Novak Djokovic Is Refused Entry Into Australia Over Vaccine Exemption - The New York Times - "The chain of events represented a startling turnabout for Djokovic, who in a little more than 24 hours went from receiving special, last-minute permission to play in the Open, to boarding an intercontinental flight, to essentially being told by the prime minister of Australia that he was not welcome in the country.
'Mr Djokovic’s visa has been cancelled. Rules are rules, especially when it comes to our borders. No one is above these rules. Our strong border policies have been critical to Australia having one of the lowest death rates in the world from COVID, we are continuing to be vigilant.'
... [There was] a confrontation between a sports superstar and the most powerful leader in one of the world’s most prosperous countries, where government officials, citizens, the media and even some fellow players criticized the exemption, seemingly prompting the sudden shift. The decision promises to become another flashpoint in the debate about vaccines and how the pandemic should be managed now, especially in Australia, where egalitarianism is considered a sacred principle — and where “the tennis,” as the Open is called, is also beloved by what often seems like an entire nation of sports fanatics... he announced on Twitter that he had received a medical exemption from the requirement that all people entering Australia be vaccinated or quarantine for 14 days upon arrival. He later boarded a plane bound for Australia from Dubai. In a statement later that day, Craig Tiley, the chief executive of Tennis Australia, explained that players seeking an exemption had to pass muster with two panels of medical experts. The process included the redaction of personal information to ensure privacy... Tennis Australia said Djokovic’s exemption was granted in part by an independent panel appointed by the Victoria Department of Health."
The campaign to kick Novak Djokovic out of Australia is interesting for at least 2 reasons:
1) We were told that there would be medical exemptions so for example those medically unable to get vaccinated through no fault of their own would be exempted from covid apartheid. Turns out that was a lie. Medical exemptions are not respected. Even though 2 panels approved his medical exemption without knowing his identity, the government bowed to political pressure and kicked him out, the first time illegally (as overturned by a judge). So even rigorously granted medical exemptions are not accepted - good luck to less high profile and less resourced people who qualify for a medical exemption
2) They originally justified their attempt based on protecting others. So they're still gaslighting everyone by claiming the vaccines are effective against infection and transmission. Of course they're not alone, around the world this is still being done - only, when poor protection against infection is pointed out, we're gaslit again and told that they were never meant to reduce infection
But anyway, the way they kicked him out in the end is basically an admission that they booted him out for political reasons
The demonisation of Novak Djokovic - "Not for the first time in the pandemic, Australia has lost its mind. After firing rubber bullets at protesters, killing rescue dogs and instructing people to wear masks outside while drinking in an effort to keep Covid at bay, the fanatical Aussie authorities have now sparked a full-blown diplomatic incident... Djokovic is now basically a folk devil Down Under. TV news and talk radio are fuming about this multimillionaire bending the rules, and with an election coming up Australian PM Scott Morrison decided to get involved. When news first broke that Djokovic was on his way to Australia, Morrison shrugged that this was a ‘matter for the Victorian government’. Just a few hours later, following considerable blowback, he threatened to put Djokovic on ‘the next plane home’ if he failed to provide the proper paperwork. The other context for all this is Australia’s often brutal lockdown policies. Melbourne, where the Open is held, has been locked down for a total of 256 days over the past two years – making it the most locked-down city in the world. At various points during the pandemic it has been all but impossible for Australians abroad to return home due to incredibly tight border policies. There were even internal travel restrictions put in place across the nation. Australians have had to deal with some of the toughest measures in the democratic world. With some states pursuing a Zero Covid policy in all but name, lockdowns have been an ever-present threat. And police have carried on in an often dystopian fashion. In Victoria, a pregnant woman was arrested in September 2020, in her own home, for posting on Facebook about an anti-lockdown protest. Like many other countries, Australia has also been roiled by stories of lockdown hypocrisy and double standards. There was fury last year over a bunch of celebrities jetting into the country, and in some cases given permission to quarantine at home rather than in hotels, while 40,000 Australian citizens were still stranded overseas. Last year’s Open also sparked anger, because elite players and coaches were being welcomed into the country at a time when many Australian citizens were still unable to get a flight home. But none of this is Novak Djokovic’s fault. Of course it shouldn’t be one rule for rich sportsmen and another rule for ordinary Australians. But you could just make the rules more sensible and be done with it. North of 90 per cent of Australians aged 16 and up are double vaccinated. So long as Djokovic doesn’t have Covid he’s no threat to anyone. Why are people angry at him, rather than at the onerous and unscientific rules they’re suffering under?... There’s nothing big or clever about being anti-vax. But we shouldn’t be looking to sportsmen for medical or moral advice. The glee with which the media and political classes have gone after Djokovic these past 24 hours, not just in Australia but around the world, is more about these people getting their moral rocks off than worrying about the fairness of the rules in Australia, or the threat to Australians’ health. Djokovic has just become a convenient target for the pent-up hysteria that months of lockdown inevitably seem to brew. And a punchbag / proxy for the cursed unvaccinated, who seem to become more demonised the more the threat of Covid recedes. The Australian authorities should let him play, and let everyone else get on with their lives."
This is like NS in Singapore - the equal misery principle. People just want others to suffer because they did, rather than end the suffering for everyone
Some Say Politics at Play in Djokovic Detention in Australia - "“The guy played by the rules, he got his visa, he arrives, he’s a nine-time champion and whether people like it or not he’s entitled to fair play,” former Australian Open tournament director and Davis Cup player Paul McNamee told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “There’s no doubt there’s some disconnect between the state and the federal government.” “I hate to think politics are involved, but it feels that way,” he added... The cases of two other Australian Open players who also received health-based vaccine exemptions are currently being closely examined. The Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported Friday that Renata Voracova, a 38-year-old doubles player from Czechia, also had her visa canceled and was taken to the same hotel where Djokovic is staying... Regardless of one's views on vaccination, the treatment of Djokovic shouldn't sit well with anyone. One reporter from Down Under told Irish media this week the Serb is "public enemy number one" in Australia and it is difficult to see how this entire incident isn't just an example of him being thrown to the wolves by the Australian leadership. It is a sacrifice at the altar of a failed Zero Covid strategy – and try as they might, no amount of political grandstanding is going to distract from that. "
Australia cancels tennis star’s visa amid Djokovic saga - "Renata Voracova, who has already played in a warm-up event in Melbourne, has been detained by Australian Border Force officials and taken to the same hotel in which they are currently holding Novak Djokovic. Voracova, 38, has reportedly been informed by the country's immigration officials that she must leave the country after she entered with a similar medical exemption to the one secured by world number one Djokovic"
Weird how they let her in before the "science" changed and she had to be kicked out
Novak Djokovic wins in court but Australia says he’s not vaccinated, may still deport him - "World men’s number one Novak Djokovic returned to training after being released from Australian immigration detention on Monday, posting a picture with his team from Melbourne Park and thanking the judge for overturning his visa cancellation... The Australian government, however, could still deport Djokovic. A spokesman for Immigration Minister Alex Hawke said that he was considering using his personal power to again revoke Djokovic’s visa... Judge Anthony Kelly had ruled the federal government’s decision last week to revoke the Serbian tennis star’s visa amid a row over his medical exemption from COVID-19 vaccination requirements was “unreasonable” and ordered his release. Kelly told the court it appeared Djokovic had sought and received the required medical exemption from COVID-19 vaccination on the basis that he had contracted the virus last month. He had presented evidence of this before he travelled to Melbourne and when he landed on Wednesday evening. “What more could this man have done?” the judge said... Kelly also ordered the federal government to pay legal costs for Djokovic, who spent several days in an immigration detention hotel, noting that his lawyers argued his “personal and professional reputation and his economic interests may be directly affected”... Judge Kelly said he had quashed the decision to block Djokovic’s entry to Australia because the player was not given enough time to speak to tennis organisers and lawyers to respond fully after he was notified of the intent to cancel his visa. Officials at Melbourne’s airport, where Djokovic had been detained on arrival late on Wednesday, reneged on an agreement to give Djokovic until 8.30 a.m. to speak to tournament organiser Tennis Australia and lawyers"
One vaxhole claimed that everyone had to be treated equally under the law and cheered the attempt to deport him. She was silent when I pointed out that a judge had thrown it out
Novak Djokovic: Tennis star leaves detention after winning visa battle - "border agents had not given Djokovic enough time to put together a defence when at 4am they demanded more documents to support his visa and allowed him just 20 minutes to produce them - as revealed by a transcript of the nearly eight-hour long interview... he was told that his visa was being cancelled unless he could come up with more documents to support it - in the early hours of the morning and without being allowed to use his phone. 'I am really failing to understand what else do you want me to provide to you. I have provided all the documents that Tennis Australia and Victorian government has asked me to do in the last three/four weeks, this is what we have been doing,' Djokovic said. 'I applied [for a medical exemption], they approved, I just really don’t know what else do you want me to say. I arrived here because of these documents otherwise I wouldn’t have been allowed to come in. I just really don’t understand what is the reason you don’t allow me to enter your country.' After being told he has 20 minutes to come up with a reason why the visa shouldn't be cancelled, Djokovic adds: 'So you’re giving me legally 20 minutes to try to provide additional information that I don’t have? At 4 o clock in the morning? 'I mean you kind of put me in a very awkward position where at 4 in the morning I can’t call director of Tennis Australia, I can’t engage with anybody from the Victorian state government through Tennis Australia. I just you put me in a very uncomfortable position. I don’t know what else can I tell you. I mean everything that that they.. that I was asked to do is here.' After being told by border guards that having recovered from Covid is not sufficient reason to get a border certificate, Djokovic adds: 'The federal government said okay, fine, access granted, travel declaration, QR code, you are free to go. 'Otherwise I wouldn’t be flying here. There’s absolutely no way I would put myself in a position to come and sit here with you... I made it all the way to Australia because you know they all made it very clear and certain to me that I have all the documentation that I possibly can provide to you.' Djokovic's lawyer presented the same line of argument in court, saying he had received assurances that a recent positive Covid-19 test qualified him for the medical exception from the country's requirement for all visitors to be double vaccinated... 'Here, a professor and an eminently qualified physician have produced and provided to the applicant a medical exemption,' Judge Kelly said. 'Further to that, that medical exemption and the basis on which it was given was separately given by a further independent expert specialist panel established by the Victorian state government and that document was in the hands of the delegate.'... Wood said Djokovic had clearly declared he had a medical contraindication that exempted him from the requirement to be double vaccinated and, even though he was not required to, had provided evidence to support that claim both before boarding his flight to Australia and on arrival... Djokovic's lawyer, Nick Wood, had argued during the court hearing that the Australian government's visa cancellation notice was 'defective' because it has a typo."
Hating on Novak has become a national sport | The Spectator Australia - "The whole country is hating on Novak Djokovic right now because he had the courage to do what most of us did not – stand up for himself. Novak’s principled stance has only served to highlight the fact that millions of Australians have allowed themselves to be abused for the past two years. And no one wants to admit that. It is far easier to demonise a Serbian millionaire who took a stand than it is to agree that we have been bullied into submission by politicians and health bureaucrats... When news broke earlier this week that Novak was going to be allowed to play in Australia, a Victorian journalist tweeted: ‘If we still have crowds at the Australian Open by the time it starts, it’s the duty of every Australian to boo Novak relentlessly between sets. Shit is absolutely f***ed.’ Urging 14,000 people under the Rod Laver Arena roof to exhale in unison to protest an airborne virus is the kind of dumb you can only be when you’re smack bang in the middle of a rabid mob. Not to be outdone, a prominent Melbourne journalist tweeted that the Australian Open was ‘a tournament fans were scared to come to in the first place and won’t want to attend now’. Really? People were scared that the medically cleared Grand Slam winner might walk onto a fenced-off court, cough during a rally, and infect everyone in the stadium with the plague? Get a grip. He’s a tennis player, not the Grim Reaper... Australia recorded more than 60,000 Covid cases in the past 24 hours. It’s not like Novak – someone who is perfectly healthy and who has natural immunity from having beaten the virus earlier – was going to ruin Melbourne’s (mythical) Covid-Zero utopia. Novak’s crime was to have insisted that a person’s medical information should be private – something we all believed as recently as 2018... Novak kept his medical history private while we all agreed to flash our medical history to a stranger in exchange for the right to enter Kmart. Novak fought for and won the right to earn a living on his own terms while we all consented to making a series of unending injections a condition of being able to earn a livelihood. Damn! Novak probably wouldn’t have agreed to a 9pm curfew. He probably wouldn’t have forbidden his children from visiting playgrounds. And he probably wouldn’t have missed out on precious time with family because an unelected, unrepresentative bureaucrat said ‘science’. Novak probably would have stood up to all that nonsense. And how we hate him for it! We have to hate him… If Novak is not the devil, then we are all fools – fools for acquiescing to increasingly nonsensical demands and fools for agreeing to endlessly shifting Covid goal posts. Novak’s Australian Open entry did not mean that we had all been played by politicians. It was Novak who was the problem – not the tyrannical rules to which we so meekly submitted. Rules that made us so angry because Novak refused to be enslaved beside us. It wasn’t fair. Why should Novak resist when we had not? He should be booed. He should be boycotted. He should get sick with Covid! At least, that’s what some people seriously suggested, whilst claiming they were concerned about ‘public health’, of course... ‘Our strong border policies have been critical to Australia having one of the lowest death rates in the world from Covid, we are continuing to be vigilant,’ he said. Vigilant in what? Protecting a Covid-ravaged populace from a healthy man with natural immunity? One suspects it might have more to do with the fact there is an election coming up and it suits to have an unpopular foreigner upon whom to focus community anger. Novak’s real crime was to have stood up for himself and, in so doing, exposed our cowardice... Think of Novak as a mirror in whom we saw an unflattering reflection of ourselves. Our first response was to smash the mirror. Then we cheered that the mirror was to be marched onto a plane and sent back to where it had come from. But there is no escaping what we have seen of ourselves – or the bad luck that’s sure to come with breaking that mirror."
Australia's 'Orwellian' decision to deport Novak Djokovic leaves many uncomfortable questions - "for all that Chief Justice James Allsop’s final decision was widely cheered, it left several uncomfortable questions. The most unsettling was that the Australian government’s central argument for revoking Djokovic’s visa for a second time was simply not proven. Alex Hawke, the immigration minister, had shifted the parameters: where the visa was initially ripped up on the basis of Djokovic’s inadequate grounds for a medical exemption, it was re-cancelled out of a stated fear that his mere presence could inflame anti-vaccination sentiment in the country. But there was, Djokovic’s barrister Nick Wood contended, “not a single line of evidence before the minister to provide a logical foundation for that idea”. In characterising Djokovic as a lightning rod for anti-vaxxers, Wood argued, Hawke had relied on just a single document: a BBC article from January 6 entitled, “What has Novak Djokovic actually said about vaccines?” The piece refers to him declaring in April 2020, long before Covid vaccines were widely available, that he was “opposed to vaccination”. He is also quoted, though, as saying he would keep an “open mind” but wanted to have an “option to choose what’s best for my body”. That crucial caveat, Wood suggested, had been disregarded by the minister. Stephen Lloyd, the lawyer acting for the government, did not furnish any concrete evidence to counter that assertion. Instead, he cited only the “lagging” vaccine take-up rates in Serbia, in spite of Djokovic’s “iconic status” in his native land. But Australia, not Serbia, was the jurisdiction at issue in this case. And there was not a shred of proof that Djokovic’s entry into Australia would influence health choices in a country where the need to be vaccinated against Covid is a universal conviction. On the contrary, in the few days he has been here, albeit in and out of detention, booster jabs have been administered at record rates. Few dispute that Djokovic acted in a foolhardy, even dangerous way in the build-up to this saga: his involvement in a Belgrade photoshoot last month, while knowingly Covid-positive, was indefensible. Equally, it was idiotic for him to let his agent enter false details on his travel declaration on his behalf. But despite the outrage over Djokovic lying, it was immaterial, with Hawke admitting that it had no bearing on his ruling. The federal court did not quash Hawke’s judgment because, in effect, it could not. It is a quirk of the Australian system that in matters such as these, the immigration minister sits above and beyond the legal system, with the power of God to decide who stays and who leaves. In the final analysis, it did not matter that in all the mid-pandemic tournaments Djokovic had attended outside Australia, not one anti-vax protest had been recorded. It was of no consequence that, as former Australian Open director Paul McNamee pointed out, he had set up a vaccination hub at his own event in Belgrade so that competitors could be jabbed. All that mattered, in the with-us-or-against-us climate that has developed here, was that Djokovic had a background of expressing views that the Australian public regarded as intolerable. This sets an alarming precedent. The Australian Lawyers’ Alliance issued a statement that the deporting of Djokovic reflected less the toughness of the nation’s border laws than their arbitrariness. Greg Barnes SC, the group’s spokesman, said: “One of the most dangerous aspects of the Djokovic matter is the preparedness of the federal government to deem someone a risk to public order simply on the basis of what it perceives that person’s views might be. This is Orwellian and it is deeply troubling in a society supposedly committed to freedom of speech and freedom of thought”. “Orwellian” is right. For almost two years now, Australia has coined some of the cruellest policies ever concocted in the name of public health. Families have been separated indefinitely across the oceans, expatriates have been threatened with prison if they dared return to their own country, while Melbourne’s 262 days of lockdown were symbolised by the sight of a homeless woman on a park bench surrounded by eight police officers. The complication is that while these excesses provoke horror in the outside world, they are endorsed by most here. Mark McGowan, premier of Western Australia, has kept his borders slammed shut even to neighbouring states for 22 months and is feted as a hero. It is against this backdrop that the ejection of Djokovic is greeted with mass enthusiasm. It is a cause for national jubilation that the reputation of the world’s most divisive player has been severely wounded. But so too, sadly, has that of the once-tolerant country that has kicked him out."
At least Australia has admitted that they deported him for political reasons. Ironically not too long ago leftists were bashing Australia for deporting illegal immigrants
Novak Djokovic set to be barred from French Open 2022 after major vaccine decision - "Novak Djokovic could be barred from defending his title at the French Open as things stand now after the Sports Ministry declared there would be no exemption from France’s new vaccine pass law."
The scapegoating of Novak Djokovic - " Many people who might usually a) despise Morrison’s brand of populist machismo, and b) deplore the quashing of legal verdicts by posturing autocratic politicians in election year, are quite happy, it seems, to see the Australian PM lift the cup on this occasion. Quashing vaccine heresy now trumps most other considerations – we have at least learned that. The grumbling nature of the final verdict – that the ban was upheld on ‘health and good order’ grounds – might however linger, unpleasantly, in the air. It suggests that Djokovic was being refused a visa at least partly on similar grounds as might a David Icke or a Tommy Robinson – because there was a whiff of the troublemaker about him. Because he was a threat to the moral purity of the people, rather than their respiratory systems, and to the placidity of the public square. He was thought by Hawke to be capable of fanning ‘anti-vaccination sentiment’. This, despite Djokovic never having uttered anything approaching ‘anti-vax’ sentiment, beyond admitting his own preference for remaining unjabbed, and his rather quaint adherence to some homoeopathy-adjacent eye-wash generally more popular in the Brighton Lanes than on the Pro-Circuit... It is ever more inconveniently clear that the present, dominant iteration of the virus presents very little threat to healthy young people. It caused Novak about as much distress, it would appear, as eating a sausage two days past its best-before date would cause an otherwise healthy Alsatian. In that regard, even on public-decency grounds, his deportation is more like preventing Elvis Presley being filmed from the waist down, than barring a visit from Identity Evropa. Serbia should cast him in a remake of Footloose. Australian chief justice James Allsop himself emphasised, seemingly through gritted teeth, that in upholding the cancellation of Djokovic’s visa, the court’s decision was based entirely on whether the immigration minister had the legal right to do what he had done, rather than on the ‘wisdom or merits’ of that decision. That suggests to me the principle, if not this case, is still up for debate. I hope so. One thing we certainly seem to have learned, if it had escaped us until now, is just how raw the bones of humanity are. And not just Australian humanity, either. The sheer, undigested joy, the unmistakably bilious, pinched, grim satisfaction taken on social media, relishing Djokovic’s woes, have made it clear that sending him home is the very least a lot of people wanted to see... I have always felt that the casual, lazy joke that Australians are descended from convicts is wide of the mark. It’s the ones that are descended from the guards you’ve got to watch. But nearly two years of seemingly incoherent, ad hoc, patchwork and reactive policies, swinging erratically like a double pendulum and imposed with a force and moral coercion in inverse proportion to their evident legitimacy, have left the entire world feeling like stressed-out, stand-in, underpaid prison guards. Like they’ve been exposed to one of those notorious social-psychology experiments conducted in the Sixties by the likes of Stanley Milgram. Indeed, anyone disappointed by the replication crisis and its impact on Milgram’s legacy now has a much wider-ranging study to look at. Around the world, governments have supposedly been ‘following the science’. Yet their citizens and subjects have rarely found that this plays out the same from one county to the next, let alone across state lines and international borders... Very likely there were irregularities for which Djokovic himself is culpable, though not to any degree that would under normal circumstances have been ineradicable. Inaccuracies in his application form, I am inclined to forgive, as I managed to very nearly create a diplomatic incident myself recently when visiting the Channel Islands to perform in a comedy show. Landing in Guernsey that afternoon, I found myself immediately siphoned off from the customs queue into a cubicle staffed by a young woman in a hazmat suit, given a PCR test and told to self-isolate for up to 48 hours until the results came in. Given I was supposed to be on stage that very evening, I assumed this was some sort of performative nonsense that the promoter would tell me to ignore. But no, he went into full-on panic mode. It turned out that the night before, I had accidentally ticked the wrong box in one of the 18 online drop-down menus I’d had to fill out, and had gaily announced that I was arriving not from England but from France. Guernsey being a bit smaller and less scratchy than Australia, and my detention being less of a political hot potato, this was quietly sorted, and I enjoyed a mere couple of hours in quarantine before signing an affidavit to say it was an honest mistake, had a rudimentary LFT and was in the wings half an hour before curtain up. I am very grateful that a ‘let’s make this happen’ attitude prevailed. But that would never have done in Australia, with the present appetite for blood. What many of the Australian people now wanted to see was an actual sacrifice, and not of one of their own... I have a sense that levels of bio-surveillance and authoritarianism that would have been laughed off as conspiratorial, WEF fantasies just a year ago are now being treated as self-evidently proportional and just"
Liberals don't love all minorities, and they aren't against demonising minorities they hate
Good luck if you deport a "minority" based on a technicality
