This ‘Honest’ Government Tourism Ad About The Great Barrier Reef Dying Is Way Too Real

Thanks to climate change, coral bleaching and the Australian government’s bold strategy of doing absolutely nothing to protect it, the Great Barrier Reef is well on the way to becoming the world’s largest pile of sludge. This morning news broke that more than a third of coral reefs in the central and northern regions of the GBR are already dead — news that the government, judging by their efforts to scrub all mention of the Reef from UNESCO’s latest report on tourism and climate change, is going to do its best to either bury or ignore.

One of the reasons the government worked so hard to remove descriptions of the Reef’s parlous state from that UNESCO report was fear that it would negatively impact tourism. That 2,300 kilometres of dead fish and seaweed might act as a greater deterrent to the tourist dollar, as well as the fact that people can access information like this pretty easily on the internet, seems to have escaped them, but points for trying, I guess.

Thankfully, others are taking on the government’s job and letting people know what’s really going on. Videomakers The Juice Media have put together a brilliant piss-take on Australian tourism ads, riffing off the government’s inaction on the Reef’s increasingly likely demise to make ‘Visit Australia’ promo that lets would-be tourists know what they’re really in for.