HBHS Debating Complete Clean Sweep
In a clean sweep of all six debates, HBHS’ Thomas Simpson (Year 12), Chris Jury (Year 11) and Neeraj Khatri (Year 12) won the Waikato/BOP Russell McVeagh Debating Championships on 13 March. The development team of Iain Miller (Year 12), Greg Kampjes (Year 12) and Fraser Paine (Year 12) was in contention at the break for semi-finals, but was eliminated on total speech points.
Each team had thirty minutes to prepare three eight-minutes speeches and a four minute reply on such diverse topics as ‘The West should stop providing aid to anti-democratic regimes in the Middle East’ to ‘This House supports the abolition of the Maori seats’.
In the moot ‘That all major national sports fixtures should be televised free to air’, the No. 1 team defeated an opposing team of university student Debate Society members who were also adjudicators.
This is an extremely impressive feat for young men in their mid-teens.
The second aim after finding the Champion team was to announce the Waikato team for Nationals. We have two of the three members; Thomas and Chris. Thomas was awarded Best Speaker for the whole tournament, which ran for twelve hours straight, from 8.ooam to 8.00pm.
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