Throwing coins on the ground is not paying people. And they aren’t drunken laughing in general. They’re laughing at the people who are scrambling for money. They are paying people to degrade themselves, and laughing at their discomfort. It’s one of the ways TV shows will let you know that someone is a villain–for fuck’s sake.
I mean, this is a textbook example of how to spin abominable behavior. I thought you Aussies hate classism, and here you are defending it.
Your characterisation as “degrade themselves” is unsupported by the evidence, and your attempt to associate it with social class is the kind of “classism” that many traditional Australians would object to.