There were many impassioned pleas to the court – people in tears, in some cases – and a legal team speaking eruditely and in a legally informed manner, all of whom rammed home the unavoidable fact that this development application has no merit and is illegal.

Those who favour the cemetery/mosque would do well to attend to legal basics such as the council zoning laws before resorting to taunts and insults intended to silence discussion on this issue.

Contra to what some think, this DA is actually illegal! A point our council is very aware of, and a point they are hammering home in the L&E Court.

It is now the hope of we residents that our voice will finally be heard and this DA will be rejected.

Despite four years of deliberate obfuscation, deception, manipulation and the collusion of the local press, we have had our day in court, where none of the slanders usually associated with DAs such as this were in evidence.

Residents of Tallong/Marulan have a very sound case for rebuffing this DA, and it has nothing to do with the religion or ‘race’ of the proponents, despite the efforts of the Al Mabarrat Society to introduce such turgid and offensive insinuations in to the brief.

I point to the Mayor of this Shire, and his impassioned advocacy to the court, where he did not mention religion, but did mention disregard and disrespect for community, process and law.

On that point, I suggest all residents of Goulburn focus their attention.

Despite what you may feel, this DA was opposed on planning grounds and will, hopefully, be rejected on those grounds.

It is an ideological stand-point only that wished to paint residents of Tallong/Marulan as bigots and uninformed red-necks.

We, the residents, have endured four years of innuendo and scare-mongering, and this paper was at the forefront of many scurrilous attacks on residents.

It ends now, in the hands of the Commissioner. If, as we expect, the DA is rejected, all Goulburn Mulwaree residents should look upon Tallong/Marulan as a signal of how a community refused to be brow beaten by big Sydney money and influence.

We live in Goulburn Mulwaree for a reason, a reason that should resonant with every resident. If you can’t see the tree, you will never appreciate the forest.

For climate change, 2016 was both a good year and a bad year.

The good news: greenhouse gas emissions are stabilising. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), for the third year in a row energy-related carbon dioxide emissions did not increase even though the economy grew, by 3.1 per cent last year. This was the result of growing renewable power generation, switches from coal to natural gas, improvements in energy efficiency, as well as structural changes in the global economy.

Carbon dioxide emissions declined in the United States and China, the world’s two-largest energy users and emitters, and were stable in Europe, offsetting increases in most of the rest of the world.

The most dramatic change was in the US where, thanks to a surge in shale gas and increases in renewable power, emissions were the lowest since 1992 even though the economy grew by 80 per cent. In China, emissions fell by 1 per cent last year, as coal demand declined while the economy expanded by 6.7 per cent. In the European Union, emissions were largely stable last year as gas demand rose about 8 per cent and coal demand fell 10 per cent.

The IEA cautions though that while the pause in emissions growth is positive, it is not enough to put the world on a path to keep global temperatures from rising above 2°C degrees. You can see the full report by googling “IEA 2017 emissions”.

The bad news? It’s still getting hotter.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an agency of the US Department of Commerce. It measures trends in global land and sea temperatures by comparing current temperatures against the average global temperatures for the 20th century. The NOAA finds that: 2016 was the warmest year in NOAA's 137-year series; this is the third consecutive year a new global annual temperature record has been set; the average global temperature was 0.94°C  above the 20th century average; the global temperatures in 2016 were majorly influenced by strong El Nino conditions that prevailed at the beginning of the year; and overall, the global annual temperature increased at an average rate of 0.07C degrees between 1880 and 1970 increasing to 0.17C per decade since 1970. You can see the full report by googling: “state of the climate NOAA”.

And there’s a long way to go yet.

We’re still pumping out some 32 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year, which scientists such as former Australian Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb warns must be very substantially reduced to prevent runaway global warming.