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Conscription speech
I bet all of you have aspirations to go to university or start an apprenticeship or even travel the world when you leave school, and I believe that most of you take this for granted. However, thousands of innocent people have this choice taken away from them for no reason at all! This is an outrage. I am here to talk to you about why conscription, compulsory military service, should be completely abolished. Conscription is a violation of freedom because it completely removes the right that we have to make our own decisions and lead our own life. This right is taken away in over 30 countries and can last as long as 10 years! You may be thinking, why is he telling me this? This doesn’t have anything to do with New Zealand. But, believe it or not, about forty years ago you would have had to abide to the slavery that is compulsory military service, if you resided in New Zealand. This speech will uncover the toll conscription pays on freedom, our opportunities in life and the stress it conflicts on families.
If your son or daughter was not able to fulfil their dreams, would you be angry? If your son or daughter was away from you doing something they didn’t choose to do would you be happy? The stress that conscription offers for certain families is immense. For example, for some single mothers, their son may be the man in the family. So if the son was to be taken away for up to ten years it could create a large, irreplaceable hole in the family. This example shows us that conscription is not just a waste of life for young men and women such as ourselves, but it can also dump enormous stress on the people around the conscripted.
Conscription creates effects that last for a life time. When you take away the choice to go to university or study straight after school, you also take away the chance someone has to make an impact on society. By taking away this choice, governments are taking away, new technology, breakthroughs in science and amazing discoveries, just to feel
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