When it comes to justice, they play dirty Down Under
National Post, 13 January 2022
It's no surprise Australian border officials trod on Novak Djokovic's rights, considering the past miscarriages of justice that have occurred there
At time of writing, the Australian government is feverishly trying to find a way to revoke Novak Djokovic’s visa ahead of his opening match at the Australian Open. That’s the political desideratum and justice will lift her blindfold sufficiently to achieve the result.
The trick facing the immigration minister will be how to expel Joker without making Australia more of a laughingstock than it already is.
How do I know this? Because that’s how Oz justice works. Or at least how it works when the world bothers to note what happens there. Those who have followed such cases were not at all surprised that Australian border officials were so determined to get the politically desirable outcome that they trod upon Djokovic’s rights to process and counsel. They play dirty Down Under.
All justice systems are subject to error — both forced and unforced, as they say in tennis — but Australia seems prone to allowing the frenzy of the mob (and about the Mob, about which more later) to affect the course of justice.
Consider two Aussie criminal trials that garnered global attention, those of Lindy Chamberlain and George Pell.
Chamberlain’s was the famous 1980s “dingo” case, where she was convicted of murdering her infant daughter in the wilderness. Chamberlain maintained that a dingo — an Australian wild dog — had taken her daughter. She spent more than three years in prison for a crime she did not commit. Her wrongful conviction was the result of public vilification, police incompetence and prosecutorial aggression. The Chamberlains were Seventh Day Adventists and their minority religious faith was used to whip up public indignation against them.
Chamberlain was released in 1986 after new evidence came to light and in 2012 Australian justice finally confirmed that she had been telling the truth all along. Even at the time of the original trial it was evident that the prosecution case was incompetent and unprofessional. But Australian public opinion had been emphatic, and Chamberlain had been sent away.
Decades later, a similar public frenzy was whipped up against Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s senior Catholic cleric, in the aftermath of a government royal commission into sexual abuse. Pell had been archbishop both of Melbourne and of Sydney, and in 2014 was appointed to a senior Vatican post.
Pell’s record on sexual abuse was ahead of its time, but the rancid public atmosphere wanted someone senior in the dock. Police in the state of Victoria, which includes Melbourne, decided Pell would be the man. In 2013 they set up Operation Tethering, which was an investigation into Cardinal Pell, even though there were no accusations against him. The police solicited — including with newspaper ads — potential charges. It was not an investigation of a crime in search of the criminal; it was an investigation of a cardinal in search of a crime.
Victoria police trolling finally unearthed a wholly dubious witness who accused the cardinal of molesting him and another boy in a crowded cathedral immediately after Sunday Mass. The other boy was already dead, having told his own mother before his death that no such thing had happened. In the event, justice took its perfervid course and Pell was convicted, spending more than 400 days in solitary confinement.
In April 2020, Australia’s High Court, in a unanimous decision rendered in lightning quick fashion, excoriated the entire prosecution case and released him. It did not return to the case to the trial court, but entered a verdict of acquittal itself, an option exercised when travesties of justice are so grave that they require an immediate, emphatic and complete remedy.
The Pell case was like the Chamberlain case. Public passions were inflamed — Pell as a scapegoat for Catholic misconduct and mishandling of sexual abuse, Chamberlain as a member of a supposedly suspicious sect.
Djokovic is feeling the hot wrath of an Australian populace confided to quarters, having been subject to police demanding papers on the streets to monitor whether citizens have wandered more than a few kilometres from home. Living with the trappings of a police state has engendered a fierce desire for Joker to feel the smack of arbitrary detention and expulsion. After all, with nine Australian Open victories, why not extend to Djokovic the same treatment the state gives to Australian citizens?
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