Don Chipp dies at 81

Don Chipp's energy, idealism and frankness won him votes and friends across the political spectrum, but estranged him from the right of the Liberal Party, with whom he'd been a federal minister before he defected and helped found the Democrats.
When he quit politics a decade later, the new party, through its numbers in the Senate, had become a genuine third force in Australian politics.
But he lived long enough to see it wither in the face of competition from the Greens and internal personal and organisational fighting.
And he came to believe that he'd failed to deliver on his most famous promise.
He'd not only failed to keep the bastards honest, he hadn't even defined who the bastards are.
Donald Leslie Chipp, who died yesterday aged 81 was born in Melbourne on August 21, 1925 and brought up in a working class, Labor-leaning home in Northcote. His mother Jessie remembered him being "as deep as the ocean".
He joined the RAAF during World War II, studied for a commerce degree from the University of Melbourne and became a management consultant.
A fine sportsman, he played Australian rules football for Fitzroy and spent 10 years on the professional sprint circuit.
Chipp was soon active on a wider stage, particularly as CEO of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games civic committee. Two years later he was chairman of Victoria's first doorknock cancer appeal. He's credited with raising more than 300,000 pounds in two hours.
He entered federal parliament as Liberal member for Higinbotham (later Hotham) in 1960 and in 1966, in the aftermath of the Voyager disaster, became Navy Minister. Inevitably, he couldn't have held the position otherwise, he supported the Vietnam war - support he later bitterly recanted.
It was in his next job, the normally inconspicuous customs and excise portfolio, that he made his name.
To the delight of libertarians and the disgust of many conservatives he cleared a big list of long censored books, like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. He took no action against the subversive Little Red School Book. He also published the list of banned books, which had been secret.
He delighted in confounding the wowsers. Years later, he speculated that they didn't like sex because they weren't much good at it.
Chipp became alarmed by the growing use of drugs. But after a world tour he warned that governments couldn't control the supply, alienating much of the establishment, which wanted a big brother minister rather than one who told them they should look after their kids themselves.

There was to be a personally traumatic aftermath many years later when Greg, the eldest of his four children with his first wife Monica, became a heroin addict.
Chipp, though retained on the Liberal frontbench during the Whitlam years, soon fell out with Malcolm Fraser. The roots of the antagonism went back to when Fraser helped bring down former prime minister John Gorton, whom Chipp admired.
After Fraser swept to power, he left Chipp out of his ministry.
Neil Brown, who was briefly deputy Liberal leader in the 1980s, says in his acerbic memoirs that Fraser should have swallowed his pride and offered Chipp a harmless portfolio, which he would have accepted.
Instead, in a major misjudgment, he left Chipp out in the cold, setting in train the events that led to the formation of the Democrats, the coalition's 1983 defeat and the long years in opposition that followed.
In March 1977, Chipp resigned from the Liberals.
He rejected suggestions he was quitting because he wasn't in cabinet, saying he couldn't serve as a minister under Fraser.
After savaging both major parties, 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 the middle of the road policies which would owe allegiance to no outside pressure group.
"Perhaps it may be the right time to test that proposition."
Chipp is generally described as the founder of the Democrats, though that ignores a lot of history.
One predecessor was the Australia Party, originally the Liberal Reform Group started by the idealistic businessman Gordon Barton, an early opponent of the Vietnam war. The other was the Liberal Movement in South Australia, which became the New Liberal Movement after some of its founders returned to the official Liberal fold.
But they'd made little electoral impact outside South Australia and were looking for a new start under a new, nationally known leader. They flirted with Gorton and even Gough Whitlam's name was mentioned.
Chipp was the ideal choice and quickly became the public face as he criss-crossed the country, a bundle of ever-available, ever-quotable energy. However, he inherited most of the Australia Party's policies and its commitment to participatory democracy.
The party was formed in May 1977 and seven months later was fighting an election with a four-page document called Summary of Principles and Provisional Policies.

Chipp packed them in. It was a full house of 1500 at Camberwell Town Hall in Melbourne for the campaign launch, where he promised an alternative to the "politics of cynicism, character assassination and misleading statistics".
Chipp in Victoria and Colin Mason in NSW were elected to the senate and the party went close in other states. Moreover, Janine Haines filled a South Australian vacancy caused by a Liberal Movement resignation.
In 1980, the Democrats increased their representation to five, giving them the balance of power - a position they were to hold or share until 2005.
However, Chipp insisted that senators were obliged to vote according to their conscience, which meant they would not always vote as a bloc.
There were also differing views on when the Democrats should use their new power to defeat government legislation. Chipp thought the promise to keep the bastards honest obliged the Democrats to support any measure the government had taken to an election campaign. He called their position "the balance of reason".
He was less enthusiastic about doing deals than some of his successors.
Chipp, in the pre-Green days, was one of parliament's most passionate environmentalists, especially after rafting down the Franklin River. The Democrats were the first political opponents of the Tasmanian government's plan to dam the river.
From the beginning, the party was troubled by competing egos, though Chipp - unlike some of his successors - was able to contain them.
Despite ill health, he also kept up his Don Chipp Travelling Road Shows, often by light plane to remote places. He'd talk to anyone.
He was greatly assisted, after their marriage in 1979, by Austrian architect Idun Welz.
Chipp retired in 1986 after 25 years in parliament. He was followed by Janine Haines, his choice and the first woman to lead a significant political party in Australia.
While he had more time to enjoy watching the two girls from his second marriage mature, he never really retired.
He had an active career as a media commentator, was a pro-monarchist delegate to the constitutional convention (later he admitted to sexual fantasies about the Queen) and ran unsuccessfully to be lord mayor of Melbourne.
He and Idun made a documentary about the devastation caused by landmines in Vietnam and Cambodia, his definitive mea culpa for the Vietnam war.
And, as his health declined and Parkinson's disease developed, he watched the decline of the party he propelled to such prominence.

He retained to the end the hope that they could rise again, though Idun resigned in 1996 because it had become unrecognisable from the party they'd formed. She cited the growing influence of "left-wing fringe-thinkers" and opposition to the part sale of Telstra, a policy the Howard Government had taken to the electorate.
Chipp had strong, though not always accurate, opinions to the end.
He thought Mark Latham was a certainty in 2004 because he couldn't believe the people would re-elect a prime minister who'd gone to war on a lie.
Chipp was a singular politician who belonged to neither left nor right. His guiding principle was English philosopher John Stuart Mill's insistence that majority opinion should always be questioned.
But he admitted he'd got his promise to keep the bastards honest wrong by over-simplifying the problem and concentrating on the politicians.
The real bastards were the millions who reacted to a problem with another beer and a shrugged "She'll be right, mate"; the shareholders who supported uranium mining because of the profits; the bankers who welcomed foreign takeovers because they were good for profits; the unions who encouraged forest destruction because it pleased their members; lawyers who opposed simplifying workers' compensation because that would threaten their holiday homes.
"These are the real bastards, and they are represented in Canberra with sickening fidelity by members of the Liberal, National and Labor parties," he wrote soon after quitting politics.
That's vintage Chipp.
With his slept-in face, his passionate energy, his gadfly challenging of accepted truths and his engaging personality, he made a difference.
Which is precisely what he wanted to do.