Rotorua teen wins national speech competition, earns Parliament invitation

Niksha Pardal was fifteen when she stood before a judging panel and told them that imagination matters more than knowledge. The Rotorua student had spent two weeks writing and rehearsing the speech, turning an abstract idea into something concrete—a argument built on mythology, invention, and the human capacity for empathy. She won the national competition. Now she and the other finalists have been invited to Parliament for a mock debate on October 19, a chance to test what they've learned in a room where real decisions get made.

The prompt itself might have seemed unpromising. Imagination versus knowledge—the kind of thing that sounds like a school assembly cliché. But Pardal went deeper. She acknowledged the obvious tension: schools teach us to value knowledge, the accumulated facts and understanding we gain through learning and observation. Yet imagination, she argued, is what comes first. It's the mind's capacity to form ideas that have never existed in reality. Before the Wright brothers built an airplane, they had to imagine one. Before anyone named the stars, someone had to wonder what they were.

She drew on Einstein's famous claim that imagination is more important than knowledge, but she didn't stop there. She traced imagination through human history—not just through scientific discovery, but through culture and meaning-making. Early humans used imagination to explain the world around them through stories that still endure. Papatūānuku and Ranginui, the earth mother and sky father pushed apart by their children to create the world—these weren't just explanations. They were sources of hope, ways of finding meaning in an unknowable universe. Without that imaginative capacity, Pardal suggested, humans would have had no reason to move forward, no sense that better days were possible.

In her view, imagination does something else too: it builds empathy. By imagining ourselves in someone else's position, we develop the ability to understand their emotions without having lived their exact experience. This matters in a New Zealand context, she argued, because aroha—the Māori concept of compassion and care—depends on that imaginative leap. We show aroha to each other, to the land, and to ourselves. And showing it to ourselves means imagining better days than the ones we're living through, which becomes crucial for anyone facing hardship.

When the competition moved to the impromptu round, finalists were given three minutes to prepare a speech on "courage is contagious." Pardal had never done an impromptu speech before. She stayed calm, thought of a hook and key points, and structured a conclusion. It went better than she expected. Other finalists had taken more scientific paths, focusing on how imagination led to concrete inventions. Pardal's approach was different—she wove together mythology, philosophy, and lived experience into an argument about what imagination actually does for human beings.

Her mother, Manjula Pardal, has watched her daughter's confidence grow over years. When Niksha was nine, she did a character recital on stage after just a few weeks of classes. Her mother was struck by how impressed the judges were, how naturally the girl performed. Now, at fifteen, Niksha has won a national competition and earned an invitation to Parliament. Her mother called it a wonderful achievement, a reflection of the confidence, dedication, and effort her daughter brought to the work.

Niksha is thinking ahead to university, considering either medicine or law. The mock parliamentary debate on October 19 will give her and the other finalists a chance to see what formal debate looks like in the actual place where it happens. For a teenager considering a future in law or public life, that's not a small thing. It's a glimpse into a world where the ability to think clearly, argue persuasively, and imagine what could be—rather than just accepting what is—becomes the work itself.