Inspired to share award with the PM
A student of Hamilton’s Sacred Heart Girls’ College is feeling inspired after winning an award previously held by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Kihikihi resident Aylish Waldron, 17, was the winner of this year’s United Nations Waikato Region Speech Contest, which the current prime minister won in 1997 and 1998 when she was at Morrinsville College.
‘‘I definitely think she’s a very inspirational woman and she’s someone that I personally quite look up to,’’ Waldron said.
Participants were required to address the question: ‘‘ How should we balance climate change issues versus economic growth in New Zealand; are they mutually exclusive?’’.
‘‘Everyone had to answer that same question in their own way,’’ Waldron said.
‘‘But our speeches were really different, and it was quite interesting to see how we’d all been given the same topic and everyone has such different perspectives on the question.’’
Waldron said she had a natural interest in economics, international relations and the media, which all areas she is giving attention to while at Sacred Heart.
When she heard about the speech competition at school, Waldron thought it would align with the direction of her study, and decided to give it a go.
‘‘The speeches were between six and eight minutes and I broke mine down into my three main points,’’ she said.
‘‘As an economy grows, it’s typically going to have more car- bon emissions and become more damaging to the environment.
‘‘Then I moved on to how the two could work together.
‘‘So I argued that we should be investing in developing more economically friend methods of production because that’s going to help increase our capacity to grow as a country, while also making sure that in the future we’re sustainable.’’
Waldron is in Year 13, so considering her options for tertiary study, and thinking of studying law, possibly with a conjoint in another discipline.
She was excited when she found she had won an award previously held by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Waldron now gets to compete in the national speech contest in Wellington, with the winner set to speak at the New Zealand Model United Nations for youth in July.