Novacc Djocovid Gets Kicked Out

 Djoyless In Shtraya

The game where nobody is a winner, rounded into the third round as Novak Djokovic and his lawyers went to appeal the decision made to kick him out of the country. The court sat today, and Djokovic lost. He is due to be deported tonight - but not before some more brouhaha.

During the week renegade dickhead MP Craig Kelly was out there arguing that Djokovic was a political prisoner which made me laugh. Kelly was firmly behind the Coalition Government's stance on tough borders when he was with the Liberal Party. The only reason he's out there saying crap like this is because he's an anti-vaxer and so is Djokovic. 

Here's a sensible opinion piece in the whole thing by Van Badham. 

When the pandemic took hold in March 2020, Australia’s federal government shut international borders to control its spread — but made no provision for the tens of thousands of stranded Aussiesstuck overseas who wanted to come home. As Mr. Morrison dumped more pandemic management responsibilities onto the states, they enforced their own domestic borders. When these policies were combined with lockdowns, loved ones were separated for months at a time.

Only when states reached 80 percent vaccination rates were border protections relaxed — some as recently as only this week. The Morrison government’s failure to order enough vaccines for the population resulted in a rollout popularly referred to as a strollout. The process of social repair has been long and difficult.

So when ordinary Australians saw an unvaccinated tennis champion bragging on Instagram of a mysterious “exemption permission” that allowed him to traipse across the border, that went down like a lead balloon.

Anyway, here's what we know:

The three-judge panel of the Federal Court ruled unanimously against the tennis World No.1 on Sunday evening, after hearing his case in an extraordinary out-of-hours sitting earlier in the day.
He has been ordered to pay the costs of the federal government in running the case, while judges did not provide reasons for their decisions but said they would do so in the coming days.

So three justice were woken up on a Sunday morning to go preside over this shitshow, and judging from the photos, they look none too pleased about that. The Chef Justice said they were there to review whether the Federal government had made an irrational decision as to render the decision unlawful - and sure enough the justices could not find such a case. 

You can't help but think all of this was avoidable if Novak Djokovic could rise above his name and get the damn vaccine. I guess the less stupid party - the Australian Government - won, and there's something to be commended in that. Thank you learned Justices.