Ben Chifley

"No treasurer, and indeed no Prime Minsiter, so profoundly affected the domestic life and future history of our country," wrote the great newspaper man Sir Keith Murdoch. "He was a great Australian idealist, an able and kindly man, serene, severe but sincere. So far as Australia is a 'welfare state' Mr Chifley is responsible." Yet the successful political leader in Chifley never obscured the man. "He had an abundance," said R.G. Menzies, "those human qualities of easy informality, of deep conviction, of quiet humour and of engaging frankness which made him, in the old phrase, a 'man's man."