Legacy Junior Public Speaking Award
Congratulations to Year 8 public speaker extraordinaire, Divyan Gnanasivam, who represented Fort Street High School in the NSW finals of the prestigious Legacy Junior Public Speaking Award on Tuesday 17th October at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The Legacy Junior Public Speaking Award aims to encourage the use of clear and effective spoken English. Since its inception in 1995, the competition has provided an opportunity for NSW junior secondary students to improve their confidence and to develop their speech-writing and public speaking skills. This annual competition is open to students from both public and independent schools. Only two students are selected to enter from each school.
Diyan reached the state finals after winning his local and regional heats against very tough competition. He was singled out by the judges for his poise under pressure and his fluent articulation of complex ideas. Divyan’s impromptu speech in response to the prompt ‘a vicious cycle’ was a poignant and incisive reflection on the epidemic of post-traumatic disorders in among returned servicepeople. His highly topical prepared speech, focusing on the scourge of misinformation, is reproduced below.
Divyan deserves every accolade for representing Fort Street High School so ably. We are sure that this achievement will be remembered as an early step in a brilliant career.
To believe or not to believe.
“Expelliarmus! Wingardium Leviosa”. With a flick of my small 8-year-old fingers holding a random stick found lying in the garden I could make anything happen – well at least in my imagination. I could shush my 3-year-old brother, I could even make my teddy hidden in a dark, dingy closet, talk. It brought me so much joy to pretend that I could wish away anything that went wrong. Make-believe was my life.
3 years later, on January 6, 2021, my idealized world crashed into reality as I watched the news in horror as thousands stormed the U.S Capitol. This wasn’t an unruly protest – it was a full-on attack on democracy by people who thought they knew the truth. Who could have thought a simple lie blared out by an election loser, Donald Trump, and amplified by the media could change the way people thought?
Worryingly, we are now facing a global march against the truth that is endangering not only the foundations of democratic systems but, our health and way of life. The independent press, so critical to countering this torrent of disinformation, unfortunately is failing.
On one side, autocratic leaders in countries from Hungary to India are muzzling their free press to control what their citizens can see and hear. In Hungary, for example, Government-aligned entities now control 80% of the country’s media – more akin to North Korea than a democratic EU country. On the other, malevolent actors are using social media to manipulate the public with conspiracy theories. Much of this disinformation is succeeding by playing on people’s deep-seated prejudices such as racism, homophobia and distrust of Government.
Sitting here in the Domain Theatre in a successful multicultural democracy, we are not immune from these dangers. With over 60% of Australian media controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and the rest by a few major players, we have one of the most concentrated media markets in the World. In this environment, the ideological biases and financial interests of our media moguls often takes precedence over fair reporting.
Just as bad, our mainstream media – fearful of appearing biased – has fallen into the lazy trap of “bothsidesism”. That is report both sides of every issue, as if they are equally valid.
The reporting in the run-up to the recent referendum on the Voice to Parliament is a perfect example of this bothsidesism. The Voice is intended to be purely an advisory body to government on issues affecting indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, the No Campaign flooded us with so much disinformation that, just as intended, it confused so many.
We were told, for example, that by voting Yes you could lose your land under indigenous land claims or that the date of Australia Day would change. No mention of how an Advisory Body could achieve such outcomes when Parliament would have ultimate say. Much of this could have been critically analysed and dispatched by our media but instead, in trying to appear “Neutral”, they just amplified it.
The steep drop in the support for YES in polls from over 67% to just below 43% in the last 12 months, was in no small part driven by this disinformation propagated through our media.
Sadly, this will only encourage such tactics in the future.
Although none of you are likely to be attending a Trump Rally anytime soon, you may be wondering how you can avoid being hoodwinked by misinformation.
It would be easy for me to stand here and tell you to be a more discerning consumer of news – know your sources, understand their motivations, beware of sensational stories. But the fight against misinformation needs to start in our schools.
Let’s take a page from Finland and Estonia, which have embedded media literacy in their K-12 school curriculum where students are taught to spot disinformation and propaganda. As a result, Finland has now been rated the European country most resistant to fake news.
Similarly, our curriculum needs to evolve to teach skills in critical thinking and to provide the tools to differentiate between truth and falsities.
For example, in maths – teach explicitly how statistics can be used to mislead; in art – how an image’s meaning can be manipulated, particularly in this age of deepfakes; in history – how the Nazis used propaganda to brainwash their population.
There is learning to be had across almost every subject.
Further, our Civics & Citizenship syllabus should be broadened to all year levels with special focus on how misinformation could be used to undermine societal harmony and our democracy.
Although it’s every child’s dream to cast a spell that would make their math textbooks disappear, I have learnt to appreciate reality for what it is and not what others make it out to be. Hope you’ll do the same.
