"I really had to go to the Left on this topic," one tells another, running through their case and the motive behind it. They're hoping for a win tonight. Another implies that the topic they are about to debate won't be a problem "when I become prime minister".

It is in these competitions that the youngest of our political minds are fostered.

We congratulate a debating team after a win, when they've obfuscated and befuddled the opposition, presented a case that is only marginally better, but sold it with an apparent passion and fervour. We don't mind that they believe in it only slightly more than the tooth fairy.

But when our politicians do the same thing – in Parliament, on television, in newspaper opinion pieces – we become disillusioned. We switch off and don't care what they're saying. It's all just a game anyway, we think, they don't believe a word they're saying. The politicians are hoping for a win tonight.

Many political leaders were exposed to debating in high school. John F. Kennedy thought it was "valuable training". Julia Gillard discovered a "passion" for it and Bill Shorten made it to the national debating championships in 1984. Our Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was described as a "legend" in debating circles in the early 1970s.

Debating, then, appears as a natural first step for the young political aspirant – but this has a detrimental effect on the quality of political discourse in Australia.

A debate at the high school level is never about ideas or reaching a consensus. Compromise is a foreign concept. It is about an easy win, with ideas moved around like game pieces on a board of words. Statistics are fodder for manipulating the argument to suit, not for having an informed debate.

In no way can high school debating be seen as a forum for exploring ideas to better the country. It's a mental game which sets the precedent for the public face of policy debate right up to the highest levels.

With a binary system of either winning or losing, all or nothing, the losing side in a debate is immediately disregarded, even if it presented ideas which could complement the winning team's proposals.

Behind closed doors, out of the spotlight, a lot of politics is bipartisan and achieved together. It is a real loss that we don't foster this skill publicly from a young age.

Supporters of debating point to the logical thinking skills, the confidence built through participation and the widespread academic results enjoyed by debaters. Debaters, they say, are more confident speakers, better researchers and are excellent at putting together logical arguments. I would add they are also good liars: excellent at sounding as though they believe in what they are saying when they really don't – just to win the game. This is a skill which politics sadly relies on.

Commentators lament the lack of diversity in politics but it starts at a much younger age. Debating competitions are made up of students who are overwhelmingly privileged, often privately educated. The competitions rarely represent how multicultural Australia actually is.

The future of politics wouldn't be so bleak and two-faced if we moved away from the competition-based debating model of fostering political interest in high school. If, instead, we developed environments where policies, ideas and convictions were discussed in an informed way without the adversarial angle and the quest for a quick win, we may soon discover that we were able to have real political debates with real, beneficial outcomes.

It's easy to roll our eyes when another politician fronts the media and calls for a mature debate about an issue. But at the moment, we simply don't know how to do just that.

Jasper Lindell is a Year 11 student in Canberra and community radio broadcaster. He was briefly on his school debating team.