Front Burner - No-vax Djokovic vs. Australian immigration

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

On Monday, world tennis No. 1 Novak Djokovic won a legal battle to stay in Australia and defend his title at the Australian Open — for now. The unvaccinated player's visa was revoked when he arrived at the border despite a vaccine exemption granted by Tennis Australia. His visa was ultimately reinstated but Australia’s immigration minister reserves the power to overturn that decision, revoke his visa and kick him out. If deported, Djokovic could be banned from Australia for up to three years. Djokovic’s personal stance as “anti-vaccine” isn’t winning him any friends in a country hit hard by the pandemic, with strict vaccine protocols and seemingly endless COVID-19 lockdowns. Today on Front Burner, we’re talking to Canberra-based journalist Kishor Napier-Raman on how the tennis star’s decision to stay unvaccinated has turned into a massive political headache for the Australian government and has triggered a fierce debate about whether he should be allowed to stay.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Angela Starrett, filling in for Jamie Poisson. Serbian superstar. History made. He has caught Federer. That's Novak Djokovic, winning his 20th Grand Slam, extending his record-breaking reign as world number one.

Oh, stop it! Novak Djokovic, what are you doing? Oh, he's done it! What a way! Oh, the brilliance. Absolutely brilliant from Djokovic, what are you doing? Oh, he's done it! What a way! Absolutely brilliant from Djokovic. Novak, or Nole, known affectionately by his fans, is a pretty divisive guy on and off the court. What's it been like to be something of the bad guy

chasing after Roger and Rafa all these years? I don't consider myself a bad guy, but I mean, it's your opinion. Cocky, outspoken and short tempered. What the hell is going on? Nobody. He called it real. From arguing with officials. What did I say? What did I say? Why did you give me warning? What? ...to smashing his racket on the court...

Wow. Djokovic, who grew up in war-torn Belgrade, Serbia, is to many a hero. A journey which began with his parents walking all hours to paper his lessons, to wait on... And when the pandemic hit, he became another kind of hero to anti-vaxxers everywhere. So fast forward to January 4th, the day he tells the world he's headed to Melbourne to defend his Australian Open title, a major event in a country that's been notoriously strict with its vaccine protocols. Now, Novak Djokovic, when he arrives in Australia, he has to, because if he's not vaccinated, he must provide acceptable proof that he cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. So we await his

presentation and what evidence he provides to support that. If that evidence is insufficient, then he won't be treated any different to anyone else and he'll be on the next plane home. Today on Frontburner, we're getting into all of this with Canberra-based journalist Kishore Napier-Rahman. How the tennis star's decision to stay unvaccinated has turned into a massive political headache for the Australian government and has triggered a fierce debate about whether he should be allowed to stay. Hi Kishore. Hi, how you doing? I'm well. Thanks so much for joining us today to talk about this story. So we heard from Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who spoke to the press even before Novak Djokovic landed at Melbourne Airport with a so-called medical exemption on hand. So when he finally did get to the airport and touched down, what happened next?

Well, it was all very chaotic. Djokovic believed that he had a medical exemption because Tennis Australia's independent panel and the Victorian state government had basically told him and given him one on the basis that recent infection would be enough. We'd also heard that the Victorian government was going to make decisions about medical exemptions and who could come in for the Australian Open. Unfortunately, you had different bureaucrats saying different things about whether a medical exemption would actually be enough for someone who was unvaccinated to come into Australia. So when you touched down, you had this absurd situation where federal immigration bureaucrats then said he couldn't come

into the country and that he didn't have a battle medical exemption. What followed was sort of hours of to-ing and fro-ing before ultimately at 7.30 in the morning Djokovic gets his visa cancelled. He's then taken off to immigration detention in a hotel and this ultimately ends up in a kind of tense courtroom drama on Monday, where he ultimately, the decision to cancel his visa is quashed. And he is at the moment free to play. But the Australian immigration minister can still cancel his visa and kick him out of the country, which is something he's considering

right now. Right. I mean, just to be clear, under what basis did Djokovic say he had received this medical exemption? Because I imagine he assumed he was clear or else he wouldn't have even gotten on the plane. Sure. So Djokovic believed that the exemption was on the basis that he had a recent COVID-19 infection. And so the basis for that the basis that he had a recent COVID-19 infection. And sort of the basis for that claim was that he tested positive on December the 16th. Notably, as we've discovered in the last couple of days, he then went out and about after the test. And then two days later, knowing that he was infected with COVID-19,

went and did a photo shoot with a French newspaper, which, you know, doesn't necessarily affect whether he can come into Australia, but does make it look like a bit of a fool. So what happened then was you had conflicting evidence over whether being recently infected with COVID-19 could allow someone to come into Australia. Generally speaking here, the rules are pretty clear. You've got to be vaccinated to come into the country.

But federal bureaucrats and state bureaucrats were kind of telling Djokovic and saying different things about whether he could actually come into the country and whether being recently infected would be enough. for example, there were emails from the health minister, which basically said that Australian regulators never thought that having a prior COVID-19 infection was sufficient to allow an unvaccinated person to enter into Australia. But you had Tennis Australia, who kind of believed the opposite and believed something else based on advice they'd gotten from separate officials at a state level so you can see there was a lot of confusion there and within that Djokovic is given an exemption by Tennis Australia that says that because he's had a recent COVID-19 infection which he supposedly recovered from in late December he was now all clear to play so that was sort of the basis from his very sudden instagram post where he says

here we go guys i'm coming to melbourne that shocked people in australia because they were like hang on this guy is unvaccinated how the hell is he coming into the country and then you know a week later he arrives and there's the cane and you have this whole fiasco unfold from there. After his visa was suspended at the airport, he was taken to the Park Hotel in Melbourne and was forced to stay there for a few days. Why is this hotel so notorious? Well, I think the hotel represents the absurdities and sometimes cruelties of Australia's border and immigration regime. So this is a hotel that alongside Djokovic was housing, I think, up to

30 asylum seekers, many who'd been there for months, some even years, in this kind of immigration detention limbo. Now, Australia's immigration system, there are a few features that I think this case really highlights. One is that people can be stuck in a kind of lim tensely and very dry legal battles over sort of very specific parts of the relevant legislation over whether someone can stay in the country and the third part is that the minister has these godlike powers in deciding whether a person can stay in the country or has to be kicked out of the country so Djokovic is housed in that hotel where his family then kick up a stink about his treatment and say he's been tortured. And that kind of thing, which is like, cool, but these guys have been in there for a lot longer.

This is the immigration detention hotel where Novak Djokovic is being kept. Adnan Chopani has been here for five months now. kept. Adnan Chopani has been here for five months now. That is the food. We've been saved every day. We found a muggle and mowed on a bread. Last year, they found maggots in their food. 20 of them got sick during a COVID-19 outbreak that was in there. So yes, the treatment of asylum seekers isn't particularly great in that hotel. And I think, you know, Novak Djokovic is a superstar international athlete. He's not used to staying somewhere like the Park Hotel. But even so, I think this highlights the real problems with Australia's immigration system. Yeah. And I had somebody, I tweeted this story this morning, and I had somebody already saying,

let's like not focus on this situation and this person. Let's talk about the immigration policies and the treatment of people in this hotel that's been happening long before the situation. Is what's happening to Djokovic a normal thing to happen for someone in this situation? Look, a couple of things there. I would say that, you know, Australia does have very strict borders. That has been heightened under the pandemic. I mean, until November this year, many, many people who are Australian citizens basically couldn't come

home because you had a 14-day hotel quarantine system and you had incredibly expensive sort of tickets to get on airlines so people just weren't being able to come into the country and see families and that kind of thing and and broadly speaking that was pretty politically popular here um as well people were happy with that but i think the second thing in terms of what's happening, Djokovic, I mean, usually the kind of arbitrariness and occasional cruelty of Australia's immigration system is not levelled at someone like Novak Djokovic. You do have sort of slightly absurd situations where a couple of years ago, our deputy prime minister threatened to shoot Johnny Depp's dogs. He's decided to bring into our nation two dogs without actually getting the proper certification and the proper permits required basically looks like he snuck them in we found out he snuck them in because we saw them taking it to a poodle groomer now mr depp has to either take his dogs back to california

or we're going to have to euthanize them. So, you know, sometimes it does collide with the celebrity class, but, you know, mostly they're relatively untouched by all of it. It's just the strangeness of the kind of COVID situation we're living through, the fact that Djokovic, you know, none of this would be a problem if he got vaccinated, of course, is trying to come into the country unvaccinated, has made him suddenly the kind of person that's put all of this under the international spotlight.

And I want to talk a little bit more about the COVID aspect of this, to understand the outrage this has caused. I guess we have to understand what Australia has been dealing with throughout the COVID pandemic. It started out really restrictive with this COVID zero policy. How did the public react to that? Sure. I think what our COVID experience tells us is that Australians are incredibly law-abiding people who are very, very good at following rules. Australia has been extremely serious about its lockdowns. When the second wave hit in the summer, authorities didn't pause. Nearly every business in Melbourne was forced to close. There are limits on how many people can return to the country and when they do mandatory quarantine hotels guarded by soldiers.

Police checkpoints to ensure no one was ever more than 25 kilometres from home and $1,300 fines readily handed out to the rule breakers. Now there is a mythology that we sometimes have that Australia is a larrikin country of people that are like very laid back and all that. It's complete nonsense. And I want to make that very, very clear for your readers in Canada that we are a nation of cops. And that was why COVID zero worked really well, because when it was closed down the borders, lock everything down, people, broadly speaking, endured it. I mean, Melbourne was the most locked, I think, one of, if not the most locked down city in the world.

They had over 200 days in some form of hard lockdown. And yes, we did have some kind of weird protests out there. It was the people against the police. A tense standoff in the centre of the city that quickly turned violent. A tense standoff in the centre of the city that quickly turned violent. There were rally cries for freedom in capital cities across the country today as anti-vaccine protesters took to the streets. We can't make informed decisions. We feel that the government is making the decisions for us.

And that's really not fair. Most people just took that on their chin and enjoyed it, which is both admirable in many, many ways, but also meant that there was an increasingly high appetite for trying to fight COVID with increasingly difficult and tough restrictions, even when you've got variants like Delta and Omicron, which meant that it wasn't very easy to deal with. What's happening now, though, is we're shifting from a situation where we basically fetishise low case numbers to a situation where COVID is everywhere. I mean, there are thousands of new cases a day. We've never experienced that. We're also a highly vaccinated country. But what that means in terms of the Djokovic situation is a couple of things. is a couple of things.

Firstly, that one unvaccinated tennis player coming into Australia is, you know, probably not going to do much damage on the COVID front given it's already out there, right? The second, though, is that the public does not have a very high tolerance for COVID rule breakers because of everything we've been through, because everyone feels they've made some form of sacrifice, because there is this belief that the rules are good and just. People don't have time for that nonsense. And so I think

that that has made Djokovic pretty unpopular. We have someone that's come from overseas and all of a sudden he's been exempt and can play. And I think it's an absolute disgrace and I won't be watching it. I guess he might even get booed when he gets up onto the court. Especially on the vaccination ground. I mean, Australia vaccination was sold to us as our ticket back to freedom and normality. In many of our states, getting to a specific vaccine threshold was basically the market which we could start reopening up and coming out of lockdown or reopening interstate borders and things like that. So it really meant a lot to a lot of people. And so Djokovic is flaunting that rule in a country

where firstly people really like obeying rules and secondly where people don't have a very high tolerance for people to break those rules. I think that's what's really frustrated a lot of people in Australia. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen I want to ask you about the political and the social fight over Djokovic's presence in the country. What is the public reaction to him now? Like, who has embraced him?

Here in Australia, I think Djokovic has always been a fairly divisive character. And I think part of that is literally just that he was the Australian Open every time. That's it. Noback Djokovic still unconquered in the ultimate match down under. His ninth title. And he does it with such sort of ruthless efficiency. So there's always been a bit of that in the background about Djokovic. In terms of the public reaction, look, you look overseas and you look at sort of the international anti-vaxxers, the reactionary international have long held this opinion ofia as this kind of orwellian dystopia

so um this sort of reaffirms that opinion of australia that's why you've got people like nigel farage getting up on on djokovic's side um and jumping into his defense um so that's long been how they've viewed us and i guess guess that's reinforced that. In terms of, you know, internally, domestically, look, I don't think it's brought in much popularity at all. I think there are some people who reasonably say, well, look, hang on. There is COVID everywhere in Australia right now. And, you know, it doesn't make much public health sense restricting. much public health sense restricting him. And secondly, this points to the fact that our immigration laws are often quite absurd, that a single minister can make this really broad decision overnight. Also, to the Serbian diaspora in Australia, he's this towering national figure,

right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that would be an exception. He is a hero here. I mean, you saw the scenes outside his hotel, you had people sort of camp there and singing and dancing outside the hotel. I mean, yeah, he is this sort of figure of national pride for Serbians in the Serbian diaspora. I mean, he's a hero to a lot of them. He does kind of like push the sort of Serbian nationalist rhetoric as well in many ways. I guess all of that plays into the narrative of who Djokovic is, is this kind of divisive guy, but also he's got this kind of evil genius vibe about

him, I think. And the anti-vax stuff and the flaunting of Australia's rules, his winning court, I think just all emphasises that a little bit. What is his reputation and what is his public profile? I think it's just as a sort of ruthless winner. I mean, when Djokovic started out in tennis, there was a big two that was better than Darlan. And then, you know, within sort of a few years, there was a big three that was better than Darlan Djokovic. And he's just used, he's just sort of really ruthlessly driven to establish himself as the number one. And he sort of disrupted that kind of big two and he has this relentless relentless drive and ambition but of course you know the other side to that is he's become this

kind of real sort of wellness freak and you know the vaccine stuff has sort of been a real part of that you know since mid last year it was always on the cards that he was quite possibly not going to get vaccinated i i feel like in my own world, in an athlete's world, there is a lot of uncertainty and just, I think, too much power given away to someone else to tell you what you need to do with your own body. And again, I think that is just part of the divisiveness of Novak. I mean, there are a lot of people who love him dearly and they're going to let that slide. There are a lot of people to whom they're like, oh, typical, it's predictable.

But I would say as well that there is a sort of like, I think, disproportionate number of anti-vaxxers among a lot of elite athletes, because I think part of it is there is this belief in the supremacy and the indestructibility of their own body. And, you know, they're all just these incredible physical specimens that are able to do incredible things. So there's this belief that, you know, a vaccine will pollute that and also that they can withstand COVID. And so what do tennis fans think of him in Australia

compared to Nadal and Federer? I think that he's never quite been as popular as those other two here in Australia. Federer, I think part of it's due to PR. Federer has wonderful PR. I mean, he's so nice to watch on court, but he's also really sort of lovable in his press interviews and things like that. Nadal kind of, again, just is a little bit more endearing.

Something about Djokovic is this ruthlessly efficient winner who broke in and sort of like shattered the supremacy of those two. So while those two seem to have always been more popular, there's something about the relentless way Djokovic wins. People like an underdog here. And while Federer and Nadal are obviously no underdogs I just think the way that Djokovic is always so dominant means or you know dominant at least in the Australian Open over the last few years means he's not quite as popular as some of those others and and I've been hearing people bring up this thing called tall poppy syndrome and how that's playing into this. And I think that's it's actually a different I think you guys have a different understanding of tall poppy syndrome than we do in Canada. But but what is that and why does that hit a nerve in Australia? Sure. I think it's sort of like a kind of resentment of people that are too big for their boots that is very much a thing here.

And I think it sort of helps understand, I guess, the resentment towards Djokovic bending the rules. It ties into our sort of dislike for people that feel that they are above any kind of rules. And Djokovic has clearly been able to just get around rules that we thought were very strict so easily. Even if people rationally understand that he's probably not going to cause a COVID outbreak on his own, even if they rationally understand that our immigration system is what it is, is a total mess, they don't like the fact that he could just, there's a rule for, you know, the thousands of Australians who struggled to get back into the country over the last year and there's a rule for, you know, the thousands of Australians who struggled to get back into the country over the last year.

And there's another rule for no back. If he's allowed to play the Australian Open, I don't want any bar of him. I reckon he's going to be pissed off. He's going to be like very determined to play well. I think that this is just all added fuel for him, in my opinion. him, in my opinion. And so, I mean, I guess if he doesn't get deported and actually competes, how do you think Australians will react? Again, I think it's going to reinforce the divisiveness. I think plenty of people in the stance might boo him. But, you know, he's always got a really, really vocal amount of support, particularly for people in the local Serbian

diaspora. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd have a lot of supporters still out there. He's a divisive figure and I think that division is going to continue. Thank you so much for your time and for chatting with us today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. us today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. No worries. My pleasure. After we taped this episode, we learned that Australia's immigration minister, Alex Hawke, could come to a decision about Novak Djokovic's fate ahead of the Australian Open draw on Wednesday. If his visa is revoked, he could face a three-year ban from the country, which would mean the Australian Open, set to begin January 17th,

will go on without the number one seeded male tennis player in the world. And that's it for today. I'm Angela Starrett, in for Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.