Djokovic did us all a favour
Ihave spent the last 10 days in MIQ lockdown in Rotorua. Occasionally we are allowed out of our dolls house room for an hour of exercise. Four soldiers are stationed in opposite corners of the yard in case anyone tries to scale the walls. Those walls are covered with beautiful artwork from local schools welcoming us home with pictures of caterpillars and kiwis, flowers and rainbows.
It seems a symbol for our times. The paintings and drawings express the human kindness that Jacinda Ardern urges us to give out in these times when compassion is a precious commodity. The soldiers are there in case we fail to follow the rules her government has imposed.
And this is why the story of Novak Djokovic is the biggest sports story of the year and possibly the century. In the case of Djokovic, here is a man, perhaps not a particularly noble one, who has broken the rules and then been crushed by the machinery of the state.
Djokovic, arguably the greatest tennis player of all time, fought the law and the law won. It was ever thus and all rather puts me in mind of the famous editorial headline, which I referenced last week; ‘‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel.’’
William Rees-Mogg, the then editor of used the quotation from the 18th century poet Alexander Pope to describe the fate of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards who had each received prison sentences in 1967 for trivial drugs offences.
Now although Djokovic may not compare favourably in the public eye to Jagger and Richards, something equally oppressive and shadowy has been occurring over in Australia. Urged on by a slavering media, the State decided to crush Djokovic.
As in all badly governed states, the crushing was an inevitability. When I read the court papers filed by the government, I knew that the ‘Joker’ had zero chance of winning, however just or unjust his cause. Under Australian law ‘public interest’ is ‘a discretionary value judgment to be made (by a minister) by reference to undefined factual matters.’
In other words, unless Djokovic could prove that minister Alex Hawke was absolutely bonkers, he had no chance of overturning the decision to throw him out of the country. The arm of the law in this case is very long indeed and not a little scary. It was also a colossal waste of public money in order to make a fraudulent point that no one is above the law.
The three judges who found unanimously in the State’s favour ruled: ‘‘These grounds focus on whether the decision was for different reasons irrational or legally unreasonable. It is no part or function of the court to decide upon the merit or wisdom of the decision.’’ Fair dinkum doesn’t come into it.
According to a survey by
83 per cent of Australians wanted Djokovic thrown out of the country and I suspect you would get a similar result in this country.
And although I may disagree entirely with Djokovic’s antivaccination views, I support 100 per cent his right to hold them.
And this is where things get tricky. Governments have played the public health card, trumping individual freedoms, which there is no guarantee we will get back.
So in some ways Djokovic has done us all a favour by challenging Australia’s authority because at least he has engendered more public discussion than we have had to date. Rules are rules, but that does not mean they are always good ones as I have recently found out.
When I arrived back in New Zealand 10 days ago, the people on our flight were put on two buses and driven for three hours to Rotorua. This I thought was crazy. There was a clear risk of contagion by putting so many people in so small a space for so long. The government’s paranoia did not seem to extend to returning aliens.
Then we arrived at the quarantine hotel and the world rotated. A soldier, who looked as if he had just left school, got on the bus and read out some rules like a teenager pretending to be a grown up. Then we got off the bus and were asked to space two metres apart in the open air, having been in far closer proximity on the airless bus.
The first staging post was sanitation. A young man asked us to sanitise our hands. He then asked me to take off my surgical mask and put it in a disposal bag. He then asked us to sanitise our hands again. We were then directed to a ‘clean’ mask to put on. So I put it on. He then asked me to sanitise my hands for a third time, despite the fact that Covid is very largely an airborne virus. Mmm, had I wandered into an episode of Monty Python?
Oh, and for those loudmouths screaming about how lucky I was to be in MIQ at all and what was I doing leaving the country – I left the country to spend three weeks with a terminally ill relative, three weeks I spent in self-imposed lockdown in order not to endanger her.
These are crazy times and I understand your fear, but we are going to have to move on from that fear. They have managed to do so in Britain although it must be said that their wearing of masks is nothing like as sensible as it is in New Zealand.
Over my 10 days in lockdown I have discovered two things. Some of the rules are very, very silly and most people who administer those rules are very, very kind. So to all the nurses and soldiers and receptionists and managers and cleaners and cooks who were so lovely to us during our 10 days in isolation in Rotorua, I say thank you, thank you, thank you.