UN Evatt Competition

On Thursday the 22nd of May Girton was able to send eight representatives from the debating co-curricular to the online UN Evatt competition. Named after the former attorney general of Australia, the Evatt competition is the largest Model United Nations debating and diplomacy competition for high school students in Years 9-12 in Australia and plays host to hundreds of schools around the country. The premise of the competition is to be assigned a country and take part in negotiations on global issues that we have been previously assigned and make attempts to solve these hypothetical issues as effectively as possible. The topics that we were assigned centred around national security, refugee intakes and drug trafficking. 

The main activity that took place was negotiation, with breakout rooms on zoom being used as a space for countries to discuss amendments to the changes that have been proposed, as well as to try and gain support for any ideas that your country puts forward to try and remedy the global issue at hand. Although we found it difficult adjusting to the online setting at first, the Girton representatives were able to get comfortable eventually and successfully lead the large group to making successful amendments and changes in order to combat the issues that we were tasked with fixing.

The participants from Girton were assigned these four countries:

Will Hamilton & Remus Brasier: China

Ava Griffin & Sophie Mayes: Great Britain

Viran Dhanapala & Aksharan Shobanan: Vietnam

Elise Richards & Poppy Cornelius: Russia

As captain, I was incredibly proud of all our participants. They showed class under pressure and were all able to present cogent and lucid arguments in defence of their propositions. Considering this was the first time in a United Nations setting for the vast majority of them it was an incredibly impressive display. Hopefully, we will see some of our representatives be presented with the opportunity to travel down to Melbourne for the Victorian semi-finals and show off their skills once more. On behalf of the whole debating co-curricular, I would like to thank the participants for their valiant efforts, and I hope that we can continue them soon.

Will Hamilton (11 Jenkin)