Andrew Bolt with a tribute to that much-maligned group:

MY SON is back from schoolies, and his war stories have turned my hair one shade greyer.

Trust him with my life, I would, but I couldn’t speak for everyone else up in Byron Bay last week.

My God, the rollcall of the drunk and absolutely paralytic … well, I’d better not reveal any confidences.

But what is it with teens and booze? I know the combination is not new, but the scale of it seems astonishing.

There wouldn’t be hundreds of police at schoolies haunts, arresting scores of the tanked, if we didn’t have a problem.

So I’d be in despair if my son hadn’t also told me of dozens of other young Australians up in Byron last week. About 150 of them, as I found out.

They were volunteers who patrolled the beach at all hours; checking on the drunk and troubled, and doing everything that some parents would have prayed for, had they known.

You know, walking the vulnerable back home, checking others weren’t choking on their vomit, giving first aid, handing out water.

My son said some of them must have checked at least 10 times on one boy he found lying almost comatose on the sand one night.

Would that boy’s mum ever know of that kindness?

So which group best represents this country?

The party animals, or the quiet ones looking after people barely capable of registering what was being done for them by complete strangers?

I’ve since checked and found that the people who so impressed my son were from a much-mocked group. Yes, Christians. They were mostly in their 20s and belonged to Red Frogs, an outreach program with 1300 volunteers – so many – at schoolies’ events around Australia.

It was started by Andy Gourley, of Brisbane’s Citipointe Church, who said the hardest thing in his work was dealing with our drinking culture.

“Unfortunately, there’s so much pressure in our culture that you have to drink,” he said.

“You drink to get smashed, wake up with peas and corn all over your shirt and you’re a legend.”

Legend? I think that honour better goes to the people helping that drunk to his wayward feet.