I have just returned home from the Adelaide Imprints Bookshop launch of your book. Thank you for including us in your itinerary, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing you speak. I hope you have provided a lightning rod for the regime change you spoke of.

Unfortunately time beat the questions, but I wanted to report an observation, and hear your opinion. I might add I have not read your book yet, though plan to as soon as my partner has finished reading it - he keeps having to put it down to calm down his rage every now and then, so it seems to be working!

Around the time of Tampa, I became concerned about the greater use of marketing style 'jargon' being used by the Government, and particularly John Howard, that is repeated by the press without contradiction, so in the end you hear the general population using the same words (thereby convinced somehow that the government is correct).

When I was a kid, people in desperate need of asylum were called 'refugees' or 'boat people'. Most people understood that a refugee needed piece of help, assistance or sympathy we could muster.

Somehow by changing the title to 'Illegal Immigrant' this can turn people's bile toward them.

It's not just the 'Illegals' either; John Howard regularly trots out the terminology 'anti-American', 'In/Not in the National Interest', 'Mateship' and so on. John's dutiful Ministers then start using the same vernacular, and the media pick it up and publish their stories under the same headline. It seems all policies released by the 'Regime' come with a tag line, in the 'Nike - Just Do it' style (Tampa - just Illegals?).

Your book details the dismantling of our democracy. As a journalist yourself, I would like to know what observations you have on the dismantling of the media, as it degenerates into an advertising medium for the John Howard regime. Thanks again for lighting a fuse!

Margoi: Hi Ben. Check out the book!