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  • Published: 27 February 2013
  • ISBN: 9781743481011
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 480

Still Not Happy, John!



The book that launched campaigns, featuring a new 2013 introduction from Margo Kingston.

After the bestselling Not Happy, John! was published in 2004, we had three more years of: secrecy, cover-ups and scandals – think AWB laws like WorkChoices eroding people's prosperity, an unpopular and deceitful war, blind allegiance to a foolhardy American president, draconian measures rushed through a hobbled Senate and applied with equal haste – witness the Mohamed Haneef fiasco, the detention of hundreds of vulnerable people, including children and Australian citizens, and above all, not listening when Australians say they want job, educational and housing security for themselves and their children, our soldiers out of Iraq – and a smart, fair, forward-looking country that finds new solutions for pressing problems like climate change.

Margo Kingston, one of Australia's most fearless political journalists, knew then that it was crunch time for Australia. This is a gutsy, anecdotal book with a deadly serious purpose: to lay bare the insidious ways in which John Howard's Liberal government profoundly undermined our freedoms and our rights. Passionate and clear-eyed about the urgent need for us to reassert the core civic values of a humane, egalitarian, liberal democracy, Still Not Happy, John! remains alarmingly relevant to Australia's political climate today.

'She rages, she hammers, she explains – but most importantly she CARES.' Phillip Adams

  • Published: 27 February 2013
  • ISBN: 9781743481011
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 480

About the author

Margo Kingston

Margo Kingston was born in Maryborough, Queensland, in 1959. She grew up in the northern sugar city of Mackay and graduated with an Arts-Law degree from the University of Queensland. She practised as a solicitor and lectured in business law before joining The Courier-Mail (before Rupert Murdoch took it over). She has been a political journalist for the Times on Sunday, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Canberra Times and The Age, and was chief of staff at the Sydney Morning Herald's Canberra bureau for two years. She was Jana Wendt's political researcher for Channel Nine's A Current Affair and Phillip Adams's 'Canberra Babylon' commentator on ABC Radio's Late Night Live for five years. Her 1999 work Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip (Allen & Unwin) won the 2000 Dobbie Award for best first book by a female writer.

At the time of writing Not Happy, John!, Margo was the political commentator for the Sydney Morning Herald online, the founding editor of its interactive journalism experiment Webdiary and a political columnist for the Sun Herald.

She took Webdiary independent in 2005 and retired in December that year due to ill health. After three years studying for a nursing degree, Margo has deferred her final year to co-publish and edit Australians for Honest Politics. She sees AFHP as a new citizens' journalism project in the tradition of Webdiary, which closed in July last year.

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