Every year, about 100-thousand students visit parliament house in Canberra with a surge in the final sitting week of the year. Reporter Evelyn Manfield caught up with a few and asked them what they think of Question Time.
00:00Order. Members on my left. Order. No. Don't look at your watch. Okay. Order.
00:12The last week of Parliament, kind of like the last week of school, can get a little rowdy.
00:18Order.
00:19He reminds me of my teachers. And actually I think my peers and I are more well behaved than many of the MPs.
00:26But noisy, screaming. I think there were some topical issues based on there with gender-based violence and gambling.
00:34But obviously there's some fun questions and more of that, that little playfulness between the politicians.
00:40Even politicians agree.
00:42We have that bickering and screaming and yelling and then you have the speaker kind of asking people to, you know, behave themselves.
00:51You think, I look at me, oh, you know, oh my God, it feels like we're in a schoolyard.
00:56But rather than a teacher, Speaker of the House Milton Dick explains his job to kids as kind of like Parliament's referee.
01:03What happens when the rec blows the whistle? And they go, oh, everyone stops. And I go, yeah. And then what happens?
01:08Depends on what you've done. If you've done a foul, you might get a red card. And I say, that's exactly the role as a speaker.
01:14Rather than handing out cards, today he's handing out awards as part of a competition to help students engage with civics.
01:21These three are the winners of the best first speech. The speech they'd deliver if they were elected to Parliament.
01:28My first speech, I actually got the pages round the wrong way. So my message to all of them was make sure you keep the pages numbered.
01:35Highlighting the need for organ donation as well as better education about drug and alcohol abuse and financial literacy, Milton Dick thinks democracies in safe hands.
01:48There is an important note of all of his guests.
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