I found my way to your website via a bumper sticker I sat behind at the lights today. I'm in Canberra, I work for the Commonwealth and I LOVE the sticker. Tell me, where can I get one?

Margo: send your postal address to defendingourdemocracy@yahoo.com and we'll send you one. They're scarce at the moment, but more are being printed.

Am only 20 pages into the book but wanted to share a link with you - I had not heard of the book until I joined a ring for it on bookcrossing.com.

You might want to check out what others think of it -

www.bookcrossing.com/journal/1815478

I plan to write with something more constructive to say soon.

Dear Margo - I enjoyed your book over the weekend. But I reckon you do better on critique and analysis than on solutions (that said, you do better than most journalists). However, a book I really thought had some great solutions is: IMAGINING AUSTRALIA: IDEAS FOR OUR FUTURE, by four young Australian blokes. I'd be interested to know what you thought of it, and whether you agreed with their ideas. I'm recommending it to all my friends who liked your book, but finished it wanting more.

NHJ!(JR): Dunno about Margo, but I haven't read it yet, although it sounds very enticing - albeit (as my lefty scone understands fings) IA generally imagines Oz from a pro-market perspective (but hey, w/o the blessed market-beasty-thingy I 'spose NHJ! wouldn't be shifting so many units so fast, so go figure...). Besides, anything with the words 'imagine' and 'Australia' in the same sentence at this national juncture has got to be a winner.

Check out the 'Imagining Australia' website arced

John Howard was right. We cannot blame flawed military 'intelligence' or under-resourced agencies for getting things wrong on the presence and potency of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The blame rests on John Howard's shoulders. And he readily accepts the responsibility for committing Australian defence personnel to an invasion of a sovereign country that was no threat to Australia.

What is most alarming about these events, in our recent history, is just how easy it was for Mr Howard to dance to George W Bush's tune and join this barbaric assault on Iraq. It seems that Australia was committed by John Howard to this invasion, the ongoing conflict, the human tragedy, the environmental destruction, cultural vandalism and financial burden to Australians without needing the consent of the Australian Parliament.

Why was it so easy for our Prime Minister to commit us to a war against a country that did not threaten us?

If the Constitution gives him

NHJ continues to connect with readers around the country. Our mounting emails tells us this, so please keep sending your events, actions and ideas.

In just-in book chart news:

Abbey's Bookshop - Sydney. Bestsellers for July - number 3, non-fiction behind Paul McGeogh's Quarterly Essay & Bill Bryson in paperback.

Better Read Than Dead, Newtown, Sydney. July bestsellers - number 4, all books. (no separate fiction and non-fiction)

Gleebooks, Glebe, Sydney. Bestsellers for July - number 1, non-fiction!

Dear Margo, having just finished reading your book with my husband, I wanted you to know the extent to which your work has been important to us. We are the 'insignificant citizens' who live in the small villages around Australia and are forgotten by people like Howard.

My husband is a recipient of the Disability Allowance and I am his carer. He has been chronically ill for over 13 years. He worked for Telecom ( pre-Telstra) and was made redundant upon its changes and his illness. I have been an activist full time home maker and carer and our children have only just left home. So at 50 years of age we are on the ' dust-heap' of this great and prosperous nation.

Ever since Howard has attained power we have been made to feel in succession, thankful, guilty, shame, sorrow, useless, guilty, useless, unimportant, lazy, guilty, bludgers, takers, guilty, depressed, lonely, sad, guilty, alone, poor, struggling and, yes, guilty. This as well as dealing with poor health an

I read the book in one sitting last night, what a depressing read...From a middle class aspirational voter who is earning 100k plus and has been in a union for the last 20 years you would expect that I would be loving JWH's warm and comfortable Australia; far from it - I am very worried for the future of our young Democracy.

John Howard takes Aussies good natured lack of public activism too lightly. If the Peace Rally in Canberra had been full of Czechs or Bosnians or Indians, they would have stormed the Parliament house and tossed him out on his bleeding ear for ignoring 200,000 pissed-off citizens. That he could have marginalised almost a million of his constituents Australia-wide by implying that they didn't represent the views of the 'silent' majority was a cynical swipe at a marvellous display of public activism - it was broad based, well behaved and constructive.

What would I have liked to see in the book?

Why did JH want this war so badly? He isn't a stupid

A Canterbury Tale. Faster than Renee Rivkin More powerful than hydrogen sulphide Able to leap into ANY war Look, up in the sky.. Is it Nelson Mandela? Is it Kofi Annan? Is it John Travolta? No, it's just John Winston Howard On another quest For truth, justice and the American way.

I've just returned from a preview screening of a wonderfully inspiring new documentary, The Corporation, made by the same team that brought us Manufacturing Consent.

It tells the compelling story of the rise of the corporate entity around the world, how it has overtaken the role of governments in so many areas of our lives and how people and groups are fighting back. It's very NHJ!

Check out the website. The film is funny, insightful, chilling and strangely heartening. Featuring interviews with numerous well-known talking heads, including Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman and a host of CEOs, whistleblowers and brokers, even the Economist, that bastion of capitalism, brought itself to say the following:

'People on both sides of the globalisation debate should pay attention. Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled by too many anti-globalisers, The Corporation is a surpri

Congratulations Margo and your contributors for setting out in detail some of the sinister attacks on our democracy, which John Howard is directing against our democracy.

Your book shows how easily democracy could be undermined and gradually be replaced by a much more authoritative form of government. As well as reversing the forces presently attacking our democracy, we have to build defences which will prevent it happening again.

To me it seems that the answer lies in providing an education system with a different orientation. Education must be directed towards teaching people to think . By saying this I am proposing that students, and for that matter the public in general, must be instructed in how to use their brains effectively and rationally. Neurological investigation has gradually revealed how much of our behaviour is directed by non -rational factors.

The only people applying this knowledge at present are the marketers, advertisers,

If we all carried around 10 'Not happy, John!' stiickers it to give away it would be interesting to see how quickly the message gets out. I'd say 'NHJ - No free trade agreement' I could think of alot more choice things to say but It would be risky as Narrabeen is blue ribbon Liberal, and as it is I'd cop a pounding from some blind Lib supporter.

I'm a swinging voter, but how we ever called him HONEST JOHN is a joke. This man is irritating the life out of me to think he is responsible for Australia. What will be left for our children and what chance will they have. If the free trade goes through unemployment will be a mess, as jobs continue to be out sourced overseas to keep the corporates and CEOs happy.

These guys have no shame....Political Prostitution. I'm going to bed to shut it all out, as I feel so desperate about the whole thing, if Latham backs the Free Trade Agreement in principle I will have to go for Independents.

Independent is what Australia

Dear Margo,

I suspect that voters will often vote on some gut feeling. What you've done in NHJ is to give Australians a sense that: they are being made fools of; that they are being lied to; and that they are being dispossed (of Parliament House, an opportunity to have a choice to select the media they want to buy, no more NGOs etc). A 'sense of indignation' is what will mobilise Australians into becoming citizens and voting John out.

We need to maintain this sense of indignation.

NHJ! (JR): John's spent the last 20+ years doing NGO/development work in SE Asia. If he can remain revved about Oz politics from there, the rest of us have no excuse...incidentally, for all those Expats - especially those in remote areas without embassies/consulates - if necessary y'can go to this AEC page as a start point in the process of:
a) making sure you're properly enrolled;
b) sussing out who your ca

I can only read one chapter of each section in a day of your Not Happy, John. I want to cry, in fact I have cried nearly each day I read a little piece of this book. I have cried for all Australians in what we have already lost and the true democracy we lose little by little every day.

But I cannot put your book aside for too long - my hand reaches out again and again to read and my mind to comprehend the enormity of the deception that is John's democracy.

I look at every news item a little more closely now.

I bought your book, read it in two days, then set about signing up to vote in the U.S. election, something that I've neglected to do for twenty years while in Australia. I've signed up my 19 year old as well. We're both able to vote in Australia and the U.S. and this is the time to make a difference.

You make some excellent points about participatory democracy that the leaders of the major parties need to read. I had great hopes for the Australian Democrats at one time but their leaders keep selling out! I admire Bob Brown's ethics, so maybe I'll vote Green...

In the letters page of the SMH yesterday, I noticed a letter related to the ALP and the Free Trade Agreement with the US. Sister Sheila Quonoey of Springwood seems to have been reading NHJ!

'We were ready to believe Labor was going to be the 'real' Opposition. Now it is following behind Howard and the Liberal Party and leaning to signing away Australia into the hands of the US. Not happy, Mark.'