Djokovic visa: It’s shame, set and match … and the Djoke is on us

The vitriol hurled at Novak Djokovic says more about Australia than him.

Return of Serb? Tennis star Novak Djokovic has shown Australia – and the world – how Covid has turned us into a baying mob of paranoid vigilantes. Picture: AFP

It is not about Novak Djokovic.

Love him or loathe him, the Djoker is one of the greatest tennis champions of all time and the way this country has pushed him from centre court to the federal court in a farcical circus shows us not what winning has done to his character, but what coronavirus has done to ours.

Djokovic was given proof of vaccination exemption from Tennis Australia and Victoria, and applied for and was granted a visa from the federal government. But he spends this weekend in detention, as yet another target for public Covid shaming and political grandstanding.

The Queensland women who went shopping in Melbourne and returned with Covid-19, the footy fans who broke to rules to see Melbourne win the AFL grand final, and the Adelaide teenager who did not head straight home from a nightclub when he received his Covid positive text – we want to take out our virus frustration on people. It is futile, the virus will outlive any of our rules.

Plenty in the community denounce Djokovic, the multi-­millionaire Serbian. The public have been conditioned by politicians, hysterical media and even some leading medicos to denounce the unvaccinated as if they are viral-terrorists – infected, dangerous, and deliberately acting as superspreaders.

The reality is that Djokovic is more likely to catch Covid-19 in Melbourne than bring it in – especially given he has already had the virus. Presumably he tested negative before the flight – which is a requirement for all those who travel to Australia.

It is absurd that we are encouraged to treat the unvaccinated as lepers given that more than 90 per cent of our compatriots are vaccinated and the latest virus variant is spreading wildly, mainly via fully vaccinated people.

The unvaccinated are a risk to themselves, not the rest of us.

As a fully vaccinated person, I could care less whether the person next to me is vaccinated or not. But mobs like to identify a bogeyman, and politicians love to fuel such antipathy to justify their power grabs and deflect criticism.

Djokovic, an arrogant and divisive figure, proved too easy a distraction for the Morrison and Andrews governments, media blowhards, the Twitter crowd and large sections of our community who still react to the pandemic virus as if it is Ebola. They cheer his confinement.

The paranoid fear one more infection when we are dealing with more than 70,000 new cases a day. They seemingly resent their own jabs and compliance with the rules and only draw comfort from others being forced to comply.

Many nations, including Israel and right across the EU, provide Covid recovery certificates which effectively replace vaccination certificates and they are recognised for entry to other nations including the US. To the extent that vaccination certificates still might be demanded in this country, they should be mirrored by recovery certificates for those who have derived immunity from the disease itself.

Vaccination status is checked at restaurants and sporting events; we have to show our certificates and negative tests to cross state borders.

We were urged to get vaccinated so we could dispense with this nonsense – yet still we are overwhelmed with onerous and illogical rules and restrictions.

A nation that cleverly and stoically kept the virus largely at bay by imposing international border quarantine is now locked in to a rolling series of confected crises under a never-ending onslaught of emergency powers and inane rules despite more than 90 per cent of our adult population being vaccinated. Now we must rush for the boosters and vaccinate the kids, then perhaps, we are told, the panic will subside, and rules will ease – unless there is another variant, of course, or more misleading media alarm about case numbers.

We are sending healthy nurses and doctors home from hospital because they have been in close proximity to, wait for it, sick people. We are crippling other workplaces with similar precautions, leaving some supermarket shelves empty.

We have overstretched our Covid testing systems by encouraging everyone to get tested; yet the infected are told to go home and take Panadol. We know Covid can kill the vulnerable and unvaccinated, so with strains becoming increasingly mild we ought to focus less on case numbers and more on those who are ill.

This is what medical experts recommend and leaders promise. But their actions defy their words.

Some will not be happy until they ruin another school year or chalk up another $100bn in debt while they punch the pongy air under their doona to celebrate another year of “resilience”.

To keep these people happy, and to make our leaders seem gritty, we reject from this country a Covid-recovered, negative-tested tennis star who was granted a proof of vaccination exemption and a visa.

It is embarrassing for a country once seen as welcoming, rational and easygoing. The rejection of Djokovic – the return of Serb – is not a sensible or science-based approach, except for political science.

There is a school of thought that says no matter his objections, Djokovic has brought this upon himself and could have avoided all of this by getting the jab and following the rules. While it is difficult to comprehend the reluctance of some to accept the protection of vaccination, it is easier to understand in those who have already had the disease.

But when it comes to rules, Djokovic arrived only after being granted exemptions and a visa. He was not to know he would be used as a convenient whipping boy in an ongoing pantomime – a Covid theatre of fear, paranoia and political one upmanship that ensured his case would receive exceptional scrutiny.

So long as we have high vaccination rates and vaccines show limited efficacy in halting infections and transmissions, the unvaccinated imperil themselves and not us. We should not easily trample on their rights, because it sets a bad precedent and demeans our democracy.

Certainly, the rich and famous should not be afforded any special favours, as they infamously were in Queensland, spirited across borders while bereaved Queenslanders or sick southerners were denied. Yet, in those and similar episodes in other states the problem was not the treatment of the stars but that similar common sense was not applied to the rest of us.

There are two reasons the Djokovic case is an abomination. First, he abided by the rules as they were outlined. Second, those rules have become redundant – mandatory testing is sensible to minimise infections in the confined spaces of 14-hour flights, but vaccination status hardly matters now when both our vaccination and infection rates are so high.

For at least a year and a half in these pages I have expressed concerns about this nation going to too far, overreacting on the pandemic and becoming a victim of our own success. The impossible zero-Covid goal infected the nation. Only NSW has shown any propensity to judge costs against benefits before delivering proportionate responses.

Scott Morrison was decisive in closing the borders early and then getting the states to back and implement quarantine. He has often verbalised the right approach but even his innovative national cabinet has not been able to deliver a consistent countrywide response – a co-ordinating meeting, it does not so much impose federal power as expose it limitations.

The Djokovic Djoke shows how the federal government apparatus has been caught up in the same paranoia, crowd-pleasing and disproportionate nonsense that has bedevilled five states.

Having deliberately fuelled fear and anxiety for two years – first to get people to follow the rules, then to justify their actions – the politicians and bureaucrats are now servants to the baying mobs they have created.

Oppositions have been too timid to call it out, preferring to profit from outrage and trepidation. Most media are addicted to Covid catastrophism, drawing eyeballs with hysteria and downplaying or ignoring the social and economic costs.

After quickly closing borders when the virus was rampant and unencumbered by vaccines, then delivering vaccination rates the envy of most of the world, Australia put itself in a position to claim one of the most rational and successful responses to the pandemic.

It was as if we had won the first two sets 6/3, 6/3, and were serving for the match.

But this Australian Open farce shows we have we failed to keep our calm. We have given ourselves the yips and bungled the third set – the one where we were going to learn to live with the virus.

Djokovic first won in Melbourne in 2008 and has kept returning for nine titles in all. Regardless of whether he plays or is returned, he has seen, and shown us, how much we have changed.