A speech from Eleni and Giselle during Senior School Assembly:

My name is Eleni and this is Giselle and we represented Westbourne in the Youth Parliament program. Youth parliament was an interesting experience and was definitely one of a kind. As most of you are aware, our team debated on a bill that we ourselves had created regarding Rape trial Reform. We were one of the lucky teams that got our bill passed through parliament.

I know a lot of you people in the audience find politics boring, or legal disinteresting and majority of you are probably zoning out of this speech and thinking about something else. But I don’t want to give the standard speech where I say that this program was amazing, year tens definitely do this next year.

Instead I just want to tell you this program is important to people that are next to you, people that you live with, or people that you see on the street. We passed a bill that showed what young people care about because whether we like it or not we are quite often ignored, yes times have changed and we have rights, but our voices are barely recognised. And that is why this is so significant, because in parliament at the moment they are working on improving trials, not just for sexual abuse victims but also for physical. By representing the voice of a bunch of high school kids, we proved what kind of world we want to live in.

That is one that we would never have been able to show if it wasn’t for the program. The program exposed us to all different types of people, it showed us the juxtaposition between the different lives that all humans live. Without this program we wouldn’t have gotten our voice heard and we wouldn’t have been published in three newspapers, a couple of articles and not even met some politicians.

You don’t have to be interested in politics or legal to complete this program you just need to have the motivation to make a change about something you care about within society. Now Giselle is going to present her adjournment speech which is just a 2 minute speech that was given whilst in Parliament house regarding an issue she cares about.

Eleni Moritz (11M) and Giselle Puno (11H)