(Image: Private Media)

The deportation of tennis player and pandemic vector Novak Djokovic was a debacle from the get-go for the Morrison government, which greenlit his entry only to decide the Serbian champ was good cannon fodder for a “we will decide who hits tennis balls in this country and the circumstances in which they hit them” campaign after he arrived — before the Federal Court threw out its visa cancellation.

That left the government to reply on its near-bulletproof deportation powers, only for the geniuses at Home Affairs to argue that deportation was justified on the basis that Djokovic posed a threat of an “increase in anti-vaccination sentiment generated in the Australian community”, at the exact moment lunatic anti-vaxxers within the government like George Christensen and Gerard Rennick were attacking vaccination.

Scott Morrison refused to accept any parallel between the two situations, presumably on the basis that him deciding he no longer wanted to accept the support of a conspiracy theorist wingnut was much harder than deporting someone.

In any event, somewhere along the way, Morrison became confused about why Djokovic was deported. It had nothing to do with any “increase in anti-vaccination sentiment generated in the Australian community” apparently, but it was because “this is about someone who sought to come to Australia and not comply with the entry rules at our border.”

Morrison might have been forgetting that in fact the Federal Court had overturned the government’s decision to refuse entry to Djokovic because the government itself admitted it had acted unreasonably when it stopped him from entering.

Legal niceties? Well, perhaps, but insisting a now spurious and legally overturned “reason” for Djokovic being deported applied rather than the government’s own bizarre reasoning that Djokovic would lead some anti-vaccination campaign while playing in a tennis tournament distracts from the profound hypocrisy of a prime minister too timid to do anything to pull into line renegade anti-vaxxers on his own backbench.

The likes of Christensen and Rennick cause far more anti-vaccination sentiment than Djokovic ever has. The player is a dickhead — but the dangerous dickheads are much closer to home.