Bright young things from across the country descended on Queensland for the national award contest, having each topped their state Golden Gavel competitions.

Each competitor was randomly assigned a topic and had a day to prepare a comical three minute speech. The winning speech by Baker was ‘Lessons I have learned from Mark Latham’, which made him “rush out and buy the Latham Diaries, which became my bible”.

Andrew won over the judges by delivering a sermon style speech, preaching from The Book of Mark — The Latham Diaries. Entertaining his audience with four lessons he had learned from “the wise one from Werriwa”, he said “sticks and stones may break their bones but a clever nick name will leave much deeper emotional scars, which take longer to heal”.

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