Sirius Debating and Year 9 English off to a flying start!

In Term One, the Year 9 and 10 Debating Elective and English courses focus on speech writing and the art of persuasion. After watching the Australian film, Rabbit Proof Fence, which presents a moving portrait of the Aboriginal Stolen Generations through the real-life experience of three Indigenous girls as well as through engaging with the thorny debate of whether or not the current Australian government should change the date of Australia Day, the Year 9 students have gained the socio-historic context necessary to craft truly persuasive speeches.

Meanwhile, the Year 9 and 10 debaters have kick started their term with seven teams registered to compete in the Broadmeadows region of the annual contest hosted by the Debating Association of Victoria. The first topics for our intrepid orators are: ‘that horse racing should be banned’ and ‘that police should always carry tasers rather than handguns.’ This has led to much discussion of the societal role of gambling and animal cruelty as well as the extent of police power and whether or not this should be curtailed. Hanane in Year 10 provided an interesting model for her team’s case centred on the adverb ‘always’ as it appears in the second topic. On the affirmative side, her team is proposing that while tasers are always necessary for all police as a means of self-protection and restraint, handguns should not always be carried around by all police. Instead police guns could be kept in the police-stations and only radioed for when absolutely necessary. This would lighten each police person’s physical load, save millions of dollars of tax-payers’ money per year and remove the symbol of violent death from our police’s image. After all, nearly all police conduct their whole careers without once having to draw their gun, so why carry them all the time? It’s always impressive to see debaters analysing the wording of a topic in order to provide a model that persuasively and logically challenges the status-quo!

Keep up the great work Sirius students and I look forward to watching you wipe the floor with the competition.