Thursday 23 January 2020 12:26pm
Peyton Bond and Kate Hellings spent last week with 14 potential new politics students from high schools all over the country at Hands On Otago 2020.
Kate devised two projects for the group to work on during the week: a domestic coalition dilemma and a China-NZ-US foreign policy problem.
After much negotiation, the students ended up with the following: National gained New Zealand First from the Labour-Greens-New Zealand First coalition in order to form a new government. ACT was left in the cold.
The students met with Peter Grace on Thursday after they determined a solution to the foreign policy problem to see what he thought of their conclusion. They enjoyed the questions he asked and answered — and ended up feeling good about what they came up with!
The afternoons were ’Snack’ time — different groups of non-politics students shuffled in, quite wary of what sort of politics they were to encounter. We went easy on them and they all seemed to enjoy the interactive mini-debates. Over the course of the week we tackled refugee numbers, legalisation of cannabis, and the potential ‘Make it 16’ voting age.
Peyton and Kate agree that their greatest accomplishment was the following exclamation: “you guys made politics fun!”