Parliamentary debating is a team sport since it is done by a team of 2 or 3 people. Each person is given a certain speaking time ranging from 3 to 7 minutes, thus giving each person the change to fully make his or her case to the judges. Interruptions are allowed, but only at the discretion of the speaker, meaning the person speaking is fully in control of the floor. Each person usually has protected time: the offering of interruptions is not allowed in the first and last minute. 

There are various debating formats which can be used. Most common are American Parliament (AP), British Parliament (BP) and Australian Parliament (Australian). In an AP debate there are 2 teams, one is assigned proposition (prop), who will be speaking in favour of the motion and the other team is assigned opposition (opp) - they will be speaking against the motion. Each team will give 3 speeches, 1 by each team member and a summary at the end which is given by the first speaker of each team. Prop will give the first speech, then the floor is given to opp, followed by prop and finally the second opposition speaker. The summaries are given in reverse order, meaning the opposition team will give the first summary and proposition will have the chance to have the final word. 

In BP, each debate consist of 4 teams where 2 are assigned to prop and 2 are assigned to opp. There can still be only one winner in a BP debate, meaning that you do not only compete against the teams on the other side, but also against the team defending the same side of the motion. It's very similar to real life politics where one party tries to show why they are better than the coalition partner without going against them. The first two teams in BP do practically the same thing as in AP but the second half clearly has a different job. Those teams will give an extension speech and a summary with the goals of adding a new dimension to the debate, to deepen or widen the argumentation from first half and finally, to provide an overview of what the debate was about and to show why they have won.

In Australian, each debate consists of 2 teams and each team consists of 3 people. This format is very similar to AP, the difference being that the summary is given by a separate speaker and he is given the same amount of time as the others, thus putting more emphasis on the summation part of the debate. Another difference is that summary speeches are not given in reverse order; so first summary is given by prop and opp has the final word.