Loose cannons

Horror!

"An Australian National Audit Office study of the administration of the work test for unemployment benefit between 1989 and 1990 has found Commonwealth Employment Service officers believed finding unemployed people a job was their main task, rather than applying the test." — Sydney Morning Herald, November 6.

Wanted: one Rasputin

"I have not ruled out the possibility of one day coming to power." — Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, heir to the tsars of Russia (and who has lived all his life in France).

I'm normal

"People always get me wrong, always try to portray me as this weirdo or this kook out on a limb ... They think I'm obsessed with curbing sex." — Right-wing bigot Reverend Fred Nile, who went on to explain to the November 9-10 Australian that he was told by his god to go and become a martyr in South America before his orders were changed and he was instructed to enter the NSW parliament.

Born again

"The cabinet is prisoner to the extreme right and they're espousing policies which have been discredited everywhere else in the world." — Right-wing former New Zealand prime minister Robert Muldoon on the present National Party government of Jim Bolger, in which he is a backbencher.

Unfair

"I should not have been put through this by any political opponent. I wouldn't do it to anyone else. I think it is gutter politics at its worst." — Tasmanian Liberal Party leader Robin Gray after a royal commission found that he had been improperly involved in an attempt to bribe a Labor MP, that he had lied to police, been deceitful and may have wanted to keep $10,000 donated to the party.

Butt out

This is "the only anti-fag legislation we would ever support". — Paul Costello of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, replying to a Tobacco Institute proposal for a united front against a bill to ban tobacco advertising because Fred Nile is supporting it. The bill is being supported by the Labor Party.

From GLW issue 35