Forum a success - Norton

Cooma Monaro Express
29/08/2006 Page: 4

LISTENING to people lecture on a certain topic for four hours straight without a break on a Fnday night would try most people's patience.

Many people who experienced that situation would come close to falling asleep after a certain period while others after a while would lose concentration and think about something else completely different.

But none of the 250 people who attended the Cooma-Monaro Shire Council's 'Should Monaro have windfarms?' forum last Friday night at the Cooma Ex-Services Club seemed to experience the above symptoms after enthusiastically listening to four hours worth of windfarm lectures without an interim.

Cooma-Monaro Shire mayor Roger Norton labelled the forum a success and believed it achieved its desired purpose, despite still being impartial on the vindfarm issue himself.

"It was a success because people went away from the forum better informed on the issue and hopefully now we can use this to move forward," Cr Norton said. "It was a little long, but its such a complex subject that needed sufficient time to be explained properly.

"You could not have given the speaker 10 minutes each because they would not have been able to explain it fully and wouldn't have done the forum any justice."

Cr Norton was particularly impressed with the way everyone at the forum conducted themselves while talking and listening about the contentious issue.

Despite the forum's own question not being answered on the night, as expected before the event, there was a wide range of views expressed about windfarms by both the speakers and the large audience in attendance at the much anticipated event.

But aside from the forum question not being answered, everyone in attendance did agree by general consensus that green house emissions needed to be reduced in Australia to combat the global problem of climate change.

The only problem was that everyone had different views on how Australia was going to achieve that, with many agreeing and disagreeing that windfarms were an effective way of reducing green house gas emissions.