CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
With the teenage poms and Brazilians returning to Australia like a post-war migration wave, it seems the horror of closed borders is now a distant memory for the low-budget tourism industry.
This sudden injection of foreign youths is particularly visible behind the bars and kitchen sinks of our nation’s pubs and restaurants, as local kids stay home and smoke vapes while the hospo jobs get snapped up by hungover backpackers with a bit of go about them.
While Australian government’s bootlicking throughout the coronation of King Charles means that British no longer need to do their 80 days of cruel rural farmwork to attain a bridging visa, the global cost-of-living crisis has seen just as many Irish and South Americans arrive to our shores ready to pick up a shovel.
They also seem the be the only young people keen to road trip around this wide brown land of ours, as small town nightclubs from Coffs Harbour to Perth begin offering weird drinks like ‘Snake Bites’ and ‘Fruit Tingles’ to keep the wide-eyed young tourists pissed on a budget.
However, the most clear sign that closed borders are a thing of the past is the fact that our nation’s central business districts now once again reek of powerful marijuana smoke.
The last remaining CBD backpacker hostels, that weren’t flipped into luxury bedsit apartments for land-banking property investors to snap up during the pandemic, are packed to the rafters with spritely young people sleeping off hangovers in bunkbeds and playing hacky sack on the street.
Brisbane’s Roma Street and Sydney’s Kings Cross is once again graced by the relaxing scent of hydroponic cannabis that has been trafficked to the big cities in the boot of a hippy’s busted Commodore from the outer Northern Rivers of New South Wales.
And with an imminent global recession predicted, State governments have urged police to please turn a blind eye to blatant violation of respective drug misuse and trafficking acts – as our nation’s economists beg the politicians to hold onto these young people with both hands for the sake of small business owners and the agricultural sector.
