Donald Leslie Chipp, AO (21 August 192528 August 2006) was an Australian politician who was the inaugural leader of the Australian Democrats, leading the party from 1977 to 1986. He began his career as a member of the Liberal Party, winning election to the House of Representatives in 1960 and serving as a government minister for a cumulative total of six years. Chipp left the Liberals in 1977 and was soon persuaded to lead a new party, the Democrats who, he famously proclaimed in 1980, would "keep the bastards honest". He was elected to the Senate on 10 December 1977 and led the party at four federal elections. From 1983 it held the sole balance of power in the Senate. Early life Don Chipp was born in Melbourne and educated at Northcote Primary School, Northcote High School and the University of Melbourne, where he graduated in commerce. After playing Australian rules football for Heidelberg, he played briefly in the Victorian Football League with the Fitzroy Football Club (playing three games in 1947, for one goal). He also played for Prahran in the VFA and was a member of their 1951 premiership side. A champion sprinter, he was narrowly defeated in the 1953 Stawell Gift foot race. After serving in the Royal Australian Air Force in World War II, Chipp worked as registrar of the Commonwealth Institute of Accountants from 1950 to 1955. In 1955, he was appointed chief executive officer of the Olympic Civic Committee which was involved in organising the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Later, he worked as manager of the Victorian Promotion Committee, and he also ran his own management consultancy. From 1958 to 1961, he was a member of the Kew City Council. Early parliamentary career Chipp entered federal politics in 1960 as the Liberal member for Higinbotham in Melbourne's southern bayside suburbs. After a redistribution in 1968, he transferred to the less safe seat of Hotham. He was given the Navy and Tourism portfolios by Prime Minister Harold Holt in 1967. After Holt's sudden disappearance in December 1967, Chipp retained those portfolios in the brief interim government of Country Party leader John McEwen, but he was dropped from the ministry by the new Liberal Prime Minister, John Gorton. That was partly because Chipp had supported another candidate, Billy Snedden, in the Liberal leadership ballot and partly because Chipp did not support a second Royal Commission