Preparatory School Debating

This week saw us debate our final round of the ISDA competition. During the debate, Trinity Prep was debating on the negative side. The topic was That public transport should be free.

The first speaker of the opposing team stated how public transport being free would reduce traffic and carbon emissions. Adam, our first speaker, rebutted this point by saying that many public transport vehicles don’t even emit carbon emissions such as E-busses and electric trains or trams. Their second affirmative speaker discussed the economic benefits of the case and Chenyu, our second speaker, stated that when people pay for public transport their money is being put towards paying the public transport drivers and how it would be immoral to take advantage of public transport and not pay the workers. Their third affirmative discussed how having free public transport wouldn’t mean there would be no cars on the road, people would still use cars sometimes and our third speaker, Christian, argued that having free public transport would still cause crashes. He also highlighted a major clash in how the affirmative team stated that it would save citizens money, but Christian argued that, if we don’t pay for public transport, we will have to pay more tax anyway.

It was a close debate, but unfortunately the win went to the opposing side. At the conclusion of the ISDA competition, we have learnt many debating skills that we can now take into our IPSHA competition for Term 2 and 3.

Rory Ashcroft | 6G