Djokovic wasn’t booted to keep Australians healthy. It was pure politics – Crikey

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Nothing says there's an election coming like tough talk on borders. John Howard did it in 2001. Scott Morrison hopes it'll work for him in 2022.

On the face of it, Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic -- the first in his profession to win $100 million in prize money, considered by many the greatest tennis player of all time, and a brand ambassador for, among other entities, an Austrian banking cooperative -- has little in common with an Afghan refugee.

But this past week, when he entered Australia to play in its grand slam tournament only to be detained by immigration officials, Djokovic exposed the punitive and arbitrary nature of the countrys immigration system -- just as a group of Hazara asylum seekers did 20 years ago when the Royal Australian Navy intercepted them on the high seas in what came to be known as the Tampa affair for the Norwegian freighter MVTampathat picked up the migrants at sea when their own boat sank and tried to bring them to Australia.

Immigration systems are usually byzantine by design, so the details of both stories are hard to parse. But here is what we know of Djokovics.

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Amelia Lester

Foreign Policy

Amelia Lester is the executive editor at Foreign Policy.

This story is reprinted with permission from ForeignPolicy.

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Djokovic wasn't booted to keep Australians healthy. It was pure politics - Crikey