TV COUPLE’S SCREEN BREAK

DAN KNOWLES AND PETE MARTINELLI SOCIAL media and the need to look good on Instagram may finally have tamed the schoolie.

As 21,000 school leavers begin pouring into the Gold Coast for Schoolies Week today, organisers of the safety response say behaviour has changed from hard drinking to toning it down to look good over a “latte at a cafe” the next morning.

But even organisers admit while they do as much as they can to tame schoolies in public places, they have no control over them once they return to their hotels – where critics of the annual influx say most damage is done.

As well as traditional Gold Coast hotspot, thousands of schoolies will descend on the Sunshine Coast, Airlie Beach and even Lake Tinaroo on the Tablelands west of Cairns for the end-of-school blowout.

There have already been reports of shenanigans at Mareeba. A half-naked squatting schoolie upset shoppers near Mareeba Coles supermarket this week with police finding seven teens in “various states of undress”. No charges were laid. Another group of teens were allegedly reciting offensive poetry near another grocery store.

This year’s Queensland Schoolies will be predominantly under 18 (85 per cent) but will drop to 55 per cent in the next two years as changes to the school age filter through, offering a challenge to organisers as they find a way to handle both legal drinkers and underage kids during the same wild week.

Gold Coast Schoolies advisory group chairman Mark Raeburn said organisers did not promote Schoolies or profit from it, they were simply trying to deal with the influx of potentially vulnerable young people and keep them safe.

He believed social media had changed the way schoolleavers were behaving, that they wanted to look good rather than getting wrecked as they had in the “bad old days”.

“The kids are much more image conscious than they used to be,” Mr Raeburn said. “Gone are the days of ‘I’ve just sculled a bottle of scotch and look at me aren’t I tough’.”

He said there was no turning back the Schoolies tide so authorities had no choice but manage it.