Loose cannons

Spot the madman

"The bulk of licensed sporting shooters would have quality guns worth more than $4000 each. You don't buy those sorts of weapons to kill people. It's the madmen who buy the cheaper variety." — John Wyche of the NSW Sporting Shooters' Association.

Carr and Kennett aren't enough?

"The Federal Government will ask the States this week to offer additional [incentives] to migrants to settle outside Sydney and Melbourne." — Sydney Morning Herald, May 15.

Adviser to dinosaurs

"Tactics of open-ended down-sizing and real wage compression are ultimately recipes for industrial extinction ... If all you do is cut, you will eventually be left with nothing, with no market share." — Neo-liberal guru Stephen S. Roach, one-time chief forecaster for the US Federal Reserve, having belated second thoughts.

Sales pitch

"I'd much rather go to war against a country that has bought US equipment ... If they got equipment from the United States, I know damn well what they got in their inventory, I know what their readiness is ... I also know what their tactics are, and I know how to defeat their weapons." — US Rear Admiral John Snyder, advocating more US arms sales to the Third World (quoted in Arms Sales Monitor and the US Nation).

World's greatest toady

"The Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Trade Minister, Mr Fischer, met Indonesia's President Soeharto yesterday — and said he was perhaps the world's greatest figure in the latter half of the 20th century." — Sydney Morning Herald, May 15.

Westminster system

"This does not get in the way of the minister's conduct in the Westminster system." — A spokesman for federal primary industries and energy minister John Anderson on the minister deciding woodchip export quotas while his wife holds shares in Boral Ltd, a major woodchip exporter.

From GLW issue 232