On 15 August 2017 TRRA Inc. held a very successful ‘Meet the Candidates’ forum for the 2017 Port Stephens Council elections at the Nelson Bay Bowling Club, attended by about 240 people and most of the candidates.

We have been running these forums for all Federal, State and Local Government elections since 2008, and have developed a format that is fair, balanced and well received by candidates and constituents, incorporating a PowerPoint presentation, a digital timer, an opportunity for candidates to introduce themselves, some fixed questions developed by TRRA, a Q & A from the floor, and a short closing statement from the candidates.

A new innovation for this forum was to arrange for it to be made into a video and post it to YouTube, so that it could be a permanent record of the proceedings, questions asked, commitments made, and a way to assist people who could not attend to evaluate the candidates.

The venue presented some technical difficulties with poor lighting and the equipment malfunctioned towards the end, but we ended up with reasonable quality video for the full 2hrs 26 minutes of the forum, but unfortunately we lost the sound for the last 33 minutes. (at 1hr:53 min) This would have been the last few questions of the Q&A and unfortunately the closing statements, which in most cases were very strong.

This was a good initiative and we are confident that we can design this into our next forum that we run with better results given this experience, but one never knows when the electronic gremlins will strike…..

The link to the video is HERE

TRRA Media Officer

Dick Appleby