Hear, hear, Albo: get these cabana sand-bagsers off our beaches
Unless you are a devoted follower of such matters, it’s dangerous to put too much faith in free online horoscopes, whose fearless predictions of health, prosperity and romance would be more believable if those same three words hadn’t appeared in reverse order last year, and been rearranged the year before that and the year before that.
After a bruising end to 2024, Copacabana’s newest resident, Anthony Albanese (a rabbit in Chinese zodiac terms), probably heard that his 2025 is set to be “a breakthrough year as things fall into place easily”, shrugged and returned to a scrum comprised of ALP strategists versed in the Dark Arts of Placating Disgruntled Voters Who Would Quite Like A Beach House Of Their Own Especially In An Election Year, Please And Thank You. Then Nine’s Today show called and had him declare open season on beach cabanas and – voila! – all was forgiven.
Position, position, position … competing cabanas at Bondi Beach.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Maybe the horoscope was right. If there’s one thing Australians hate more than a prime minister with a tin ear, it’s a shoreline with an obstructed view. Especially if that obstruction, which is less beach cabana and more beach kit home with optional fold-out table for aperitivo hour, was plonked there by some tattooed bogan blow-in from Wherever, who erected it at ungodly o’clock before promptly dashing off to Fitness First to smash out 80 clicks on the stationary bike he/she reserved with a hand towel at half past get serious.
In cities as relentlessly obsessed with real estate as Sydney and Melbourne, such practices are frowned upon but strangely tolerated. While its neighbours probably spent the morning giving the unoccupied cabana the stink eye, nothing actually happens when its owners finally roll in at 11am, all drink coolers and portable speakers and weird swimmers in the process of being eaten by the backsides they’re supposed to be covering.
On Tuesday, Albanese decried the practice of sand-bagsing as “not on”, adding that the beach is “a place where every Australian is equal. And that’s a breach of principle, really, to think that you can reserve a little spot as just yours.” (Let’s just pause here to observe that reserving a little spot high in the hills of Copacabana that is just yours is perfectly fine and definitely not a breach of any principle whatsoever. OK, that’s done.)
The point is, Albo is right, not that that makes a blind bit of difference to our absolute waterfront-hogging friends, who hail from a long line of Veruca Salt types invoking the principle of Terra I-Got-Here-Firstus to justify their actions.
In the supermarket, their overflowing trolley is a giant metal placeholder in the middle of the 14-strong checkout queue, abandoned while they pop off to indulge a craving for Persian fairy floss and a tub of organic tzatziki. At the takeaway coffee place, they’re dismayed to discover that for once, mysteriously, they did not get there first, and then spend a solid 90 seconds tap-tap-tapping their credit cards on the counter before explaining that, although they practically invented the principle of Terra I-Got-Here-Firstus, it needs to be overridden on this occasion by the principle of Terra My-Need-Is-Greater-Than-Everyone-Else’s, because there were no car spots right out the front so they had to park in a bus zone.
They are also perfectly capable of packing up the crazy and taking it on tour. On their last holiday to Bali, they discovered (to their utter disdain) that when they rolled into the hotel at 4.45pm, all the good pool seats were taken. “What sort of a Third World, five-star resort do they call this?” they huffed, before resolving to retaliate by leaving a filthy review on Tripadvisor.
