Minter Ellison’s Andrew Baker scooped the National Golden Gavel Award in the annual public speaking competition for young lawyers, held under the auspices of the Australian Young Lawyers Association.

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”.