the PARTY party – Preparing to Speak Professionally

a longer toastmasters speech: 18 – 22 minutes.

delivered on 17 September 2020

No I am not going to speak professionally. That would take a lot of promotion and time. It would be good for my ego, but that is not how I see myself. But this was a fun speech. I pretended to be a party leader, firing up the membership to go out and get us votes for the election.

The speech had 5 parts with times as planned

1. 3 minutes: Welcome and thanks. Who are we? what is our schedule? I got some members to stand up and take bows for their work: Duncan for putting up the billboards, and Cassie for making the TV ad.
2. 5 minutes: policy platform number 1. The Great Leap Backwards. This is borrowed from the McGillcuddy Serious Party. The idea is that the peak of civilisation was reached at the beginning of the 19th century at the time when European settlers arrived in NZ. It has been all downhill (a blind alley of progress) ever since. We should go back to a simpler time without burning fossil fuels and forcing people to slave over a computer all day. More people will work on the land and craftsmen will support them by making tools and bread etc. Entertainment can be provided by minstrels and story-tellers, and people can rediscover community.
3. 5 minutes: policy platform number 2. Happyness. It would be everyone’s right to be happy. In fact everyone would be obliged to be happy. We wouldn’t copy the Americans and enshrine the pursuit of happiness in the constitution, which doesn’t seem to lead to much happiness itself. We would change the Bill of Rights to add the right to be happy, and any laws that make people unhappy would have to be changed. We would make it a crime to not be happy, but instead of punishing unhappiness people would get treatment. This would have the effect of emptying our prisons and stopping the use of psychoactive drugs as crime and dependency stem from unhappiness.
4. 5 minutes: policy platform number 3. Abolish money. The use of money encourages the accumulation of wealth, which causes the vast mal-distribution of resources that causes deprivation and misery. Without money people will only produce what they need and what they can trade with their neighbours. Where wider trade is necessary we would go back to using pounamu (greenstone). This has the advantage that it would be very hard to hoard and can be made into jewelry even if it is not needed for tools.
5. 3 minutes: summary. What do we still have to do before the election? How do we go out and sell the party and the platform? Why is it our time? How we are going to double our support every day?

How did it go?

I lost my train of thought a couple of times, and missed out on some material, so the times ended up being a little short (17:55). In general it went well. Nobody fell asleep. Some found it amusing. There was some audience engagement. Maybe I should have asked the audience some questions, or got them to repeat the slogans.

Rana did the evaluation. he was quite complementary. He recommended I use a cheat sheet so that I don’t forget what I was going to say. Useful, but if I prepare properly I shouldn’t forget. His challenge was to use more time, as this is the point of the project.

The timekeeper (Mitch) also commented that I could have added a little more detail to eke out a little more time from the speech.

So I learned a lot from the exercise. I would have to do more work if I was to speak professionally, but can have confidence to give longer speeches. I look forward to hearing other members attempting the project.