Part Eight: This System Only Works In Total Basket Cases - The Nationals
We’re at the end of this series! While of course it’s turned out to be mainly me imparting background information rather than giving direct debating advice, I’m fine with that. There are plenty of good people out there to learn you on debating; finding access points to easily digest information over time to turn into mechanisms can often be harder, so I’m happy to have done my part for that. But I thought I should do one truly debating thing, and so that brings us here, to me taking on a motion set at my own Nationals, a motion I was mercifully on the right side of, because every team on one side won and every team on the other side lost. (If they are, no offence, foolish enough to set the motion again and make me look like a leaker, I will pack my bags and leave the country. I hear Rwanda is lovely this time of year if you make a stop off in Britain.)
Today, I’m going to be giving myself the bad side of the argument.
I don’t remember the exact wording but that’s okay, because it’s just a simple this versus that at stake here.
Infoslide:
First-past-the-post voting (FPTP or FPP) is a voting system wherein voters cast a vote for a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election.
Mixed-member proportional representation (MMP or MMPR) is a mixed electoral system which combines local FPTP elections with party list votes, which are used to allocate additional members in a way that aims to produce proportional representation overall.
THP FPTP to MMP.
I have been waiting for this for so long with so much excitement. You’d be surprised how easy it is to avoid figuring out any of the arguments ahead of time - it’s great meditative practice. Having written all this, I’ll grab pen and paper, give myself half an hour, and embark for the second time, and for the first time on the aff, to grappling with this argument. Let’s go!
https://youtu.be/EbnfGhNPrV0 [let me know if there are any troubles with the link, it's my first time uploading a YouTube video]
Hopefully you learnt something from that! Let me see what I can add. Pinky promise I’m not just using this as a chance to talk myself up. I make a lot of errors and I’m not presenting myself as somebody to imitate, but as one of the many examples of speakers you see to form ideas from. Going miles over time, while very fun and allowing me to provide you all with a lot more content, is a great demonstration of why prep should be all about keeping it simple and not overcooking what you need to do. Last minute scribbling down should typically be about adding quick, snappy mechanisms to reinforce existing points, not further extending the “and then and then” unless you literally haven’t gotten to your impacts. I took twenty minutes to get through three pages because I made my argument too fancy!
Prep proceeded without trouble; in keeping with a tradition that dates back several years I threw on some post-rock (Skinny Fists is split into two discs on Spotify now! Big day for annoying people) and got stuck into the subject. This wasn’t complicated - the best outcome out of a politics debate is typically the government being better at doing things, which helps everybody in the country, and the second best is often either accountability or representation; I figured that, if this was a real debate, accountability would probably come second and representation would be relegated to a split, particularly because neg really has the upper hand on that front.
I spent too long on my introduction and model for how simple it is. All I needed to say for that model is a) we’d have stayed on the same course (typical for a prefers motion); b) we’d have fewer seats than we do now; and c) we’d have more electorate seats than we do now, so smaller electorates. Politics debates very rarely require more thought-out motions; this is at the upper end.
My first point sets out to immediately overcome a problem I’ve identified before, where what is being done is not exactly clear. I know specific examples like state housing builds in this case, but you don’t need examples simply to pick something, and it’s probably easiest to pick a left-wing idea. Just say the state will build more houses or hospitals or schools, or hire more doctors or teachers. That’s what your goal looks like: the government is better at solving a problem.
As you can see as I step through political actors, I’m doing two things. One, I’m clearly showing how the model impacts them. I’ll flag now this speech is way too example-heavy and mechanisation-light; you should be characterising, for instance, how parties try to get into Parliament (and, therefore, how your model affects that). My mechanisation is super fuzzy around how the major parties change their behaviour around swing seats. Let this be a warning - more knowledgeable people than you can bury you under a mountain of knowledge, but if you can pick out that they never actually mechanised anything and show you’ve got a simple, clearly mechanised plan that works, you’re in the running.
Two, I’m being decisive. I’m not dithering about what minor parties could be good; I’m saying they all should be gone, even if I don’t believe that in real life, and later I’m saying the same about list MPs. The starker you can make a choice in a debate, the plainer it is to both teams what you actually stand for. There are times where the other team blunders and you should be racing to coopt as many of their benefits as they can, but if they don’t leave the door open, more different is usually better than more similar!
My decisiveness goes a bit OTT when I preempt the other side’s “gotcha” by saying “of course governments on our side of the house will do bad policy”, which is a hell of a gaffe. If I were neg and I heard that I’d instantly note it down for my intro - purely a stylistic choice, not an important takeaway, but humour gets attention. Nonetheless, I find rhetorically it can often be useful to hammer home how unequivocally bad things are, like me trying to characterise list MPs or minor parties as intrinsically bad from the start. The other team are forced onto the defensive by that characterisation more than what teams often offer, which is a measured, careful statement of “I can see the merits in x, but it scrapes in as worse than y”. Love measured carefulness in real life but this is debating, go hog wild.
My final two notes, then. One, don’t be like me and get too wedded to referring to specific examples again and again if they’re simply your pet favourites rather than important, leading illustrations of a given concept. I wanted to keep talking about Jim Anderton again and again, but that wasn’t the best. The Finlayson example, on the other hand, was inspired if I do say so myself: sometimes the best way to use an example or mechanism is to hold up something obviously good, acknowledge that good, but show how that leads to a bad aspect, or vice versa.
Two, I aim to bring it back to what’s simple, realistic, and easy to envision, with talking about how MPs are active in their electorates. Yes, technically strategically the most important advice I can give for debating is probably weighting what wins the debate, but to me the best improvement you can make to your speeches to be clearer and guarantee your impacts is just showing how these little things happen in practice in the real world and what they mean. After all, isn’t that what politics at its best is meant to be?
Thanks for coming with me on this journey. Whether you’re reading up on this to be prepared for your next weekly school or club debate, or just because you’re curious about the troves of knowledge I possess, I appreciate the effort you’ve put in to read up on all this. If you’d like to read more about the world, check out my Favourite Articles of ____ series. It's been an honour and a pleasure to write out all this, I hope you've learnt a lot, and I wish you the best of luck in debates and future exploits.
There’s only one thing left in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Politics in Debating…
From the wise words of Sun Tzu:
oH, tHe GoVeRnMeNt CaReS
Like four people are going to get that Nationals deep cut.
Have a great day!
Comments