That's disappointing. I feel like being able to swim and handle ocean surf is a "birthright" of Aussie kids. I remember being taken out in fairly big crashing surf as young as 5 and 6 years old by my parents so I could learn how to handle it (dive under breaking waves, judge currents, etc).

I would guess the trend is not so bad in Queensland. One thing that is very impressive here is the number of pools in schools, including public schools, and the very, very active swim programs that go with them. Brisbane probably has one of the best swimming cultures in the world (backed up by the number of swimmming champions that have come from here).

I grew up on the Gold Coast and definitely enjoyed that birthright, playing in the ocean shallows from before I could walk, doing nippers at age 6, etc, but I believe the Queensland standard has also dropped to 50m. I don't think many public schools there have pools even now though, it was almost all private ones when I was a kid. A big differentiator in Qld was the huge number of backyard pools, but they seem to be disappearing as Qld catches up population wise with the southern states, not to mention costs with recent droughts.

Watching my nephews that nature of their swimming seems to be a bit different, for me we were riding or bikes to pools/beaches by ourselves from the age of about 9, they live in Brisbanes suburbia and have to be driven to a pool/beach and then supervised. They're largely left to their own merits once they get there, but it's more of a family thing than a friends thing and they don't have to learn there own dispute resolution and the like, nor do they get to decide when to go and when to leave.