'The Last Free Room' (original speech, approx. 500 words). Context: a fictional Year 12 student, Ines Varga, addresses the ordinary meeting of the fictional Kelloway Shire Council, which is considering a report recommending that the town's library be closed and its services moved to a 'community hub' in the larger town of Brennan.

Councillors, thank you for the three minutes. I will try to use them well, which is more than I can say for the first fourteen years of my life, most of which I spent in the building you are proposing to close.

I should say at the start that I am not here to tell you the library is lovely. You know it is lovely. You have seen the children's corner with the whale painted on the wall, and you have seen the leak above it, and you have seen the quote for fixing the roof, and I understand that the quote is the reason we are here.

So let me talk about the number that is not on the quote.

Every weekday afternoon between half past three and six, there are somewhere between twenty and forty teenagers in that building. I have counted. They are not all reading. Some of them are charging their phones. Some are doing homework because home is loud, or cold, or forty minutes away on a bus that has already left. Some are there because it is the only room in this town where a sixteen-year-old can sit for two hours without buying anything and without anyone asking what they are doing.

That is what the library is. It is not a building full of books. It is the last free room.

The report in front of you says the service can be 'consolidated' into the community hub in Brennan, twenty-five kilometres away. I have read the report. It uses the word 'access' eleven times. I would like to ask the people who wrote it when they last caught the 4:10 bus to Brennan, and whether they noticed that there is no 4:10 bus to Brennan.

I am not naive. I know the roof costs money and I know the shire does not print it. But I also know what you have spent money on. The new signage at the entrance to town cost more than this roof. It says 'Kelloway: A Great Place to Grow'. I walk past it every morning on the way to the building you are closing, and every morning I think: grow into what?

Councillors, I will finish with this. In Year 7 I did not have a computer at home. I wrote every assignment for two years on the second machine from the left, the one with the sticky E. I got into the course I wanted on the strength of those assignments. I am not special. There is a kid in Year 7 right now sitting at that same machine, and you are about to turn it off.

You can fix a roof. You cannot easily give a town back the room where its children learnt to be alone with a book, or with each other, or with their own thoughts.

Keep the library open. Fix the roof. Put a bucket under the whale if you have to. But do not take away the last free room.

Thank you.