Novak Djokovic star of another court battle

The Federal Court of Australia’s ‘greatest hits’ for 2021-22 were topped by tennis star Novak Djokovic’s fight against the cancellation of his visa.

Tennis star Novak Djokovic. Picture: Getty Images

The Federal Court of Australia’s “greatest hits” for 2021-22 were topped by tennis star Novak Djokovic’s fight against the cancellation of his visa so he could play in January’s Australian Open, a Covid-related stoush that attracted 1.2 million views on YouTube, the court’s latest annual report says.

There were also 626,000 views of the court’s online file of the case, so intense was interest in the unvaccinated athlete’s failed battle to prevent then immigration minister Alex Hawke deporting him because he would have posed a risk to the health, safety and good order of the community if he remained. Second place-getter was Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation action against Fairfax Media over war-crimes allegations, with almost 93,000 views of the online file so far.

While the court allowed videos of the case to be shown on YouTube for three months, this was banned after it was revealed unidentified foreign individuals had been using the videos to identify secret SAS witnesses ­appearing in the case.

Other media magnets included Clive Palmer and West Australian Premier Mark McGowan’s defamation actions against each other arising from WA border closures during the pandemic; Renee Ferguson’s damages claim against Cricket Tasmania arising from sexual harassment allegations and teenager Anjali Sharma’s case against then environment minister Sussan Ley, arguing a duty to protect Australian children from carbon dioxide emissions to be generated following the approval of a coal mine.

The Sharma climate change case was among the judgments whose delivery was promoted via the court’s new Twitter account launched in January, which gained 2584 followers in the six months to the end of June.

The court’s 2021-22 report said the pandemic had “dramatically changed” the way the court operated, “most significantly, through the use of webcasting so the public can follow individual cases without the need to come to court”.

It said that during the lockdowns, the court had “effectively become a de facto broadcaster, making cases more accessible and easier to follow for media and general public”.

The report stressed the galvanising influence of technology in managing documents, workflow and cases as part of its embrace of a digital future. Hybrid hearings involving participants inside the courtroom, and remote from it, had become frequent and the court aimed to have the majority of its courtrooms enabled for video conferencing by June 2023.

New digital practice officer positions had been created at the end of last year to help court staff and judges with new technology, which included training judges in the use of iPads and related software “to improve effectiveness in court operations and other key tasks such as judgment writing”.