Posted on 01/16/2022 12:18:37 AM PST by DallasBiff
Well, to me, that's the problem with those people. Not with Australia. All Australia has done in this instance is have legal requirements to enter the country that we do not make exceptions for, just because somebody is good at tennis. Djokovic was treated exactly the same as any other person who tried to enter Australia without the correct documentation. The fact that people outside Australia hysterically overreacted to that and linked it to all sorts of nonsense that doesn't apply isn't anything to do with us. It's to do with stupidity and ignorance, a lot of it deliberately manipulated.
Did he "lie" on an application?
Yes, he did. He was asked a simple yes and no question, and he lied. But that is actually only one part of it.
Perhaps not. I'm a citizen of Ireland (and the US) and as such I can travel from France to Germany as easily as I can travel from Michigan to Indiana and as easily as you can travel from Queensland to New South Wales. I've traveled all over Europe without a single stamp in my Irish passport. So if he did travel to Spain it's understandable why he might not have seen it as a foreign country.
Well, first of all, the question wasn't "Have you travelled to a different country in the last fourteen days." It was, have you travelled. If a person had flown to New York to Los Angeles a week before they entered Australia, they would be expected to answer "Yes" to that question, even though those were in the same country. It's not really relevant when it comes to somewhere like the United States, but there are cases where it is relevant so the question is asked. The essence of the question is that the Australian government where somebody has been in the previous two weeks, in case they have been somewhere that poses a specific threat.
But secondly, I do not buy that excuse - that this was an innocent mistake. Djokovic has been travelling the world professionally for about twenty years. If he doesn't understand a simple travel form at this point, there would have to be something seriously wrong with his mental capacity.
And when this lie comes from somebody who has also seriously 'misunderstood' the entry requirements to come into Australia, that becomes more significant. One 'mistake' - maybe. Two 'mistakes'... that becomes even harder to believe. Three 'mistake' - because he also mislead the Judge at his first court appearance. At some point, you need to stop assuming error.
(For the record, I personally, do accept his misunderstanding about his entitlement to the visa he received was reasonable on his part - and does involve incompetence by an Australian based body - I'll get back to that in a moment - but I do not believe he did not understand the simple Yes/No question on the form, and I do believe he deliberately mislead the court. Those were simple issues)
There was a way around this which would have been quite reasonable all the way around. The government could have announced that he made one or more errors..."innocent" errors...and,as a result,he will be allowed in to play but will be required to be tested daily while in the country. A positive test will result in him being ordered to "quarantine" and/or to leave the country.
Why should we - and why would we - do that? Why would we give this man special treatment and allow him entry to this country when he has violated and broken the rules we set for entry? Why would anybody expect us to do that?
Because understand that is what has happened here. A person has arrived in Australia and turned up at the border without the documents he requires to enter Australia, and without any sort of legally valid reason to enter.
Now, is it possible that given time and discussion before he just turned up at the border, some sort of agreement could have been reached? Yes, it is.
And here's where the incompetence does come in. Tennis Australia negotiated with the Victorian government for an exemption for Djokovic to be allowed to move freely about the state and they got it.
They also contacted the federal government and asked if people were exempt from the vaccination requirements for entry if they had had COVID in the last six months. The federal government replied to them stating absolutely clearly that no such standard exemption applied for entry to Australia (and the primary reason for that is that not all states would agree to it, and the federal government has to set a single standard for entry so we don't end up with different standards at different borders - somebody being able to legally enter Australia via Melbourne, who wouldn't be via Perth). At that point, Tennis Australia could have and should have contacted the federal government and asked in individual exceptions could be made. They didn't. It's impossible to say at this point, whether or not the federal government would have allowed such individual exemptions worked out in advance. I think that something probably could have been worked out. But the point is, it wasn't even tried. Tennis Australia did not try to make this happen.
But they did send Djokovic information - inaccurate information - that may well have lead him to believe he had a valid exemption. Tennis Australia provided Djokovic with the wrong information. And that is incompetence on their part.
Now, Tennis Australia is not an Australian government body - it does receive some grants from both the federal government, and state governments - but it is not a government body in any sense. Blaming the Australian government for their incompetence seems very, very odd to me.
And it also complicates the situation that arose further - because if Djokovic had been admitted to Australia, based on a mistake made by a private company that sort to employ him (and that is the legal situation) - well, private companies cannot authorise entry to Australia. Only the Commonwealth government can do that. And they can't really let it happen even if it was a genuine mistake. And certainly not because of significant incompetence. Telling somebody they will be allowed into Australia when they're not... that's not a little mistake.
Now, I'm not going to say the Commonwealth government handled this perfectly - the Immigration Minister should not have taken four days to make his decision.
Lastly...when I say "Australia needs him" I'm thinking along the lines of worldwide goodwill...reputation..."standing".
I don't deny Australia's reputation has been damaged by this. But I believe most of the damage has been done because people have not understood what actually happened, but instead believe this all involved completely different issues, and was down to incompetence by a private company, not following Australian law. If the Australian government is going to start making decisions based on what people outside Australia falsely believe is true, rather than based on the actual facts - that would be a ridiculous situation.
As I said, you are one of the people here on FreeRepublic who, historically speaking, has seemed to have a decent understanding of how and why Australia secures its borders. But even you seem to think that this is something different from that. It really isn't.
Djokovic did not have valid permission to enter Australia and attempted to do so without such permission. That may well have been an honest mistake on his part, because I do believe he was mislead by Tennis Australia, a private company.
But the cornerstone of Australia's border policy is that the Australian government decides who comes here, and the circumstances under which they come.
Not Tennis Australia.
(I haven't gone into the problems the Victorian government contributed to, because, reluctantly (given I despise the Victorian government) even though I think they could have handled some things better - and are more to blame than the Commonwealth government, in fact - none of their mistakes would have mattered at all, if Tennis Australia had done their job with even basic competence. Nonetheless, because of what the Victorian government did, there was a very real constitutional risk here that allowing Djokovic into Australia as the Judge did on Monday, could have seriously eroded all Australian border security law - we would have had a situation where somebody was admitted to the country on the basis of a decision by a state government - and that is clearly unconstitutional - even if Victoria didn't do anything to set it up deliberately, I really do think it's likely they would have sought to exploit the precedent it created in future - as would other states.)
Australia had concentration camps already in World War I, long before the Nazi party was invented (for immigrants born in Austria-Hungary...probably for those born in Germany too...even if they had sworn allegiance to the King of Great Britain and were willing to fight for Australia in the war).
The original Concentration Camps were run by the Brits during The Boer War.
And yet the vaccinated can get and transmit the virus.
Yes, I knew about those. I think the Spanish had something similar in Cuba in the 1890s which may have been even earlier.
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