AUSTRALIANS AREN’T COMING BACK TO AMERICA: Trump destroys the US tourism industry single handed.

Five years of social media history, an iris scan and a strip search, all for the privilege of being called a coward by the President.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics dropped a number this week that should have every game show host in Mar-a-Lardo choking on his well-done ketchup steak.

Australian travel to the United States for the year to March 2026 is down 5.5%. The only destination in our top 10 most visited countries that copped a decline. Every other country we go to is up. Japan up 14.4%. Vietnam up 17%. China up 16.5%. 12.7 million Australian outbound trips this year and the one country we have collectively decided is not fucking worth the airfare is the one being run by an adjudicated rapist with 34 felony convictions, a fake tan applied with a roller, and a hairpiece that looks like a possum got electrocuted on a powerline and then welded to his skull.

Let me get specific about who I’m talking about, just so we’re all on the same page from the start. I am talking about a man found liable in his own country’s courts of sexual abuse. I am talking about a man convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York courtroom by 12 of his fellow citizens. I am talking about a man who sent an armed mob to murder his own vice president and then sat in the White House dining room watching it on the telly with a Diet Coke and a Filet-O-Fish. I am talking about a man who lost an election, refused to leave, attempted an actual fucking coup, failed at the coup because he is too monumentally thick to organise a coup correctly, then somehow conned 77 million of his fellow countrymen into giving him another go at it.

That guy. That bedwetting, Adderall-snorting, ketchup-flinging steakhouse hustler. The reverse King Midas of Queens, the bloke who turns everything he touches into shit. He is now in charge of deciding whether or not Australians are allowed to come and look at the Statue of Liberty.

And we’ve collectively had a look at the offer and gone, you know what mate, no thanks. We’re going to Hoi An instead. The food is better. The people aren’t MAGA. The visa is automatic. And nobody at Da Nang International Airport is going to demand five years of our Instagram before we’re allowed in for the bahn mi.

THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE

The Australian Travel Industry Association chief, Dean Long, a sober and professional man whose entire job is to not start diplomatic incidents, summed up the data in news.com.au with the kind of restrained politeness that screams Australian:

Australians haven’t turned away from travel, they’ve turned toward Asia, and the numbers are making that impossible to ignore. Japan up 14.4%, Vietnam up 17%, China up 16.5%. The outbound total hit 12.7 million trips for the year. This is not a story about Australians staying home. The U.S. is the one market bucking that trend.

Let me translate Dean Long’s industry-association diplomacy into actual Australian English for the benefit of our American readers, who appear to be struggling with the basics.

What Dean is saying, very politely, is that nobody wants to go to your fucking country anymore. Not us. Not the Brits. Not the Canadians. Not the Germans. Not the Japanese. They’ve worked it out. They’ve done the maths. They’ve looked at the price of the flight, the queue at customs, the odds of getting strip-searched at LAX for having the wrong opinion on Instagram three years ago, and they’ve gone, nah mate, give it a swerve.

VIDEO: Canadians are fucking totally done with Trump

And here’s the bit that should have every American hotelier and theme park operator vomiting into a Stetson. Globally, 80 million more people travelled internationally in 2025 than in 2024. The whole bloody planet is on the move. Up. Everywhere. Except America, where foreign visitor numbers dropped 5.5% and international visitor spending fell 4.6%. The single slowest-growing region for tourism on Planet Earth is the one with the bronzed mango-faced madman in charge.

Asia-Pacific, the region your President has been busy threatening to nuke for the last 18 months, is the fastest-growing tourism region on the planet. People are voting with their wallets and their wallets are saying anywhere but Florida, thanks.

THE ESTA INSULT

Now here’s the bit that should have every American tourism operator screaming so loud you can hear them from the moon.

While the World Travel & Tourism Council is on its hands and knees begging the Trump administration to make America even slightly more welcoming ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the Department of Homeland Security has decided that the actual fucking problem with American border policy is that it is not invasive enough.

Let me explain to readers who haven’t had the joy of filling one in. The Electronic System for Travel Authorization. ESTA. The form every Australian tourist completes before flying to the US. Right now, you tick a few boxes confirming you’re not a terrorist, you don’t have tuberculosis and you’ve never been a Nazi. Boom. Sweet. You’re in.

The proposed change requires five years of social media history. Five fucking years. Every Instagram post. Every Facebook comment. Every Twitter, sorry, X reply where you called Trump a knob, which for the average politically engaged Australian represents approximately 47,000 entries in the spreadsheet, and that’s just from the last six months.

What is the actual plan with all this data? Some 22-year-old DHS subcontractor on $18 an hour is going to sit there with a Red Bull and an ergonomic chair he can’t afford, scrolling through five years of strangers’ Instagram, going, hmm, this Australian woman from Coogee called the President a “spray-tanned shitstain with a bedwetting problem” in 2022, can’t have her in the country, she might radicalise the cast of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.

Are you fucking kidding me?

This is the dumbest border policy proposed by a democracy in living memory. And it comes from a government that allegedly believes in small government, individual liberty and the sanctity of being left the fuck alone. The party of “the government should not be in your bedroom” wants to be in your DMs going back to the Obama administration. The party of “don’t tread on me” wants to tread all over a Brisbane plumber’s TikTok feed. The party of “America First” is shitting in its own mouth on global television.

It is, and I cannot stress this enough, dumber than a sack of arseholes.

THE ASYMMETRY

Now here is where the geographic dropkicks running American policy don’t seem to grasp the basic geometry of the situation.

China just opened visa-free travel to Australians. 30 days. No application. No fee. No five-year digital cavity search. Just rock up at Pudong, get the stamp, off you go. Eat some dumplings, climb the Great Wall, take a photo with a panda, fly home. Bing bang bosh.

Japan has been visa-free for Australians since the fucking Pleistocene. Vietnam will hand you an e-visa in 24 hours. Indonesia, visa on arrival. South Korea, visa-free. Thailand, visa on arrival. Half the Asian continent has worked out the radical, mind-blowing, four-dimensional-chess insight that if you want tourists, you make it easy for tourists to come.

America’s current position is the precise mathematical opposite. The slogan is now: please come and spend your hard-earned holiday savings in our gun-soaked sphincter of a country, but first we are going to need to scrape your digital DNA, possibly do an actual DNA test, scan your iris, scroll through every Instagram DM you ever sent your sister, harvest five years of every opinion you’ve ever expressed online, detain you for six hours at LAX if your beard is the wrong colour, strip-search you if your visa-vetting officer is hungover, and throw you in a Louisiana detention facility for two weeks if you ever retweeted a Bernie Sanders post in 2019.

This is not a competitive position. This is the tourism equivalent of opening a restaurant on a busy street, sticking a bouncer at the door, and demanding diners hand over their last five years of tax returns, an iris scan and a stool sample before they’re allowed to look at the menu.

And then complaining to the local paper when nobody comes for dinner.

THE IRAN INSULT

Now let’s talk about the bruise. The actual, real, throbbing fucking bruise. The thing that’s driving Australians to cancel their American holidays and book Vietnam instead with no plans to ever go back.

Earlier this year, the United States, in its infinite fucking wisdom, decided to start a war with Iran. Operation Epic Fury, they called it. Real name. Sounds like something a 14-year-old Call of Duty player came up with after his fourth Mountain Dew and a long, hard think about what would impress his stepdad at the next custody weekend.

They closed the Strait of Hormuz. The global oil market lost its absolute shit. Every Australian motorist watched the price at the pump climb past $2.80 a litre. Our farmers ran short of diesel. Our supply chains creaked. Our supermarkets started rationing fertiliser. And our economy ate the consequences of a war we did not start, did not want, did not vote for and did not get invited to join.

Then, while we were paying for their war at the pump and trying to figure out how to keep enough diesel in the trucks that deliver food to our cities, the President of the United States got on his shit-stained little social media platform and called the Australian government a pack of cowards for not joining in.

Not a phone call. Not a diplomatic cable. Not a quiet sit-down between ambassadors. Not even a fucking email from one of Pete Cocksbreth’s brunch-room amateurs at the Pentagon. No, mate. The leader of the free world, the man with his porky little finger on the nuclear button, the bloke supposedly representing the political and moral inheritance of Lincoln and Roosevelt and Eisenhower, can’t operate email. Doesn’t know how it works. Has never sent one.

So he just typed his insult out in all caps from the gold toilet at Mar-a-Lardo, posted it next to a meme of a bald eagle holding an AR-15, and went back to watching Fox News with the sound up and his pants undone.

And now this same fucking government wants us to hand over five years of our social media history so we can come and spend our holiday savings in their hotels?

Pull the other one, dickhead. It plays Waltzing Matilda.

A LETTER I ALREADY WROTE

Now listen. Before I go any further, I want to be honest about something.

I already wrote America a letter. A long one. A sad one. I called it Dear USA: When You Were Awesome. You can read it here:

That letter was the heartbroken one. That letter was the 5-year-old kid from Saint Mary’s South Primary School in western Sydney, still in love with the country he grew up worshipping, still grieving for the America that gave us Springsteen and Aretha and Indiana Jones and the moon landing. That letter was for the critical-thinking Americans, the ones still in the fight, the ones who never stopped fighting.

I cried writing that letter. A lot of Americans cried reading it. Some of them have not stopped writing back.

This letter is not that letter.

This letter is the one I write after the heartbroken one. After I’ve had a couple of beers. After I’ve watched the news again. After I’ve watched another video of a 22-year-old international student being snatched off a footpath in Massachusetts by masked men in unmarked vans because she wrote an op-ed about Gaza. After I’ve watched another Australian get strip-searched at LAX for having an Iranian stamp in his passport from a holiday three years ago.

A U.S. military wife from Australia is sharing her story after she was imprisoned by border officials at the Honolulu airport.

After I’ve realised that being polite has gotten us precisely fucking nowhere.

This letter is for the 34-count felon in the Oval Office. The 77 million bedwetters who put him there for a second go. The Fox-marinated cousins who think Hannity is journalism. The QAnon mothers who think Mexicans are eating their cats. The DHS contractor who thinks scraping a Sydney plumber’s Instagram is a reasonable price of admission to a country that buried our diggers in the wars it started.

This letter has different vibes to the last one. This one has had a couple of beers and a long think about exactly how much of a wanker your country has decided to become.

THE WORLD CUP DESPERATION

Here’s the kicker. The part where the comedy curdles into actual policy failure and the air goes out of the room.

June and July 2026. FIFA World Cup. America, Canada and Mexico jointly hosting. 11 of the host cities are in the United States. Biggest sporting event on the planet. Billions of viewers. Hundreds of millions of potential tourist dollars on the line. Hotels and restaurants and rental car companies and waiters and bartenders and Uber drivers all banking on a flood of international visitors who will fill their tills for six solid weeks.

And the World Travel & Tourism Council, run by Gloria Guevara, has just very politely pointed out that the United States, the world’s largest tourism market, is on track to spectacularly fucking blow it. From her April statement:

The U.S. must invest in promoting its attractiveness, both in international markets and during the summer of Football, change perception and position the U.S. as a welcoming destination, and grow international visitor spend.

She is giving the Trump administration a literal step-by-step roadmap. Be welcoming. Promote yourself. Don’t, for example, introduce policies that require every visitor to hand over five years of social media history before they’re allowed to come watch a soccer match in Dallas.

And what does the administration do?

It proposes harvesting five years of social media history from every visitor.

In April, nearly 400 US travel association members and industry advocates got on a fucking plane and flew to Washington to beg Congress not to do this. Halting the ESTA changes was in their top three priorities. Top three. Out of every single thing the US travel industry could ask the government to fix.

The American tourism industry is on its knees in the Capitol begging its own government to please, please, please not torch the World Cup. And the administration’s response is to keep waving the matches around saying, mate, watch this, you’ll fucking love it.

You will not love it. You are going to hate it. You are going to watch empty hotel rooms in 11 cities for six straight weeks while every World Cup tourist in the southern hemisphere decides to watch the matches in a Bali bar with a Bintang in their hand because Bali doesn’t demand a social media audit before you’re allowed on the beach.

THE ALUMINIUM SIDING SALESMAN

Here is the thing about the aluminium siding salesman from Queens.

He has spent his entire life misunderstanding every transaction he has ever been in. He thinks tourism is leverage. He thinks visitors are supplicants. He thinks the rest of the world is so desperate to come to his country that we will swallow any indignity, hand over any data, queue at any checkpoint, just for the privilege of standing under the Statue of Liberty for a selfie.

He has never grasped that tourism is the most voluntary thing on Earth. People are freely choosing to hand over their hard-earned holiday money in exchange for an experience. The moment the experience becomes “potential interrogation, possible strip search, mandatory digital colonoscopy of your last five years online, all while the host country’s president calls you a coward on his social media platform for not joining a war you weren’t invited to”, people go somewhere else.

The miracle of free choice. The miracle of capitalism. The very thing your country claims to have invented.

He doesn’t understand it because he has never been a tourist. He has never queued for anything in his life. He has never had to take off his shoes at security. He has never had to fish around in a foreign wallet for the right colour money. He has never been the foreigner. He is the kind of clueless, gold-plated, never-had-a-real-job, born-on-third-base, born-thinking-he-hit-a-triple prick who genuinely cannot comprehend that other people might have options.

Well mate, surprise-fucking-surprise you gold medalist sump plug. We have options. And we are exercising them. With both hands. In every direction except yours.

WHAT AUSTRALIANS ACTUALLY THINK

Let me clear something up for the American readers, because the orange shit volcano’s media stooges have spent the last 18 months telling Americans that the rest of the world is jealous of them, or scared of them, or out to rip them off, and none of that is fucking true.

Australians don’t hate Americans. We have never hated Americans. We love Americans. We love your music. We love your movies. We love your weirdly enormous breakfast portions. We love the chaos and the warmth and the way you can fall into a conversation with a complete stranger in a diner in Wyoming and three hours later you’ve been invited to her cousin’s wedding in Cheyenne and offered a spare room and a beer.

We love the America that fought beside us at Long Tan. We love the America that put men on the moon. We love the America that invented jazz and rock and roll and hip hop. We love the America that built the United Nations and the Marshall Plan and the rules-based order that kept the lights on for 80 years.

What we don’t love is your current fucking management.

We don’t love being smeared as cowards for not joining a war we weren’t invited to. We don’t love being tariffed by a country we signed a free trade agreement with in good faith. We don’t love being lectured about freedom by a government that’s currently snatching legal residents off the footpath in Brooklyn and locking them in detention centres in Louisiana for the crime of writing an op-ed.

We don’t love the prospect of an iris scan, a DNA test and a five-year social media audit just to come visit Yosemite for a week.

We don’t love watching the country that gave us the Bill of Rights tear up the Bill of Rights one amendment at a time.

We don’t love what you have become.

So we’re going to Japan. We’re going to Vietnam. We’re going to China. We’re going to South Korea. We’re going to Thailand. We’re going to Indonesia. We’re staying in the region that actually wants us there. The region that’s growing. The region that doesn’t require an audit of our digital lives as the price of entry. The region where the airport staff smile at us instead of staring at us like we’re the cargo on a slave ship.

You’ll get us back. Maybe. Eventually. After the management changes. After the 34-count felon is back in a courtroom where he belongs. After the cabinet of grifters and bedwetters is broken up and the donor-funded judges are off the bench. After the Democrats finally remember what they’re supposed to fucking stand for.

In the meantime, you can have your strip searches. You can have your social media scrapers. You can have your iris scans and your DNA swabs and your masked goons in unmarked vans. You can have your World Cup with empty hotel rooms across 11 cities and bartenders in Dallas crying into the tip jar because the international tourists they were promised never showed up.

We’ll be in Da Nang. The beach is unreal. The food is incredible. The visa is automatic. The wifi is faster than yours. And nobody is asking us what we tweeted in 2021.

The numbers don’t lie, mate. The world has moved on.

We loved you when you were awesome. We mourned you when you fell apart. And now we’re packing our bags and going somewhere that isn’t run by a rapist.

IFLA ~ Maizy & Gman

AUSSIE TO YANK GLOSSARY (THIS WEEK)

Ratfucked: Comprehensively destroyed through deliberate sabotage. As in, the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement was ratfucked by tariffs in 2025.

The pump: What Americans call the gas pump. The fuel bowser where Australians watched petrol hit $2.80 a litre during Operation Epic Fury and quietly noted the address of the bedwetter responsible.

Dropkick: An incompetent fool, usually one who thinks he’s clever. The natural collective noun for senior Trump administration appointees.

Knob: Penis. Also, any man behaving like one. The single most useful word in the Australian language. Apply liberally to the White House press secretary, the Defense Secretary and the Attorney General. Stack as required.

Clacker: Backside, arse, the relevant orifice for the metaphorical insertion of this op-ed.

Pull the other one, it plays Waltzing Matilda: Australian for “I do not believe a single word of what you have just said, and I am insulted you tried.”

Mar-a-Lardo: The Florida country club where decisions of global consequence are made between rounds of golf, Diet Cokes, and screaming sessions about the cable news chyron.

Bedwetter: Originally, a child who wets the bed. Now also, a thrice-married, twice-impeached, 34-count-felony-convicted, adjudicated rapist who allegedly required adult diapers during his 2024 court appearances.

Cocksbreth: The Defense Secretary. Real name Pete Hegseth. Renamed by IFLA after extensive consideration of his contribution to American military diplomacy.

Sphincter: An anatomical ring of muscle. Used here in the geopolitical sense. As in, “the gun-soaked sphincter of a country that used to be the United States of America.”