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School children ranking each other on attractiveness is nothing new. Not sure about Australia but here in the states ranking people based on attractiveness made it's way around the news as well previously. As the article points out, this had been happening for as long as people can remember and many people have had personal experiences going across both sexes. Heck, even I had the misfortune of finding out what some girls rated my attractiveness back during high school.
It's just yet another opportunity to bash on men and to push the women are victim narrative that seems to become ever more prevalent.
Interestingly enough /r/TwoXChromosome had a thread on that news and most responses seem responsible: https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/b68zn2/teen_boys_rated_their_female_classmates_based_on/
The responses that seem to say the attractive rating between teens is problematic are actually downvoted.
That being said, this was 5 years ago. I wonder if the average user/demographic has shifted enough that the responses would be different today. There is another post on /r/melbourne about the exact article you linked to: https://old.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/1ckq7hp/private_school_boys_suspended_after_absolutely/
It's a different subreddit so I would expect TwoXChromosome to be more sympathetic to the girls, yet the responses on this more recent story seem to be more full of outrage.
Melbourne is rather leftist and conformist by Australian standards, it's reasonable that they're more feminist than US feminists.
This came up during "the voice" referendum too, which proved to Australian reddit that they live in an irredeemably white supremacist dystopia. It's actually more off the deep end than most of the US city subs.
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There was also a similar though more serious scandal in California back in 1993 around the so-called Spur Posse.
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