Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

A week ago last night the founding leader of the Australian Democrats, the Hon. Don Chipp, passed away. My fellow Victorian Democrats and I were deeply saddened by Don’s death although we knew him to be frail—indeed, he had been gravely ill in hospital on occasions over the last few years.

It was a great honour to know Don and I have no hesitation whatsoever in calling him a great man. But I want to start by talking about Don, the man. He was passionate, idealistic and committed to social, environmental and economic reform. He was, as a result of that, also popular. He is widely mourned by his enormous circle of friends, family and colleagues, especially the media and the people who knew him through the media, heard him at town hall meetings or met him in the street. He was a very public man with a strong sense of public good—the common good. He was seen as refreshingly honest. I doubt he had many secrets. He shared the joys of his family life with anyone who would care to listen. He talked openly about his physical condition even though he never complained. He was charismatic, self-effacing sometimes, a joker, a sharp critic, a master at clever, usually spot-on retorts, highly intelligent and highly motivated to save the world from powerful forces of self-interest.

Former political leaders this week have called him principled—driven by very clear principles about how politics and relationships ought to be conducted. At his funeral two days ago we heard from his children what he was like as a father—terrifying, exhilarating, smelling of aftershave and cigars, but above all loving and nurturing. A man with a passion for language, clear thinking, clear expression, ideas, argument, sport and having fun. Speechmaking at family functions was routine and everyone was expected to do it.

He was a monarchist but a strong believer in democracy. He was a practising Christian but irreverent too. He believed in free enterprise and was suspicious of the welfare state, but he was also a man for the underdog, compassionate, a man of contradictions. He was indeed complex. He also had high expectations of himself and others. He planned his own funeral. Played in the cathedral were John Farnham singing Help and Zorba the Greek, slotted in alongside choristers and organists making centuries-old music. The coffin made its way out of St Paul’s to the waiting hearse to the swing of a jazz band. Something tells me he wanted us to enjoy his funeral and to leave it with a spring in our step.

Despite his disabling conditions, his daughter Laura says he danced the night away at her party just a couple of weeks ago. He never lost the fire in his belly against injustice; he was antiwar, antinuclear, anti dishonesty, anti artifice. He was pro women—with four daughters and two wives that is hardly surprising. After almost a decade and four elections he left his beloved party in the hands of a woman, Janine Haines, the first female leader of any party in the country, a leader we also said goodbye to just two years earlier.

In his confidence in women, and in so many other ways, he was a man ahead of his time. He was pushing for ethanol as an alternative to petrol before most Australians even knew what it was. He led Australia out of the dark ages of censorship. He saw nothing wrong with lovemaking or people writing about it. He was tolerant, but suspicious of wowsers. I hardly knew Don when he told me the tale of inviting a colleague into a motel room on an election campaign trail and enjoying his shock at seeing Idun, his wife, in her nightie breast-feeding one of their daughters. One of his staffers at the funeral described the Chipp entourage making its way to Canberra back and forth as the ‘Chipp circus’. The babies and the prams and the beloved german shepherd all piled into the Comcar.

A couple of years ago he told me he could not understand what all the fuss was about internal party disputes. Senators in our party, just like the others, have never got on with one another, he said. Some apparently even refused to come to party room meetings, declaring them a total waste of time. It was perfectly okay for Don for people to disagree. He approved of the conscience vote not just for euthanasia and stem cell research but for anything. He strongly believed it was the antithesis of democracy to coerce party members into voting all the same way and he saw to it that our processes allowed MPs to vote not only according to conscience but according to the evidence as they saw it or to properly represent the interests of their state.

I want to put on record some comments made by two important Democrats not able to be part of this debate. Former Senator Sid Spindler from Victoria said:

Don should be remembered less for the keeping them honest slogan, a quixotic endeavour at best, than for the substance of these and other policies he so insistently and courageously took into the public arena. Many of his priorities were ahead of that time in the eighties when he secured a bridgehead for the Australian Democrats, advocating unpopular causes like a capital gains tax, a place for women in Australian politics, drug law reform, justice for Indigenous Australians, sitting down with their leaders for three days in Alice Springs, long before the term ‘reconciliation’ was coined.

I was one of several Australia Party members who had urged him to have a go at “changing the world” and have a go he did. Later, when I worked with him on a daily basis I came to respect him for his honesty, his sincerity, his passionate belief that the impossible could be achieved. He came close to it.

Heather Jeffcoat, Acting President of the Democrats, said:

He set the audiences on fire with his passionate views. Indeed, in a letter to members in July 1977 he said: “we are going like a rocket”. He was not wrong.

Don was also a charmer, a very kind of person, genuinely interested in the welfare of everyone around him, with a deep interest in what it means to be a human being, as evidenced by his statement to members:

One of the most exhilarating and satisfying experiences a human being can have is showing tolerance to a different view and being big enough to agree to disagree with another person and still maintain a close relationship.

Don also leaves an extraordinary and enduring legacy in politics. He said:

Politics is not a profession—it is a disease. To do the ultimate good, one must be at the seat of ultimate power and the seat of power is politics.

Don served in the RAAF during World War II, studied commerce at the University of Melbourne, was the Chief Executive Officer of the Melbourne Olympics Civic Committee and was elected to the Kew Council. But Don was not a one-dimensional career politician; he was also a family man, spent time overseas and was a talented sportsperson—playing a few games for the Fitzroy football club, playing district cricket and dabbling in professional sprinting. Perhaps his greatest claim to sporting fame was as the last batsmen to partner Sir Donald Bradman in the 1963 PM’s XI against England.

Don eventually entered the House of Representatives in a by-election for the seat of Higinbotham in 1960. At that stage he was 35. It was not long before his independence of mind and attachment to principle were to show themselves. In 1961, as a backbencher, Don voted against a government bill imposing capital punishment. In 1966, in the aftermath of the Voyager-Melbourne Navy disaster which took the lives of 82 sailors, Don became Navy minister. It was during this time, as he dealt with the storm that arose from allegations about the cause of the tragic accident, that his disillusionment with the way the major parties used the parliamentary system was crystallised. Don wrote in his autobiography:

The whole Voyager story indicates how a parliamentary system can be abused ... how decisions can be made by politicians which are not in the public interest, but for expediency.

Don was made Minister for Customs and Excise in 1969 and it was during this time that he made what was probably his biggest contribution as a minister and when his credentials as a small ‘l’ liberal were most on show. Don realised the absurdity of Australia’s outdated censorship laws and he worked against formidable opposition to liberalise them—even going so far as to show movies for other members and explain why they should be made available for adult viewing. Don also cleared a big list of long-censored books when the list of banned books was itself banned. That did not stop Don. He published the secret list and, by his own account, allowed members of parliament and journalists to take home banned books of literary merit. The Little Red Schoolbook, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Marijuana Papers, The Boys in the Band and Carnal Knowledge were liberated.

After being dumped from the ministry by the Prime Minister at the time, Malcolm Fraser, and sent to the backbench in March 1977, Don resigned from the Liberal Party. Some say the Democrats owe their formation to former Prime Minister Fraser—perhaps, but I think his dissatisfaction with his own party and the opposition would have led Don to that decision in any case. He resigned over five issues: the 25 per cent cut in foreign aid; the abolition of the Australian Assistance Plan—one of the most exciting and progressive social reforms ever undertaken, according to Don; the abolition of the funeral benefits for pensions; the breach of the promise to index pensions; and the decision to devalue the currency and the refusal to lower tariffs so as to contain the inflationary effect of that move.

In his resignation speech, he criticised both the Whitlam and Fraser governments. Don said:

I wonder if the ordinary voter is not becoming sick and tired of the vested interests which unduly influence political parties and yearns for the emergence of a third political force, representing middle-of-the-road policies that would owe allegiance to no outside pressure group.

So began the coalescence of the Australian Democrats—a party based on small ‘l’ liberalism and participatory democracy, an alternative to the major parties which transformed Australian politics.

Don became leader of this new party and its public face and his personal integrity, enthusiasm and frankness generated publicity, public interest and great momentum. Don crisscrossed the country, inspiring hundreds of thousands of people. He spoke at town hall meetings overflowing with people disenchanted with the main parties, fed up with, as he said, the ‘politics of cynicism, character assassination and misleading statistics’. In Don’s words, the Australian Democrats offered:

A politics of hope, of reconciliation, of openness, of optimism. We offer a politics based on three simple virtues that have been badly battered and abused ... I speak of honesty, I speak of tolerance and I speak of compassion.

In June 1977, just a few months after Don had resigned as a Liberal MP, the Australian Democrats were formally launched and barely six months later they were fighting a federal election. Back then the Democrats campaigned on unemployment, inflation, uranium, industrial relations and social policy—some things never change. Don won a Senate seat for the Democrats in Victoria with 16.3 per cent of the vote, as did Colin Mason in New South Wales with 8.3 per cent and we went very close in other states too—Ian Gilfillan polled 11.2 per cent and Jack Evans polled 12.5 per cent in WA.

Back then, as now, people said it was a flash in the pan; the Democrats were bound to fail at the next election. Don led the party for the best part of a decade, including for four federal elections. This was the beginning of the Democrats taking the balance of power—the main minor Senate party with which governments had to negotiate the path of critical legislation. By 1981 the Democrats held the balance of power—a role we held or shared for 24 years until the coalition gained their Senate majority last year. During this time the Democrats fulfilled the vision that Don and others had for our party.

At the launch of the campaign for the federal election in December 1977, Don said:

... our first objective is to secure a Senate seat in every State. This will give us balance of power, the balance of common-sense, the balance of wisdom, the balance of reason in the Senate. We solemnly undertake to exercise that power responsibly and constructively. ... Our role will be to restore the Senate to its proper function as a House of Review and a States House—not a party political house. We will not permit a Government to steam-roll through ill-considered legislation that will adversely affect the Australian people. We will ensure that all important legislation is thoroughly discussed and clearly understood inside and outside the parliament before it is passed. We will support and strengthen Committees to consider legislation and consult with the Australian people about the legislation before it is enacted.

This he delivered and this we still deliver. We respected the parliamentary processes and enhanced the Senate’s function as a house of review. We reformed Senate practices, especially Senate procedures and the committee system. We created a more dynamic Senate which challenged legislation and added real value through its committee work. While the Democrats held the balance of power, the Senate was neither a rubber stamp nor a house of obstruction. Most importantly, we exercised our power in the Senate in a fair and even-handed manner.

Don saw that Australian politics needed a third force and he created the Australian Democrats to fulfil that role. While Don may be gone, the need for a third force is not. With the government having the majority in the Senate, the Senate’s ability to act as a house of review has been largely dismantled as the government of the day has rushed to give itself more power and less accountability. The Democrats have always looked to hold the government of the day to its promises and negotiate between the government and the opposition. Don’s approach of seeking consensus and compromise more than conquest and political point scoring meant that he was able to obtain legislative concessions from successive governments, both Liberal and Labor—concessions that made legislation fairer for the disadvantaged as well as for ordinary Australians. This was a precedent continued by those who followed in Don’s footsteps and perhaps now even more than ever there is a need for the Democrats to play this role.

While many will see the party that Don founded as his legacy, we must not forget the issues and causes he championed with relentless passion. In many ways, as I said, Don was a politician ahead of his time. He was an early advocate for environmental causes and justice for Indigenous Australians. He was opposed to nuclear arms and uranium mining and played a central, if not leading, role in the saving of the Franklin River from being dammed.

Don never really retired and he never lost his enthusiasm or commitment to public service, even after leaving parliament in 1986. He had an active career as a media commentator, was a pro-monarchist delegate at the Constitutional Convention and stood for election as Melbourne’s lord mayor in 2001. Most recently with his wife he made a documentary about the devastation caused by landmines in Vietnam and Cambodia. Don has been quoted as saying that, ‘All I want to be remembered for by my wife, my kids, my loved ones, is that he was a good old honest bastard who gave it his best shot.’ He will be remembered for that and much more.

I take this opportunity to pass on our condolences to the family of Don Chipp: to his wife, Idun, to his six children—Debbie, John, Greg, Melissa, Juliet and Laura—and to other family members on what is a very great loss for them and for us. It is also a great loss for Australian politics and for the Australian people. We celebrate Don’s achievements and we mourn his passing.