The timing was once again unfortunate. Minutes after Judge Anthony Kelly had expressed his sympathy for Novak Djokovic in Melbourne, Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke of "clear instructions" from his government in the capital Canberra, 500 kilometers away, which would have spoken against the issuing of a visa to the top athlete. The fronts were marked: Here the federal judge who took the border guards at Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne and their behavior to the chest. At 5.14 p.m. in the Australian afternoon, he ordered the world's best tennis player to be released from deportation custody within 30 minutes so that he could defend his title at the Australian Open. There the Australian Prime Minister,who after some hesitation had clearly decided against the entry of the unvaccinated world star and was now brought before a court.
Christoph Hein
Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.
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It is quite possible that Morrison found his master in a tennis player of all places.
Not just anybody - but number one, blessed with tremendous mental strength.
She let him stay for four days in a detention center for refugees instead of flying home after hours like his Czech colleague Renata Voracova.
Australian newspapers spoke of a "sensational verdict" that had led to "international embarrassment for the Morrison government".
At one point, Morrison asked for forgiveness
As if through a magnifying glass, the Djokovic case makes the internal Australian conflicts visible. Those between the federal and state governments, those between vaccinated and anti-vaccine, those between the Conservatives in Canberra and the Labor government in industrialized Victoria. He exposes the self-confidence of Australia's long-established political elite. And he presents the “happy continent” as a country that he can be: overwhelmed by the problems the world throws at him, undercooled when it comes to compassion for the weaker.
"Australia is a happy country, ruled mainly by second-class people," wrote the author Donald Horne in 1964. On Circular Quay in Sydney, a plaque in the floor commemorates the intellectual who later complained that his sentence was often misinterpreted . Of course, anyone who follows the political struggles, the stabbing in Canberra, the stepping down of the losers, can only interpret Horne's sentence as follows: Many top politicians on the fifth continent revolve too often about themselves and their power. Too seldom do they think outside the box.
The affair surrounding the dissolution of the contract to buy French submarines last fall was such a case: Australia of course had the right to dissolve the contract. The bulldozer mentality, with which the government passed the French over as business partners in order to serve their “natural partners” in Washington and London, has not only angered French President Emmanuel Macron. Morrison, once head of the Australian tourism authority and therefore ridiculed by his opponents as "Scotty from Marketing" to this day, has marched into parliament with a chunk of coal to demonstrate for the "black gold". In the last election campaign, he had himself photographed during a service that he celebrated fervently.But when the sky over Canberra turned orange two years ago and the people in Woden or Chifley were already packing their emergency kits because the forest fires were approaching, he was on vacation in Hawaii with his family. For this he asked for forgiveness.