Double fault for Novak and common sense
The mishandling of the Covid crisis by our politicians is at break point.
From Inquirer January 14, 2022 By Steve Waterson
7 MINUTE READ THE AUSTRALIAN
There were cynics who doubted the clowns who run this country could maintain their high standards of idiocy into this third year of pandemonium, but here they come again, tripping over their giant shoes as they enter the ring. Buffoons of that pedigree were never going to let us down.
True to their vision, we’re trapped in a miasma of bumbling incompetence, leavened with spiteful, vindictive meddling in our private lives. Polka-dotted bowler hats off to them, I say.
What a wacky week these crazy kids have delivered us. But before we luxuriate in the comic masterpiece of the Australian Open and the government’s removal of reigning champion Novak Djokovic late on Friday, we should pause to applaud the latest jewel in the crown of our leaders’ stupidity: the screamingly funny $1000 fine for not filing your positive rapid antigen test to the NSW government’s gnomes.
The early promise and backbone shown by the NSW Premier suggested he’d fluffed his lines, but normal nonsense programming was restored at the prompting of his Health Ministry halfwits and a couple of Sydney talkback windbags. Their barrage of uneducated blustering and bullying, echoed by the shrieking flock of Chicken Littles that nest in our print media, saw the Premier’s resolve evaporate like the morning mist.
Given his government has no idea who among its subjects has the RAT kits – (I bought a couple of packets a month ago – or did I?) – nor how many they have, or whether they’ve been used, correctly or otherwise, or by whom, or what result they gave, it seems unlikely that any fines will be collected. So, an unenforceable law to deal with an undetectable offence with a mighty but undeliverable penalty. If there’s a more amusing way of inviting contempt for the rules and their creators, I look forward to it.
You can see the appeal, though: at a grand a pop they only need to catch 11 million recalcitrants and – bingo! – that’s paid for the 58 million PCR tests we’ve conducted so far.
Besides, self-reporting has marvellous potential. In some US cities there have been calls to defund the police, but our jokers have gone one better and outsourced the role to the citizens. A simple command to report oneself on pain of punishment – why did no one think of that before?
“Hello, NSW police? I drove home on New Year’s Eve and used a breath-test machine to discover to my horror that I was marginally over the limit. Please suspend my licence for three months – oh, and there’s a cheque for $1500 in the post.”
Meanwhile, infections continue to climb, hundreds of thousands a day, boosted by the eager self-testers who uploaded their results to the health services website. So after nearly two years of kicking it, here’s where the can has ended up.
We should rejoice that the Omigod! variant is less deadly than Delta Force, apparently by 20 per cent, or 10 per cent, or 48 times less virulent, or 97 per cent weaker (I fear I’ve been reading too widely). I have no idea what these figures mean, or how they can possibly be calculated; and their vast range tells me nobody else does either. They’re no more trustworthy than the daily case numbers regurgitated by our media, whose very precision makes them suspect.
Does anyone with the tiniest shred of intelligence really believe we are tracking every infection? I know a dozen people who’ve had positive RAT results but have no intention of throwing themselves into the maw of a health bureaucracy that will order them into isolation.
And if my experience is not unique, then there must be hundreds of thousands more live cases out there, many with mild or no symptoms, which means the latest instalment of Covid is even less deadly than we are told.
If so, we are now recording and overreacting to a disease no more dangerous than seasonal flu. The reborn urge to track contacts, to order isolation and quarantine, to mandate daily tests (impossible to source) in order to validate exemptions for critical services, is causing more chaos than at any time since the madness took possession of us.
Helpful messages pop up on phones after a visit to the pub, informing you that when you checked in, someone with Covid was there “around the same time”. Then you are advised to “monitor for symptoms”. Good Lord, now you mention it I do have extreme pain and fever, a sore throat and a blinding headache, plus I’ve lost my sense of smell. Thanks for the tip, NSW Health, I might never have noticed. What a pity you have no advice on how to treat it.
To those businesses that survived destructive and unnecessary lockdowns thanks to the fabulous largesse of our various JobKeeper programs, good luck getting through the pseudo (but every bit as harmful) lockdowns generated by the insane requirement for many healthy staff to stay at home – this time with no financial support.
In Victoria, the legal fun looks set to continue, featuring backflip after hilarious backflip. With their inept, confused and torturous mishandling of what looked, no matter what side you favour, to be a simple visa decision, the PM and his ministers have turned the modest success of his “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign to attract overseas tourists into a triumphant “What the bloody hell are you doing here?” drive to dissuade them from coming.
News reports worldwide have focused on the battle to protect Australia from a Serbian tennis ace. I don’t know if we’re the laughing stock some critics say we are, but I doubt there are many potential visitors racing to their travel agents after viewing the fiasco we’ve created.
Lawyers say hard cases make bad laws; but bad laws also make hard cases. Some of us have clung from the start to the belief that an Australian passport holder should be allowed to enter Australia at any time, and that Australians should be allowed to move unchallenged around their nation. Many didn’t want our international borders to be closed at all, although the hysteria that discarded the world’s carefully prepared pandemic contingency plans put an end to that foolish dream.
So if those who have opposed the country’s brutal border closure now adopt the PM’s “rules are rules” platitude (as though the rules were dropped here from outer space, rather than born of his own unseemly and unending panic), we are valuing the internal coherence of a bad system over our desire to see a measured, reasonable response to an unvaccinated person seeking entry to a country where almost everyone is vaccinated.
Djokovic came here for our entertainment, and to enrich himself and his trophy cabinet, not to infect Australians with a disease he doesn’t have or to spread his simple-minded anti-vax message. The “Gotcha!” reaction to a couple of trivial form-filling errors and the embarrassing interview process he was subjected to show how thoroughly Covid paranoia has penetrated our institutions.
It’s not clear to me why anyone would fraudulently claim they hadn’t been to Spain in the fortnight before heading to Australia. I don’t believe such a visit is prohibited by our entry laws, which are designed to capture travel to more problematic places than the Costa del Sol.
Nor do I see why a multi-millionaire globetrotting celebrity, in a sport famous for mollycoddling its stars like newborn babies, would be filling out his own online visa application, doubtless one of dozens his minders arrange for him each year.
Trouble is, the principles of fair play are so much more difficult to defend when the super-entitled “victim”, backed by a phalanx of clever lawyers, is such an absolute tosser, and not that lovely Roger Federer. Maybe we should have another yes/no question on the visa application: Are you a dickhead? But until we do, we should not have indulged the mob howling for the expulsion of the world’s No.1 tennis player from what may be the only globally significant sporting event we will host this year. Anyone who believed Djokovic was more of a threat to public health than any of the thousands who would pay to watch him play is an idiot. He doesn’t dive into Young & Jackson for a post-game beer during the tournament; and, more importantly, he doesn’t have any Covid to transmit.
I imagine you have to be profoundly obsessive and self-centred to excel in any individual sport, although Djokovic does seem to wear an extra layer of charmlessness. His gloating Instagram post that he had secured a medical exemption to enter this hermit kingdom stung anyone impacted by our travel restrictions (and I speak as one of them, forbidden to visit my dying father or attend his funeral).
Nevertheless, Djokovic’s obstinacy may have done some good. He deserves no credit for it, as his motives were primarily mercenary, but perhaps his immigration farce will persuade a few more people to question the benefit of continuing these pointless prohibitions, though I won’t be holding my breath.
In a proper big top, the clowns appear between performers of genuine talent: tightrope walkers, lion tamers, trapeze artists, jugglers; but our cavalcade of stupidity looks set to go on and on, with no relief and no skills on display. If we’ve learned one thing from our politicians during the pandemic, it’s that a circus composed of clowns and nothing else is no laughing matter.
STEVE WATERSON
COMMERCIAL EDITOR
Steve Waterson is commercial editor of The Australian. He studied Spanish and French at Oxford University, where he obtained a BA (Hons) and MA, before beginning his journalism career.
Original article here
PM, when you’re in a hole of your own making, stop digging
Scott Morrison’s obsession with pub politics has exposed him as a populist drunk, more focused on low-rent politics than sensible policy.
12 January 2022 THE AUSTRALIAN
As we waited, and waited, to hear if the Immigration Minister would use his personal powers to kick out Novak Djokovic, news leaked that the tennis player may have “lied” on his incoming travel paperwork. Seems there might be a date discrepancy about when Djokovic last travelled.
This is the sign of a desperate, delaying government likely poring over polling and hunting for ex post facto reasons to discredit Djokovic.
When in a hole of your own making, stop digging. Climb out with grace. There is a way Morrison could turn around a trashy drama that is an insult to the tennis player, and our country’s reputation as a free and fair-minded country.
He could lead by pointing out that it’s high time our Covid border policies are changed. Until he does that, he will share inglorious similarities with Mark McGowan. Both have border policies that are disproportionate, embarrassing and idiotic. Both policies point to politicians unable to manage risk sensibly.
What makes Morrison’s position worse is that as Prime Minister he has used his federal pedestal to tell Australians to push through, to live with Covid, to lift the doona. He has preached that people want government out of their lives.
By using the world’s top tennis player as a political football to play moralising border cop in the lead-up to a federal election, Morrison has made a farce of those sentiments, and exposed his attachment to a Fortress Australia policy well beyond its use-by date.
Those who are excited to see the Djokovic debacle as a proxy battle for different border policies that deal with asylum-seekers need a triple dose of clear thinking. Djokovic was invited into this country to play at a grand slam tennis tournament. The winner of 20 grand slams, hoping for his 21st at the Australian Open starting next week, filled out every form he was required to, provided documents asked of him, including a vaccination exemption provided by Tennis Australia’s panel of medical experts and a letter from the Department of Home Affairs confirming his visa to enter the country.
Djokovic had recently recovered from a Covid-19 infection. Medical experts acting for Tennis Australia and the Victorian government understood the rules to mean that Djokovic therefore did not need to be vaccinated for six months.
As Federal Circuit Court judge Anthony Kelly said on Monday during Djokovic’s legal challenge to the Morrison government’s deportation order: “What more could this man have done?”
Throughout Monday’s live-streamed legal proceedings from Melbourne, Kelly was scathing of Djokovic’s treatment by the federal government and the Australian Border Force delegate.
And for good reason. Did Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews read the transcript of the border bureaucrat’s interview with Djokovic? Did any of her advisers? What about anyone in the PM’s office? Had anyone with an ounce of sense read this 30-page transcript they would have seen a dodgy interview leading to a dodgy decision where the tennis player was not treated fairly or reasonably.
Detained in an airport room for hours from midnight on January 5, without legal counsel or access to his phone, Djokovic was unable to contact TA officials to help with questions that, very politely, he did his best to answer. At 5.22am the ABF bureaucrat promised Djokovic extra time so he could rest and contact TA by 8.30 that morning. The bureaucrat then reneged, waking the tennis player around 6am and effectively telling him that speaking with TA or lawyers wasn’t going to make a difference to the decision to cancel his visa.
This, said the judge, “has the quality of this ex post facto view”. No matter what Djokovic provided, border bureaucrats had made up their mind to cancel his visa. No one in the Morrison government looked at this debacle with a modicum of common sense before defending the decision. Instead, the PM and his ministers applied the excitable and distorted lens of politics.
The humiliation was avoidable. Morrison could have taken a breath and let the Victorian government cop the flak for granting a medical exemption to Djokovic.
Instead, the PM sniffed a wind somewhere and decided to have a fight with Tennis Australia, the Victorian government and the world’s top tennis player.
“Rules are rules, especially when it comes to our borders,” the PM said, right after border cops cancelled Djokovic’s visa. His sermon about obeying rules backfired when Andrews was forced to agree in court on Monday that the bureaucrat acted unreasonably towards the tennis player.
Morrison’s obsession with pub politics has exposed him as a populist drunk, more focused on low-rent politics than sensible policy that is becoming of a leader.
The question now is whether any good can come of the Morrison government’s public humiliation in court on Monday?
It ought to be the trigger for a new and freer border policy that reflects three realities. First, Australia’s high vaccination rates. Second, Omicron is infecting hundreds of thousands of Australians without a blowout in mortality rates. An unvaccinated tennis player who had contracted Covid and carried Covid antibodies was no danger to a country awash with Omicron. Third, we must, as Morrison says, live with this virus and demand less intervention from government in our lives.
If not now, when do we live with Covid? If not now, when do we get governments out of our lives? Or are these just marketing blurbs from a PM who is more middle management than leader, a man who reached the top job because his predecessor made such a hash of it?
Morrison is Malcolm Turnbull’s legacy.
If the Prime Minister tries to turn this into his Tampa moment by digging in to defend border policies that barely made sense in 2021, then it will settle his place in the pantheon of Australian politics as the poor man’s version of John Howard.
Howard took on people-smugglers and won. Morrison chose a fight with Tennis Australia and Victoria’s Labor government, used a tennis player to play tough border cop, and was humiliated in court. He will dig a bigger hole for himself if he refuses to change the country’s Covid border policy to reflect reality.
Look at it another way. While snooty elites in the international community condemned Howard’s border policies before, during and after Tampa, many countries – especially in Europe – have been trying to emulate those policies in recent years. No one will want to copy how Morrison damaged the country’s reputation with its shabby treatment of Djokovic.
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
COLUMNIST
Janet Albrechtsen is an opinion columnist with The Australian. She has worked as a solicitor in commercial law, and attained a Doctorate of Juridical Studies from the University of Sydney
Original article here
Their problem isn't border policy. It's a panicked population allowing their government to go full despot. Everyone gets the government they deserve. Maybe they'll recover.
Does not the govt realise that we are in the information age? That send him off the court will only galvnise the opinions and sentiments that the govt is supposedly afraid of?
This drama is more exciting than any tennis match Novax played in!
I he hope continues to appeal, as a matter of point of principle - if he is a supposed "fighter". He can afford to do it.