The Night Paremoremo’s Maximum Security Prisoners Won Auckland’s Top Debating Trophy

In the winter of 1977, a van carrying six maximum-security prisoners wound through Auckland’s streets towards the University of Auckland’s Maidment Theatre. The men inside — among them a drug dealer, a safeblower, a heroin importer, and a convicted killer — were dressed not in prison uniforms but in the fashion of the era: bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and wide-lapel jackets. Each was accompanied by a personal guard. They were heading to the final of the Auckland Debating Association’s Athenaeum Cup, the city’s most prestigious debating competition.

They won.

The story, now told in Greg Newbold’s memoir Dream Dealer: From Prisoner to Professor — The Extraordinary Life of Greg Newbold, published earlier this year, is one of the more remarkable episodes in New Zealand’s social history. Two teams from Paremoremo Prison’s maximum-security wing had made it to the final night, beating out the lawyers, accountants, and university students who ordinarily dominated the competition. When the judges handed down their result, the Athenaeum Cup went to Paremoremo — the trophy that night made the journey back through Auckland’s streets and into one of the country’s most forbidding institutions.

No escape attempts were made.

The debating club at Paremoremo had been established in the early 1970s by a young man named Don McKinnon — the same Don McKinnon who would later serve as New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and, later still, as Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. Before entering politics, McKinnon helped set up the club as part of a broader effort to bring intellectual engagement to the prison. He saw, as others would come to understand, that debate — the discipline of constructing an argument, listening to an opponent, and thinking on your feet — was a form of education as rigorous as anything offered in a university tutorial.

The prisoners who participated in the 1977 competition were not passive students. Newbold, who was himself a first speaker on one of the teams, has since described the dynamics of the club with characteristic candour. “Most criminals have really high self esteem,” he told RNZ. “They think they’re bloody superman and untouchable.” That confidence, he noted, turned out to be an unexpected asset in competitive debating.

The inmates had also developed a formidable home advantage when visitors came to debate inside the prison walls. McKinnon recalls one visiting speaker who attempted to win the audience — made up largely of prisoners — with a condescending approach to prison reform. “That speaker was crucified for the rest of the night,” McKinnon told RNZ. Audiences that included men serving long sentences were not inclined to sit politely through speeches they found patronising. They yawned loudly, rustled, and made their displeasure impossible to ignore. It was, in its own way, a form of rigorous peer review.

On the night of the Athenaeum final, the journey to the Maidment Theatre had an unexpected interlude. Before reaching the venue, the prison van stopped at the home of Geoff Greenbank, a former Kings College principal who had been tutoring the debating club. There, the inmates and their guards sat down to a buffet dinner with wine — a brief window of ordinary life before the competition began. It was the kind of evening that would have seemed impossible to anyone who knew only the locked doors and concrete corridors of Paremoremo’s maximum-security wing.

The event at the Maidment Theatre unfolded without incident. Visiting debaters faced opponents who had been rigorously coached and who brought a self-assurance that is hard to manufacture in a seminar room. By the evening’s end, the cup belonged to Paremoremo.

Newbold’s memoir covers not only the debating triumph but the full arc of his years inside the prison. It includes a subplot that has taken on a kind of legendary status in the telling. At one point, a group of inmates hatched a plan to take hostages over a dispute with prison management. The grievance in question was the permitted size of a Christmas fruit cake — specifically, whether inmates should be allowed two pounds or more. The authorities held firm on the fruit cake. The hostage plan was abandoned.

Greg Newbold eventually left prison and remade himself entirely. He completed a doctorate and joined the academic staff at the University of Canterbury, where he became one of New Zealand’s most respected criminologists. His memoir, now in circulation through New Zealand bookshops, has given new life to a story that might otherwise have stayed locked away in the memories of those who were there.

The debating story resonates well beyond nostalgia. It sits at an unusual intersection of New Zealand social history — at once a story about rehabilitation, about the unexpected possibilities that open up inside closed institutions, and about what happens when someone is given a genuine reason to think rather than simply to wait. The debating club at Paremoremo gave men with few options a structured way to compete on equal terms with the world outside. The result was not just a trophy. Newbold’s own trajectory from prisoner to professor is the most vivid evidence of what that kind of engagement can produce.

The debate about how New Zealand’s prisons should balance punishment, public safety, and rehabilitation remains very much alive. In that context, a story from 1977 about six men in bell-bottoms winning an argument feels less like a curiosity and more like a reminder of what is possible when institutions choose to invest in people.

Dream Dealer: From Prisoner to Professor — The Extraordinary Life of Greg Newbold is available in New Zealand bookshops now.

Did you debate competitively at school or university, or do you have a connection to prison education programmes in New Zealand? Share your thoughts in the comments below.