perhaps it may be the right time to test that proposition.

Michelle Grattan wrote of him:

Passionate, intense, emotional; he never felt, or did, things by halves. His personality was multi-coloured. His reactions were sometimes exaggerated. Deeply angered by a pretty mild reference I made in an article when he was still in the Liberals, he didn’t speak to me for several years; then he gave me a leak on his resignation from the party. His face evolved from matinee idol to its famous wrinkled form, outward sign of a complex inner journey.

He was a complex man. I could only know him, if you like, tangentially from those observations of him when I was a boy visiting parliament and then, ultimately, when I was a member of parliament in this chamber. I knew him briefly when I was a minister and he was the then Leader of the Democrats in the Senate. But you were conscious of a person with a powerful influence. He built a third party force in Australian politics based around centrist notions, that there was room between the very broadly based Labor and Liberal parties for another view of the world. It was a very challenging proposition.

We pride ourselves in this place on being a broad church. I have heard the Prime Minister use that expression and I have used it myself. I have described our side of politics as ‘a broad church’, and I have heard the Prime Minister describe his side of politics as a broad church as well. That is the conventional way that we tend to view our political parties, and it would suggest that, aside from single issue concerns, there would not be much room for a centre party. Don Chipp challenged that notion and he challenged it successfully.

It is very much to his credit that the political force that he created has lived on for at least 20 years from the time that he led it. That is considerable longevity and a demonstration that he created something beyond himself, not just of himself, and that he touched a note of some value and sensitivity in Australian politics.

As I said at the outset, we express our deepest condolences to members of his family. They can be proud of their husband and father. The Democrats can be proud of the man who founded and led them. They can draw sustenance from his memory and sustenance from his example.

Mark Vaile (Lyne, National Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to 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.

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don Chipp, as others have said, was a fierce competitor both in politics and in sport, but he combined that with a fierce care for people. So many people have described him as a larrikin who will certainly be remembered for his way with words. Apart from his very well-known quote of ‘keeping the bastards honest’, many Australians will remember Don Chipp for some of his other ones, and I will repeat some of the more famous of those. He claimed that wowsers did not like sex because, ‘They’re no good at it.’ He took his pro-monarchist position to a new level by declaring that he ‘fancied the Queen’.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Abbott interjecting

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Obviously agreed to by the Leader of the House. It was that larrikin spirit that gave him the courage to stand by his convictions and encouraged many Australians to vote for him. He was certainly an uncompromising and ambitious character. When he left the Fraser government he described it as ‘too right wing’. But he did not become an Independent or retire from politics; he founded a new political party. That was an extraordinary response from a man who was dropped from the ministry and was frustrated with the state of party politics in the parliament, which he saw as becoming ‘increasingly farcical as a place of real debate’. He gave voice to his frustration and seemingly predicted the birth of the Democrats in his 1977 resignation speech to parliament, in which he said:

The parties seem to polarise on almost every issue, sometimes seemingly just for the sake of it, and I wonder whether the ordinary voter is not becoming sick and tired of the vested interests which unduly influence the present political parties and yearns for the emergence of a third political force.

Whilst I do not agree with what he said, the electorate success that followed for the Australian Democrats was certainly a major achievement for which Don Chipp will be remembered. Geoffrey Barker summed it up well in the Australian Financial Review, writing after Don Chipp’s death:

It takes a rare combination of ego, energy and outrage to impose a new centrist third party on a mature two-party political system.

Although Don Chipp said, ‘I do not feel alarmed now at the power of my personal ego,’ a lot of his motivation was to change things for the good of others. He was particularly passionate about the environment, and cited a 25 per cent cut in overseas aid as one of the reasons he was leaving the Liberal Party. As customs and excise minister he changed Australian censorship laws, refusing to ban the Little Red Schoolbook and lifting bans on other works, not necessarily because he agreed with what they said but because he disagreed with censorship.

Don Chipp’s stance identified him as a small ‘l’ Liberal and certainly made him some enemies among conservatives. He was even accused of ‘radically subverting Australia’. Don Chipp did not confine his efforts of ‘keeping the bastards honest’ only to those of the Liberal or Labor persuasion. His commitment to honesty extended to the media. Michelle Grattan wrote a terrific story in the Age about Don Chipp’s ruse to forestall press criticism when, despite his reforming approach, he felt he had to cut a sex scene out of the Swedish movie Like Night and Day. He wrote a press release explicitly describing the offending scene, and then he called a press conference and challenged the press gallery—in his words, ‘Now let’s see if you bastards have got the guts to print it.’ Even the bravest so-called bastard published only a toned down version and did not criticise Chipp’s censorship of the film.

He certainly was not afraid of attacking either the Liberal or Labor parties, or in recent times even the Australian Democrats. He regretted his own strong support of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and he later became equally strong in his opposition to it. Don Chipp not only wanted to hold others accountable; he applied those high standards to himself.

He certainly had a lot of friends in politics despite being described by Paul Kelly as ‘a constantly infuriated paradox who radicalised with age’. In Don Chipp’s typical larrikin fashion, he criticised Australians for political apathy, a theme which he revisited many times during his career. There is no question that he cared much for his family and the Australians he called the underdogs. He said upon leaving the parliament in 1986:

All I want to be remembered for by my wife and loved ones is that he was a good, old honest bastard and he gave it his best shot.

When asked by the Australian in 2004 about his most treasured possession, Don Chipp referred the question back to his family and came back with the answer: ‘The capacity to love, the capacity to be loved. Is that too corny?’ No, it is not corny and I am sure his family knew that he loved them. We send our condolences to them for their loss and for Australia’s loss.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the debate be adjourned.

Question agreed to, honourable members standing in their places.