Terry Barnes

Terry Barnes is a Melbourne-based contributor for The Spectator and The Spectator Australia.

Friday

Terry Barnes

Will Australia ever let Novak Djokovic in again?

With Russia playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game with Ukraine, this week the world number one tennis player, Novak Djokovic, must have thought we needed a distraction. Following his charm offensive with the BBC’s Amol Rajan earlier this week, Djokovic has announced that he would like to play the Australian Open again, despite the minor complication of his having been banned from entering Australia for three years, following his deportation last month. Djokovic told Serbia’s national TV, ‘I want to come back to Australia in the future and to play on Rod Laver Arena again… A lot of professional and personal beautiful things happened to me there. Despite all this, I have a great connection with Australia.

Saturday

Terry Barnes

Novak Djokovic’s arrogance was his downfall

The Australian government’s decision to cancel the world number one tennis player Novak Djokovic’s visa was inevitable in the end. Things started well for Djokovic. On Monday he won his initial match in the law courts when his QC-led legal team successfully challenged his visa cancellation as a breakdown of procedural fairness. After this utter humiliation, it seemed unlikely that Scott Morison’s embattled government would overturn the Federal Circuit Court judge’s ruling. But on Friday evening local time the umpire struck back.

Thursday

Terry Barnes

Novak Djokovic is treating Australians like mugs

Just minutes from the heart of Victoria’s capital, Melbourne Park is one of the great tennis complexes. For a fortnight in January, it will be the centre of the tennis world as the home of the year’s first Grand Slam tournament, the Australian Open. For Melburnians the Open is more than just a tennis tournament. The grounds throb with life and with the relaxed summer holiday vibe that comes between Christmas and Australia Day on 26 January; night matches pause as celebratory fireworks light the skies over the city. This year will be no different, except for one thing. To enter Melbourne Park, patrons, staff, media and almost all players will have to be double-vaccinated against Covid-19.

Monday

Terry Barnes

Zero-Covid is wishful thinking if Australia wants to rejoin the world

As former Australian foreign minister and High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer wrote in last week’s magazine, almost all Australian states, like neighbouring New Zealand, are determined to eliminate Covid-19 at all costs. At the beginning of this year, Australia seemingly had defeated Covid. Total numbers of people infected, out of 25 million, were in the few thousands, with related deaths in the hundreds (mostly in care homes). Even now, with a major Delta variant outbreak across our two biggest states, New South Wales and Victoria, less than a thousand Australians have died from or with Covid, almost all elderly or people with other health complications.

Tuesday

Terry Barnes

How Australia was caught in lockdown limbo

Sajid Javid’s deleted weekend tweet about Britain ‘learning to live with, rather than cower from Covid’ upset just about everyone – from frontline NHS workers to Covid-19 victims’ groups. But Javid could actually have been talking about Australians. While the UK’s Freedom Day went ahead despite 40,000 people testing positive for Covid daily, over half of Australia’s population has been cowering under lockdowns imposed by their state governments, while the other half are exhorted to treat their locked down fellow Australians as pariahs. For what? Yesterday, Australia’s health department reported just 157 positive cases in the previous 24 hours, mostly in the Greater Sydney area.

Thursday

Terry Barnes

Australian border closures could work for Britain. Here’s why

Melbourne Australia has been a rare success story during the pandemic. There have been around 29,000 cases of Covid, 908 of which have proved fatal. There are currently just 125 active cases in the entire country, a mere 25 of which have required hospitalisation. For a population of 25 million, this is a vastly different experience to that of Covid-beleaguered Europe and North America. No wonder the British government is considering whether it might be time to copy Australia’s approach, to help save an economy and society battered to a degree Australians can scarcely comprehend. Australia benefits from being a remote island continent with no international land borders.