Parliamentary debate

I joined the debate practice last night and the rules are different from the one I familiar with. It is called parliamentary debate. There are two sides against each other, i.e. the government and the opposition. Each team consists of two members with the prime minister (PM) and member of government (MG) in the government team and the leader of opposition (LO) and member of opposition (MO) in the opposition team.

Here comes with the interesting part. In Hong Kong, the debate topic is given by the teacher or the debate organizer. Both sides usually have preparation time to draft their debate speech. For parliamentary debate, the topic or the case, however, is determined by the government. That means the government has infinite amount of time to prepare their speech as the case is written by them. The opposition only knows the case when the government announces it right before the start of debate. To compensate the disadvantage of the opposition, the government is not allowed to include any statistic or any knowledge beyond common sense in their speech while the opposition can say everything they know.

Before start, PM presents the case to the opposition who can ask as many questions as they want for clarification. Then, the order to deliver speech is PM, LO, MG, MO, LO and PM. The limit for all speeches is 8.5 minutes, except the first one which is 7.5 minutes. The last two speeches cannot include any new point.

What if the government presents a case which largely favors their side? The opposition can argue that is a tight case and convince the judge it is not worthwhile to debate.