Easy answer is that I didn't know about `current_app`. However docs on it it [says](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/http/urls/#django.core.urlresolvers.reverse):

  > The current_app argument allows you to provide a hint to the resolver indicating the application to which the currently executing view belongs.

This view does not belong to the `speeches` app  (namespaced as `committee` and `hansard`) so it would not be appropriate to use `current_app` to select where the speech section urls should point. It would work in this particular situation, but would cause some very subtle issues if something else expected it to be correctly set.