Don Chipp

Don Chipp 1977

Donald Leslie Chipp (born August 21, 1925 in Melbourne , † August 28, 2006 in Richmond ) was an Australian politician , minister and long-time founding chairman of the Australian Democratic Party, the Australian Democrats .

School education, military service and job

During the Second World War he served in the Royal Australian Air Force. After studying at the University of Melbourne, from which he graduated with a degree in business administration, he played Australian football for a few years and also played a few games in the top league. The enthusiastic athlete was also a finalist in the highly regarded Stawell Gift Run. From 1950 to 1955 he was in the administration of the National Accountant Institute. In 1955 he became chief executive of the Citizens Committee of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne . After the Games, he worked as the manager of the Victoria Funding Committee while also setting up his own management consultancy.

Political career

After a seat on the city council of the Melbourne suburb of Kew from 1958 to 1961, he was a member of the bourgeois Liberal Party in the Australian House of Representatives in 1960 , where he represented a constituency of Melbourne until 1968.

minister

On January 26, 1966, Prime Minister Harold Holt made him Minister of the Navy and Tourism. After the death of Holts he was of his successor John Gorton not entrusted more with a ministerial post, presumably because Chipp its competitors Billy Snedden had supported in the race for Holt's successor and partly no doubt because Chipp another commission of inquiry with regard to the destruction of the naval ship HMAS Voyager after a collision in 1964. John Gorton was possibly vulnerable here as Minister of the Navy from 1958–63. After the 1969 elections, however, Gorton appointed him to his cabinet. Don Chipp was Minister for Customs and Excise Taxes until March 1971, succeeding Malcolm Scott . In this office he received nationwide attention due to the far-reaching abolition of censorship for printed matter, the import permit for novels such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer , and the permission to sell Playboy magazine . These actions made him popular with many people, but on the other hand led to disagreements with his party friends, who considered him too liberal. During this time, Chipp belonged to Snedden and Andrew Peacock of the so-called "small" l "Liberals" group in the Liberal Party, that is, to those who are more liberal values, here liberal with a small "l" as the orientation of the Liberal Party, here Liberal with a capital "L", felt obliged.

After the Liberal Party's defeat in 1972, he was shadow minister for social security. He remained a strong supporter of Billy Snedden, who became chairman of the Liberal Party after the election defeat, but was also defeated by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the 1974 election.

Although the Liberal Chairman since March 1975, Malcolm Fraser , appointed Chipp to his interim cabinet as Minister for Social Security, Health, Repatriation and Compensation after the governor-general's dismissal of Whitlam by November 11, 1975, he was part of that cabinet after the election in December 1975 , which was to rule until 1983, no longer.

Founder and Chairman of the "Australian Democrats"

After an increasingly disappointing year as a "backbencher", Chipp finally resigned from the Liberal Party in 1977 to found the Australian Democrats at the end of the same year and to remain its chairman until 1986.

For the new party, he was elected to the Senate together with his party colleague Colin Mason , who represented New South Wales , in the December 1977 election. As a senator, he was involved in several important environmental and social processes and played an important role in stopping the “Franklin Reservoir Project”. In the 1980 federal election, the Democrats first " tipped the scales " in the Senate, a role that they would often play until 2004.

In December 1986 he resigned from the chairmanship of the Democrats and was replaced by Janine Haines . In 2001 he ran unsuccessfully as Lord Mayor of Melbourne. After that, the politician, who had Parkinson's disease , rarely stepped out in public. Nevertheless, he gave an opening speech at the party conference of the Australian Democrats, which were already in a deep crisis at the time, in Melbourne in May 2006. Don Chipp died in August and was given a state funeral. It is questionable whether the party he founded will survive long. After the federal elections in 2007, it lost its last seats and is now only represented in parliament in South Australia .

Web links

• Short biography on the homepage of the Don Chipp Foundation ( Memento from February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
• Article on the death of Don Chipp in the "Sydney Morning Herald"