Joe Hildebrand on the Australian Open shambles

It would take an act of incompetence to derail the Australian Open. But the Victorian government managed to achieve just that, says Joe Hildebrand.

The Australian Tennis Open final has always been a special event in the national calendar.

It would signal to a lazy sunbaked population the sprawling summer holidays were over but also dangled one final carrot. Even as we knew the holidays were drawing to a close it gave us one last thing to look forward to.

And in TV terms it offered whoever was hosting the blockbuster event, which regularly pulled in 1-2 million viewers without breaking a sweat, the opportunity to reassure citizens there were still plenty of good times ahead. Pat Rafter would be replaced by Packed to the Rafters; Medvedev would be replaced by MAFS.

It was a blissfully mindless way to transition from mindless bliss to mindless monotony.

It would therefore take an extraordinary act of destructive will or brainless incompetence to derail such a perfect event but to the Victorian government’s credit it somehow managed to achieve just that.

Joe Hildebrand says the Australian Open was a miserable affair.

This year the big wow moment of the broadcast didn’t involve a single shot but rather the booing of Tennis Australia chair Jayne Hrdlicka when she thanked the Victorian government for enabling the Open to go ahead and looked forward to further recovery thanks to the COVID-19 vaccine.

The crowd’s behaviour was rude, bizarre and contradictory. Why would anyone attending a match boo the organiser who got the match to go ahead? And why would anyone anywhere boo anybody for hoping things were going to get better?

And yet it somehow summed up the whole Victorian approach to COVID in a nutshell: International tennis players let in while Victorian families were locked out; matches played to fake oohs and aahs from empty seats after yet another kneejerk snap lockdown; the despair, deflection and double-standards that have cursed the southern state for a year rearing their ugly heads yet again and the premier still refusing to say it will be the last time.

Somehow the government managed to take Melbourne’s biggest international event and the flagship TV event of the calendar year and make it miserable, so miserable even those who were in attendance were angry about it.

It really is a sorry state in more ways than one.

Joe Hildebrand is on 2GB Nights with John Stanley on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8pm

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand on the Australian Open shambles