This weekend (11th – 12th September) is the NZ Women’s British Parliamentary Debating Championships! Please email Steph at exex@debating.co.nz if you’d like to debate. Teams are in twos; you can find a partner yourself or get us to find one for you. Beginners are most welcome. The tournament will be chief adjudicated by Desley Horton and you can expect to get some fantastic feedback over 7 rounds of debating. Registration is FREE although please bring $20 for a BYO dinner on Saturday night. There will also be a Women’s forum on the Sunday.

Get excited girls!

Hey all,

As you would have read in my email, Auckland 2 have made the Australs final and will be debating tonight at 6pm at Sky City Theatre against Victoria University of Wellington 1.  Well done to Akif Malik, Steph Thompson, and Kathy Errington.  Best of luck to them – and if you are in the club, please come along and watch!

Max

Hey everyone,
 
I hope you’ve enjoyed a good week so far before the mid-semester break.  Thanks for those who attended the Ladies’ Liquid Luncheon, which by all accounts was a great success – thanks also to Nupur Upadhyay, our Women’s and Minorities’ Officer, for organizing. 
 
As we noted last Thursday, there will be a “backwards debate” this week at 6pm on Thursday (tonight!), in a lecture theatre on campus.  We need a big enough lecture theatre to cater for Pool A and Pool B debaters, so we are still finalising where this will be held.  Please keep checking your email, and I will send out a short message to inform you of the location once we hear back from those in charge of rooms at the university.  I will also post the room on the website.  It is likely to be a Clocktower or Engineering lecture theatre.  The backwards debate is an exciting comedy debate, which begins with an adjudication – and ends with the first affirmative! Basically the adjudicator and later speakers talk about what has “already happened” in the debate, creating funny and unpredictable situations that the later speakers have to comply with.  In past years we have seen songs, rhymes, raps, and many other amusing incidents.  Look out for more similar funny moments, involving the Society’s funniest debaters!
 
Just after 7pm we will be heading over to the Cap and Gown lounge, below Shadows, to have a pub quiz to finish off this mid-semester.  Bring your ID and a gold coin to get in at the door.  Get into teams of 5-8 and enjoy a relaxed evening that will finish earlier than usual to allow you to head home for Easter.
 
There will be no debating this week, and we do not meet in the Thursdays during the mid-semester break.  We’ll be sending teams down to Easters (or University Games) and we’ll keep you posted of how we do there! We’ll be back with another round of the First Semester tournament, now sponsored by Russell McVeagh, on Thursday 22 April. 
 
Cheers – and see you Thursday!
 
Max

Hi everyone,
 
I hope you had a good weekend.  We had our “Easters” trials on Saturday and Auckland now has a good contingent being sent down to Invercargill to challenge the other universities at University Games.
 
Plenty more coming up this week at the Debating Society.  First up, on Wednesday evening there will be a public debate organised by the Republican Movement Aotearoa New Zealand in association with the Debating Society on whether New Zealand should become a republic.  There will be some guest speakers, including Keith Locke of the Green Party, as well as speakers from our own Society.  The debate will start at 6.30pm in Clocktower 032.
 
Secondly, on Thursday we will be having Round 2 of our Internal Tournament.  Apologies for the waiting times last week: it was the first week we’d tried and the new format, and it proved more complicated than we’d expected.  We have drawn up a list of revised teams, and I will be sending this out in a separate email.  These teams have been put together based on who showed up last week, and who put in details on the online forms.  Note that there are lots of people who have entered the online form who are not in this list.  That does not matter.  You can still come along and form a team from this round onwards.  We will form further teams this Thursday that will last for the rest of the semester, but we have decided that it is better to form teams on the night than online, because many people do not show up.
 
Some important notices about this Thursday:
- If you are in Pool A, you need to RSVP by 5pm on Thursday if you are coming to debate.  This means we can run to time and announce the Pool A moot at 5.45pm.  You can RSVP if you are in the team list or if you are not.
If you do not RSVP, please come to Pool B at 6.30pm.  You will not need to RSVP for Pool B debates; we have time during coaching to put the draw together.
- Pool A: please meet in Stone at 5.30pm.  Pool B will meet this week in Northey (downstairs from Stone, ask anyone for directions) at 6.30pm
- The coaching topic for this week will be “Debates on Economics, International Relations, and Human Rights”, starting at 6.30pm for Pool B and 7.30pm for Pool A, with a basic and an advanced session as was the case last week.  We have revised our coaching programme, and decided that you will need to attend five coaching sessions, not six, to get a Certificate of Debating Proficiency.
- If you are interested in trainee adjudicating, we cannot guarantee that you will be able to trainee for each round – we have too many numbers and this means debates last too long.  We’d encourage you to debate, and we may be able to have you traineeing once every two weeks.  Apologies for this.
- Finally, this weekend on Sunday 28 March there will be the Women’s Day, or “Ladies’ Liquid Luncheon”, organised by Nupur, our Women’s and Minorities’ Officer.  You’ll have received more about this if you’re a female member of our Society, but it should be a great chance for female debaters to meet each other and to see some of the top women debaters in action! To those who aren’t female, to give some explanation of why we have events like this: debating has been traditionally, and still is, a male-dominated activity.  Over the years we have brought more women into debating through events like these, and so we are continuing to try to encourage gender equity in the Society.
 
Anyway, look out for another email from me – and see you on Wednesday, or Thursday at 5.30pm (Pool A) or 6.30pm (Pool B)!
 
Cheers,
 
Max

Hey guys,
 
Great to meet a lot of you this past Tuesday and Thursday.  If you haven’t been able to make it yet, don’t worry – it’s not too late to come along this week and introduce yourself to us all! Well done to Aria Newfield, who won the First Year Rep election on Thursday and now joins us on the executive.  She is the person to go to if you are a first year and you have any ideas/comments; her email is arianewfield@gmail.com.  Thanks to everyone for standing, and to the other candidates that did not win, please stay involved with the club.
 
Three things coming up this week: first, on Wednesday, we have the Race Relations Debate in the Business School,  Room OGGB5 at 6.30pm.  We have some awesome speakers, including the Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres, Vicar of St Matthew’s in the City Glynn Cardy, Tayyaba Khan, Political Studies lecturer Stephen Winter, and our very own Akif Malik and Sam Bookman.  The debate will be judged by Labour MP Jacinda Ardern.  It is on the topic “This House would ban religious hate speech” (see poster attached).  If all of that isn’t enough to whet your appetite, there will also be free nibbles and some drink after the event! We look forward to seeing you there.
 
Secondly, on Thursday, we have Round 1 of our First Semester Tournament, along with the start of our regular coaching sessions.  As we explained on Thursday, we will split everyone into two pools: pool A at 5.30pm and pool B at 6.30pm.  Meet at the Law School in both cases.  There is no difference in quality between the pools: they just allow us to divide up numbers.  Pool A debaters will meet at Law School at 5.30pm, have the topic of their debate announced at 5.45pm, debate at 6.15pm, and have coaching begin at 7.30pm (and go until about 8.30pm).  Pool B debaters will meet at Law School at 6.30pm, have coaching until 7.30pm, then have their topic announced at 7.30pm, and debate from 8pm until 9pm.  Coaching will be hugely valuable, and as we indicated on Thursday, if you complete six weeks of coaching, we will provide you with a Certificate of Debating Proficiency.  Coaching will be split into two tiers: a basic level coaching course, and a higher level coaching course.  If you don’t want coaching, you can take the opportunity to watch a debate.
 
To sign up for the tournament, we need you to fill in the following form: http://bit.ly/a680tt.  You need to fill this form in whether you have team members to debate with or you want to be placed in a team.  It is very important that you get this form back to us by Wednesday at 12pm.  That way we can announce pools on Wednesday evening so that you know when to turn up on Thursday.  Please note that we can only guarantee you a debate if you fill in this form.  If you do not fill in this form we will try to match you with speakers on Thursday night, but cannot guarantee in anything.  If you don’t have a team, just tell us that you are keen to be in the tournament and we can sort you into a team.  (The tournament does not require you to show up every week, though the top teams will be chosen from their best four results, so it does help!) We will also do our best to put you into your preferred pool, but we may have to alter some preferences to ensure an even balance.
 
Finally, this Saturday 20 March at 9am we will be holding trials for Easters or University Games (until about 3pm).  This involves impromptu debating (5 minutes preparation time) and is not for the faint-hearted! But if you are keen to trial for the tournament, which is in Invercargill over the mid-semester break, then please reply to this email to register your interest.  We will be sending down five teams of two to Invercargill (a total of ten speakers), and the tournament is likely to cost between $300 and $500 when flights, accommodation and food are added together.  Please consider this before sending your email through.
 
Cheers everyone!
 
Max

PS: if you are reading this announcement on our website, and have not been getting our emails when you should have been, please email us at exec@debating.co.nz.  (This is likely because we may have incorrectly entered your email address from our sign-up sheets to our email.)