So why did Australia give him the Visa in the first place then?
Then start sliding and wheedling when the political climate turned against the Prime Minister?
(I've no idea of the total number of times, but he's won nine Australian Opens, so it is at least nine times), I honestly would expect him to understand the difference between the Victorian and Australian governments.
You have state governments determining immigration? Do they decide on wars too?
What does the federal government do then?
The Federal govt issued the visa and the state govt is responsible for assessing vaccine exemption which it did and it issued vaccine exemption for Djokovic.
Djokovic followed the law and the process exactly and cleared airline checks and was on his way when the lying PM Morrison decided to intervene and decided to use Djokovic as a political football as the media had created a manufactured outraged against letting a unvaccinated player in. Instructions were sent to Immigration officers to turn back Djokovic at the airport.
They did not expect Djokovic to fight back and since he won his court case, the Immigration minister is frantically figuring out how to deport Djokovic and his department officers are combing through the various forms to find some fault.
This is how batshit crazy Australia has become recently and this too under a so called conservative PM who is widely expected to lose elections due in a few months.
Because when you apply for a Visa to Australia, you are sometimes to make a declaration if certain things are true, and the Visa is issued on a conditional basis, based on the assumption you have told the truth, and that will be verified on arrival on Australia.
When it comes to something like a vaccination exemption, you are not asked to provide it until you arrive. The alternative would be to require people to visit an Australian embassy or consulate before a visa was issued, which would impose a major inconvenience on people.
This is not an unusual system. Most countries use a system like this.
And it works - because well over 99% of people do not lie on their application and so when they arrive in Australia they simply show the document they claimed to have then, and are passed through border security. It's rare for somebody to actually turn up without the documents they claimed.
In Djokovic's case, that did happen. At this point, I accept that he wasn't intending to deceive over his vaccination status - he genuinely believed he did have an exemption. But it's a rare situation.
Then start sliding and wheedling when the political climate turned against the Prime Minister?
That isn't what happened. Djokovic announced on the internet that he had a vaccination exemption and was getting on a plane to Australia. The media picked this up. At that point, people in Border Force started asking "How did he get this?" given that whether or not he was going to be allowed to come and play had been a fairly major news story over the last few weeks in Australia and up until he posted this story, all indications were that he was not likely to be able to come in. Exemptions to the double vaccination rule for entry into Australia is rare - it would have been a news story of its own if an exemption had been issued. For this reason, they started looking into what had happened while he was in the air, and could find nothing to explain how he might have got an exemption - because he hadn't. And that's also why they checked his papers carefully when he arrived. I suspect if he hadn't made that internet post, he'd have simply rocked up at Border Security, shown his bits of paper that said he had a vaccine exemption and Border Security would have waved him through - but because he'd given them time and caused confusion, they'd very carefully checked exactly what the rules were.
This had nothing to do with the Prime Minister. In fact, politically speaking, Djokovic being allowed in would have been very good news for the Prime Minister at the time - because it would have pointed out the hypocrisy of the socialist Victorian government in refusing to allow millions of Victorians to work if they are unvaccinated, but allowing a foreign millionaire superstar special treatment.
You have state governments determining immigration?
We didn't until Monday. Unfortunately the court case involving Djokovic has changed that. The Judge has let him stay based on a document issued by the Victorian government, and ignored the fact that under Commonwealth law, he didn't have a right to enter. Victoria did not intend to issue any type of entry permit - Djokovic misunderstood the document - but that is basically what has happened now. Whether you think Djokovic should have been allowed in or not, the way the Judge has done it is terrible in terms of Australian constitutional law. He has let somebody into Australia whose entry was not authorised by the Commonwealth government, on the basis of a document issued by a state. People outside Australia seem to think this whole case is somehow scoring points with COVID. It isn't. It's about border security and the right of the Australian government to set rules that determine who is allowed into Australia.
Do they decide on wars too?
No. At least not until some other Judge decides to ignore the constitution.
What does the federal government do then?
I'm going to give you a serious answer. Australia's constitution deliberately makes the Commonwealth government pretty weak and the state governments pretty strong. Why? Because the state governments wrote the Constitution - in the 1890s when the six Australian self-governing, semi-sovereign, almost independent from Britain (Britain still controlled defence and foreign affairs - but everything else had been handed to the six separate colonies at various times over the 19th century) were considering federating into a single country, delegates from each of the colonies (now the six states of Australia) met in constitutional convention and wrote the constitution. They deliberately wrote it to protect their interests - they did not want to give up their powers in a wide range of areas to a new federal government.
Section 51 of the Constitution they wrote is an explicit and limited list of the powers the Commonwealth was given by the states. The Commonwealth only has power in those specific areas. Everything else remains entirely in the power of the States.
I won't list everything in Section 51 - but you can look it up if you want. Briefly, the powers they placed in the hands of the new federal government were those relating to international trade, laws relating to foreign corporations in Australia, banking, external affairs (basically foreign relations - but I'll mention a bit more of that in a moment), taxation, overseas quarantine, currency, postal and telegraph (and related areas) services, immigration, and copyrights. Powers to create a welfare and to fund (but not run) a public health care system were added by constitutional amendment in the 1940s, and national defence (again, I'll mention a bit more about that below). All others areas remained in the total control of the states - the states do have the power to ask the Commonwealth government to temporarily take over other areas, but that doesn't happen very often at all.
Critically during the pandemic, the states have had nearly all the powers in Australia to deal with 'public health' issues, which is why every state has handled the pandemic differently, and pretty much totally ignored what the commonwealth government wanted them to do (the Commonwealth opposes most vaccine mandates, most lockdowns, and all border closures - yet, because the states have the power, we've had all of those to varying degrees across the country).
I said I'd get back to foreign affairs and defence - as I mentioned earlier, in the 19th century, while Britain handed over self government to the Australian colonies on most matters, they maintained control over foreign affairs and defence. And that remained the case even after federation - the Commonwealth government (the name used for the new Australian government) only had very limited powers over foreign affairs (there were no Australian embassies anywhere in the world, for example) and defence (Australia's military was considered part of the British military and subject to its orders). It wasn't until the 1920s that Britain decided to allow the 'Dominions' (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland (technically speaking), and Newfoundland (separate from Canada at that stage) the right to take control over foreign affairs and defence, and Australia didn't actually do it until 1940 (when it became clear that if a war in the Pacific broke out, we wouldn't be able to rely on support from Britain because it was committed in Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic). At that point, the Commonwealth got full control of foreign relations and defence (although even as late as 1951, the only way Australia could promote its most senior General from the Second World War to Field Marshal (Five Star rank) was from him to also be promoted to Field Marshal in the British Army - Britain still had a residual military control. Hell, Australian warships at the start of the Vietnam War were still sailing under British flags until Britain asked us not to, as they weren't actually fighting in that war...)
I've strayed a bit - the point is that Australia's commonwealth government actually has control over only a limited range of areas. The states have control everywhere else. Entry to Australia is one of the areas that is supposed to be solely under Commonwealth control, but the Judge's verdict on Monday puts that principle at serious risk. The High Court is probably going to have to intervene on that one - but luckily for Djokovic, they'll take months to decide whether to intervene (they will, but it's still a slow process).