Schoolies is short for 'School leavers', a right of passage for high school graduates in Australia. It's very similar to the American college Spring Break but for 17 to 19 year olds. What started out as a week-long Queensland high school celebration on the Gold Coast in the 70's has evolved into 3 weeks of alcohol fueled destruction of Surfers Paradise each November by thousands of kids from all over Australia, with total disregard for authority.
Schoolies is pretty much a nationally sanctioned binge fest for kids, with parents assisting with their kids' bookings for accommodation as well as the procurement of way too much piss. As if there's not enough aggro during Schoolies without the kids getting wasted. No doubt there is racial resentment when you bring kids from all over Australia onto the same turf. The fact is, drunken Yobos, Islanders, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Greeks, Lebanese, Somalians and Vietnamese just don't mix in the lucky country that we call Australia. It's inevitable for kids to bring all the b.s from back home and rep their own clique when partying it up with tens of thousands of strangers.
More Schoolies pics: couriermail.com.au
Then, you compound all that with jealousy over girls/guys and who banged who... it's pretty much a disaster waiting to happen. Oh, and lets not forget to mention the odd drug deal gone wrong when people rip each other off.
The winners from all this nonsense? The alcohol industry has the most to gain, and to a lesser extent, the accommodation providers. The losers? Taxpayer dollars drained in order to provide extra police & emergency services as well as repairs to vandalized public property. Most importantly, the kids lose out. They might think they are having a the best time of their lives, but this right of passage into adulthood is pretty much to blame for the decline of western civilization (part IV?) as it reinforces irresponsible and antisocial behaviour that is rampant in modern Australian society. All the b.s you see when you go out on weekends can be traced back to Schoolies. Schoolies teaches kids that drunken disrespectful behaviour normal when they grow up.
Queensland Government claims that banning Schoolies is not possible. They argue that there is no way for them to control whether kids book holiday accommodations or not on the Gold Coast, and there is no way to interfere with economic laws of supply and demand. Well, that's retarded because local government are the ones encouraging Schoolies by barricading off special Schoolies zones in Surfers Paradise and putting on the Schoolies beach parties. Are all the violent and sexual assaults worth the tourist dollars and the tax revenues from alcohol sales? Someone definitely screwed the pooch on the Schoolies cost/benefit analyses.
I reckon Penelope Spheeris should make another movie, one about all debauchery that goes on during Spring Break and/or Schoolies. She can use house and dance music as the soundtrack instead, or maybe rap. Oh wait, she hasn't been relevant since the 80's.
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