The Winning Speech in a School Competition, published in the Tonga Chronicle on August 9, 1973.

As we all know, Tonga is one of the last remaining Kingdoms on earth. Its system of government is based on a monarchy. There is a Parliament, a Privy Council and ultimately the king or reigning monarch. All this, my friends, is under the suspices of democracy.

Let me speak of the Parliament. There are seven representatives of the group of 33 titled men or nobles in the land. On the other hand there are only seven representatives from the population of 90,000. The various Ministers of the Crown who are His Majestry's Cabinet complement the Parliament.

A democracy, my friends, is rule by the people where every man has equal rights under the law. I hereby state emphatically that the present system of government is not democratic. The representation in the Parliament is clearly biased in favour of the nobility. There is a representative for roughly every five nobles. However, it is very worthwhile to note that there is only one representative for approximately every 13,100 Tongan citizens. The distribution of voting power in our Parliament is surely prejudiced in favour of the nobles, imbalanced, unfair, and simply undemocratic.

This situation needs to be remedied. There must be a greater opportunity for every Tongan citizen to have his say in the running of the country. You may scoff at me and say that every man has this right because he is allowed to elect a representative to Parliament. However, this facade of democracy crumbles when his representative enters Parliament because of the unbalanced voting power which I have already mentioned. It would be appropriate here to state again that one nobles’ representative stands for five nobles while one people's representative comes from roughly 13,100 Tongan nationals.

In the past, the educated people of Tonga were mostly from the nobility. These educated people had the running of the people as their responsibility. The uneducated masses, which included my great-grandfather and your great-grandmother, looked upon this group of educated people with the faith that they would govern the country well.

Today, however, this situation is changing. More and more of the Tongan people are becoming educated. With this education, my fellow students, a creeping but uneasy awareness of the lack of democracy will come to exist in every educated person's mind. This uneasy awareness of the present lack of democracy will have its harmful effects if something is not done to correct the present system.

What, exactly, do I mean by harmful effects? My firends, let us cast our minds back to the China that existed before 1949. After a long period of frustration with their overlords and undemocratic system of government the people rebelled and seized power for themselves. Think of Russia before 1917. The same thing happened. I am not saying that Tonga will come to such an extreme situation as that of Russia in 1917 or China in 1949. What I am saying is that unless the present system of government is modified to become more democratic, discontent, disillusionment and perhaps even rebellion on a smaller scale will occur.

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Perhaps this rebellion could be expressed in the form of a ‘brain drain’, where our educated people would leave the country because of dissatisfaction with the undemocratic system of government. This happened in Germany when Hitler established his totalitarian system of government.

If and when the existing system of government is changed, to become more democratic of course, the country will benefit. You will inevitably ask, why? The answer is this: because each and every man will be able to contribute something worthwhile to the welfare of the country through his Parliament representative. Only when every man has equal representation in Parliament will there be truly rule by the people and for the people.

However, if our system of government does not become more democratic then the tranquil way of life that you and I are accustomed to may be disrupted. It is no longer safe or even reasonable to ignore the increasing number of educated voices and minds in the kingdom.

My fellow students, this is my plea to you. Let us join together with fervent hope that our form of government will become more democratic in the future. You and I will become members of that imposing force of educated Tongan people and it is our responsibility to see that today's oligarchy is tomorrow's democracy.