Ouster of a champ: With Djokovic out, Oz heaves a sigh of relief

Two major network news anchors were caught on hot mics using at least 10 expletives to discuss the issue. This would usually provoke some social sanction, but given that the expletives in question were used to describe Djokovic, both news anchors have since become national heroes.

And yet none of the acrimony is about tennis. It is entirely about Australia’s experience of the pandemic, the growing policy failures of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government and the current out-of-control spread of the Omicron variant here. 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.

The champ who chose to thumb his nose at vaccination struck powerfully as a symbol of the contrarianism that has now frayed our once united national pandemic response. Just a few weeks before Djokovic’s arrival, the conservative government of New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, abandoned contact tracing, mask mandates and other pandemic protections precipitating a wave of Omicron that was crashing across the entire east coast and prompting the reintroduction of restrictions just as Djokovic landed in Melbourne.

The government’s insistence that citizens could take “personal responsibility” for their health was not only contradicted by Djokovic and his hazy trail of post-positive-test encounters; it was also somewhat undercut by the government’s failure to provide nearly any means to do so.

Supplies of crucial booster vaccines were, again, not ordered in time to counter the wave. Public testing centers were shut to meet backlogs as positive cases overwhelmed them, yet the government decided the alternative of rapid antigen tests should be a matter of retail sale. While Australian-based test manufacturers fulfill supply for other countries, price gouging has run rampant in the domestic market, and the precious test kits have become impossible to find.

Denied tests, unaware infected people spread Omicron further, straining both the health system and supply chains as more and more workers fall sick. Australia, whose high social compliance with lockdowns and vaccination kept us safe from COVID for so long, now has one of the highest infection rates in the world. KFC is running out of chicken, and supermarket shelves are bare. School reopenings have been delayed. Employees are being sent to work sick. The federal government is now reportedly forcibly acquiring supplies of rapid antigen tests from the businesses and service organisations that it had told to find their own.

Of course, while Australian Twitter may name him “Novax Djocovid,” no local holds the tennis player responsible for our crisis. His unsatisfactory paperwork fails stated visa requirements, and that is reason enough for its revocation.

But to understand the rage unleashed by Djokovic, one has to recognise the similarities between his behavior and that of our government. First, there is their shared failure to treat the threat of the virus’s transmissibility seriously. Then there are the obfuscations, contradictory statements, blame shifting and inherent belief that rules only apply to other people, which characterise months of government mismanagement of the crisis. There’s a familiar pattern of government miscommunication and ineptitude unfolding around Djokovic that sadly reminds us of our brief and squandered advantage over the virus.

Badham is a columnist for The Guardian Australia

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