It isn’t up to aircrew to officiate border control, they are there to fly the plane and serve the damned peanuts.
And he is sitting in a hotel down under? Easy peasy. Needle jab, blood in a tube, titer it out for covid. Good titre, he plays, no titre bounce him home. Not a problem.
The issue is not whether he tests positive for Covid, but whether he has been vaccinated.
The Australian Health Ministry wrote twice to Tennis Australia informing them that vaccination was necessary for a visa, and that prior infection would not exempt players from that requirement. Tennis Australia apparently ignored that, and told players that prior infection would exempt them from vaccination.
This AP story has details I hadn’t seen before:
That guy is a one-man super-spreader event.
Except that according to the excerpt that keeps getting into the newspapers, they didn’t. They said vaccination was necessary for quarantine-free entry.
If he’d been met at the border with “Fine, but you do know you have to isolate for seven days then get a negative test, right?” then we wouldn’t be having this dust-up
More info on the subject of quarantine/vaccinations. I got this off some informed person in the Guardian comments section:
I don’t know if that’s part of the information anyone knew or relied upon when Djokovic’s paperwork was being sorted out. He doesn’t seem to have left himself two full weeks’ of quarantine time in any case. But that’s an official government website - yes, unvaccinated people can come to Australia if they quarantine.
(doesn’t say anything about the specifics of the visa he had - but he claims the visa didn’t actually ask him questions about vaccination)
From here:
https://www.smartraveller.gov.au/COVID-19/COVID-19-frequently-asked-questions#q16
Yeah, I can imagine that seeing such a high-profile exception must have rubbed public opinion the wrong way.
The authorities could have, in the lead-in, said “no, the Open is not so precious, sorry, shots or you’re not coming”. But if they did open the door to exceptions they should have made things clear all around and guarded against loopholes or end-runs.
Of course, who is involved is what heats things up – some Joe Whatsisface granted a similar exception, who was not in the world spotlight as a vaccination mandate opponent, would not create as much friction. But this is the star of the event, and his position for the record has been that he believes the shots should not be a requirement for travel and participation. That makes many people suspect that if he does not have them it’s not because of any valid medical issue but because he just doesn’t bloody want to and feels entitled to continue to carry on his business regardless.
The airline is generally on the hook for flying someone back to their country of origin if a traveler is denied entry, so it’s in their best interest to check said traveler’s documentation before letting them on the flight.
Wouldn’t it be check-in staff verifying documentation before you even board, not the flight attendants who are serving drinks and showing you where the emergency exits are?
@iamthewalrus_3 There’s a concept in user interface design called “friction,” where you make less desirable actions more cumbersome to execute. For example, you don’t want people to constantly create and delete accounts, so you make it where there are extra steps for both. Another is requiring a waiting period for something that could be done quickly, or talk to a real person for something that could have been handled automatically.
Whether intentional or not, that seems to apply in this situation. No one wants to give out medical exemptions for vaccines. The vast majority of people who want an exemption don’t actually need one. We definitely want it to be much easier to just get the vaccine. As such, it makes sense that there’s more bureaucracy involved.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a more general problem that affects other situation. But I’d argue it makes more sense to bring that up in a thread about those problems, rather than the one time the system seems to be working as we would want.
Heck, maybe you can even come up with some “dark patterns.” That’s a term in UX design for situations where the tactics are used to try and push the user to do something that is in the best interest of the company or website, but not in the user’s best interest. Examples include making it tedious to remove your personal data, or the perennial “easy to sign up for payments, but more difficult to quit.”
But, in this thread, I think it’s fine that an antivaxxer got caught up in red tape when he tried to exploit the exemption system. I actually would argue that there should be more red tape like this—as a form of soft restrictions—when hard restrictions aren’t practical or aren’t working as well as they should. I’d love to see it become quite tedious to opt out of vaccination of all kinds.
Yes it is. Of course best practices are a bit more difficult to figure out when it’s a privately chartered flight for an internationally known sports star who has a habit of publicly lashing out when denied his way.
It wasn’t clear whether people were lumping in the ground crew with “flight attendants”. The time to check for proper documentation is indeed on the ground before you get on the plane, usually at check in. If flying to a place with strict visa requirements (e.g., the US), airlines will often have a dedicated screener to go over your travel papers even before you reach check in. Once you’re in the air then no one’s going to check anything (except your seat number) and the crew’s interaction with border control is limited to handing out customs and immigration forms.
Here’s some news:
Guardian live updates:
Tran argues that Judge Anthony Kelly cannot find that Border Force officials pressured Djokovic during the interview process.
Kelly responds that he would be “most reluctant on the available evidence” to suggest an actual intention to pressure, but it doesn’t “kill the point” that Djokovic felt pressured.
He agrees that they didn’t pressure him, but that doesn’t mean that the poor baby didn’t feel pressured. 
This judge seems to be a major Djokovic fan.
As expected Djokovic wins again.
Judge Anthony Kelly reads out a minute agreed to by both the government and Djokovic, where he quashes the decision to cancel Novak Djokovic ’s visa, orders government to pay costs, and for Djokovic to be released from detention in 30 minutes with his passport and personal effects released to him.
While I have no time for anti-vaxxers, I think the judge basically got it right on the evidence and situation presented.
Possibly his staff should have done a more thorough job checking with both state and federal bodies (I’m sure that situation does not obtain in Serbia), but the fact remains he had a valid entry visa and was told by responsible bodies that he’d be able to enter.
It seems that the decision was made only on technical grounds, because Djokovic was not allowed enough time to respond to the visa cancellation.
Djokovic was allowed until 8.30am when he was originally detained to respond to the notification to cancel his visa, but the decision was made at 7.42am.
[The judge] found if he had had more time he could have consulted more widely and responded further than he was able to.
This seems to imply that the visa was not valid. The problem was only in the process of allowing him to respond before cancelling it.
The immigration minster can just re-cancel him again if he wants to.
Yes, this would make the government look like a bunch of whiny little bullies … but they can do it.
Um… he could get vaccinated?
I’m no longer patient with the anti-vaxxers. Want to enter Australia? Get vaccinated. No one has an unfettered right to travel the world.
Honestly, I don’t know who I want to kick more in this whole sorry saga. I mean, what did the guy do to get his infection - go lick a bunch of ICU beds? Or does he have a tame doctor somewhere who can fake a PCR test for him?
It’s all just too depressing