mike carey

ABC TV interviewed a lawyer who had been watching the proceedings. He said that after Djokovic's team had presented his case, the Commonwealth had effectively folded, agreeing to the judge's proposed ruling. After the ruling had been handed down, Counsel for the Commonwealth advised that the Minister would now examine the option of exercising his discretion to cancel the visa anyway. The judge thanked Counsel and said that if the Commonwealth had proceeded to take up that option without mentioning it in court, he would have been 'incandescent with rage'. Presumably he would have been unimpressed that the Commonwealth had only conceded in his court because it knew it had a 'get out of gaol free' card. (I don't know what he could have done about, perhaps issue an injunction preventing any action being taken to effect the cancellation until after the Open?) A potential stumbling block for Djokovic is that in his arrival declaration he said that he had not travelled in the 14 days before arrival in Australia when he had been in both Spain and Serbia in that period. To me, that would be a pretext not a reason to cancel his visa.

WTF? Djokovic has won his case and the cancellation of his visa has been quashed, with the Home Affairs Department ordered to pay costs. I have yet to see any further details of the reasons for the decision. I can only speculate they ruled on the administrative processes by which the visa was cancelled since it is pretty clear that he didn't qualify for a visa to be issued. The immigration minister could still use his discretion to cancel the visa anyway. He may be reluctant to do that as it would then be a political rather than an administrative one.

Yup, not much wriggle room there!

It was more being a smart arse and playing around than any sort of originalist urge!

The only plausible explanation for this is that he made that appearance between taking the test and receiving the result, and local regulations didn't require you to isolate for that period. Here you have to do that if you are having the test because you suspect yon might have the virus, although not if it's a test to clear you for travel. In his case there would seem to be no reason to have a clearance test, as absent vaccination a negative test wouldn't let him into Australia. The only conceivable reason for having a test was the hope that having a recent infection would exempt him from needing to be vaccinated. On the basis of all that, his appearance with those children shows nothing but a wilful disregard for their safely.

He was Bahamian, (which was British at the time) and apparently his accent from there was an obstacle at the start of his career.

So name the forum 'Wendys'?

And as has been noted in another thread, he has reactivated his RM ad. He has posted travel to Tejas in mid January and OC in mid February.

Go into it with your eyes open. Assume that he wants to engage you in another appointment and plan on that basis. If that's ok, do it (if you're happy with that). You could ask him what the ground rules are. If he just wants to meet, whether that involves sex or not, that's sort of a bonus. Don't assume he just wants a meeting off the clock.

Tourist attractions are, almost by definition, places with a wide general appeal. Archaeological sites are a specialist interest. Persepolis is most likely, for Westerners not just Americans, an unknown rather than underrated site. Given the US government's hostility to travel to Iran, it is likely to remain largely unknown to that audience. If I were to go there I would lose my access to visa waiver travel to the US, not something I am willing to forego just yet. I can remember Persepolis being one of the locations the Shah used for his celebrations of 2500 years of the Persian Empire. When I googled it I discovered that it was when I was still in high school (1971). Old I am!

Haha, now I remember him, or at least the context in which he came out. A very political move to do so for the Sochi Olympics in the face of Russian LGBTI policies. But now, back to the subject of the thread.

I get the joke, less so perhaps than if I'd known who BSR was talking about. And yes, a joke is a joke. I didn't say it wasn't funny, I simply said that there was a serious point there as well. As I said above, the serious point might have been one best not commented on. And yeah, at a party I'm boring AF, a complete Debbie Downer, as a number of people on the forum can attest!

I don't know him, so that is an explanation, but there is an inherent joke in asking if yo can reveal something that is already revealed. But even if it's a joke it still poses a serious question. Perhaps a question I didn't need to answer.

That depends on what you characterise 'the whole world' knowing to actually mean. Mostly, the whole world doesn't know (it's not the whole world anyway, it's the developed Anglosphere and some others), it usually just suspects. More broadly, I'd say you can come out regardless of how widely your sexuality is or is suspected to be. If you choose to come out you have a target audience you are thinking about, no matter how large or small that audience may be. I've heard it said that you have to come out again every time you meet someone.

Bon anniversaire!

Absolutely! He won't care one jot what the Serbian president says or thinks. In every issue bar this one, the Serbian president would neither know nor care what an Australian PM thought or did. Nil-all draw. This all depends on the Federal Court now, although you can never rule out a sudden technicality that prompts a reassessment (if the public mood shifts).

Agree on both counts, although I'm due to do an anal test, but bowel cancer screening (which is free here). Earlier in the pandemic I recall seeing vision of PCR test stations where both were swabbed.

On the issue of nose or throat/cheek swabs, I had posted somewhere in the forum that a medical expert here had commented that Omicron is more strongly present in the throat and far less prevalent in the nasal passage than earlier variants. That appears to be becoming the accepted medical opinion. The instructions with the kits are likely to take some time to catch up with this, so it makes sense to swab both. (I wouldn't advocate adding an arse swab, but maybe that's just me.) A comment on the wider discussion of the efficacy of RATs. There are two separate questions, how effective they are at detecting the disease accurately, and whether the testing being done with them is necessary or even useful. The former is purely one of the statistics for how well they work, the latter is one of whether you need to find out if a particular person has the disease. Opinions differ on which people you need to know that about. If the aim of the testing is to exclude people known to be positive then the value is clearer than if the aim it so determine that people don't have the disease. We know that a negative test is only good for the five minutes after it is taken (hyperbolic exaggeration), so their benefit is in winnowing out some of the positive cases not in identifying those who are not. Public health officials know this so they will likely only mandate them as a gate-keeper test (as opposed to other reasons) when they see a benefit in excluding the proportion of population that return a positive test. One of the unstated reasons for testing more widely than is necessary is to reassure the wider community. The merits of this are at best debatable. Case in point is South Australia that as it was opening up the the eastern states required a RAT for the couple of weeks when their case load was negligible but scrapped it when their numbers started to rise and they had had time to explain to the SA public why they weren't needed. (I mean to explain why the tests were not needed, not to explain why the SA public was not needed. I make no comment on the latter.) In Australia, not requiring a test is not a free-for-all. People who test positive must isolate for usually seven days so they are taken out of circulation once they are known to have the disease. Testing is only required in limited specific circumstances. Surveillance testing is now a thing of the past. Public health policy has moved from aggressively looking for as many cases as can be found, to isolating known cases. Mandatory testing of all the household contacts of a known case is a completely different thing to testing everyone that was in a shopping centre the hour after a known case visited it.

He appealed to the Federal Court, and they adjourned the case until Monday, so effectively he can't be deported while the case is pending. That court can't be relied on to do what the government wants, so I'm not sure why the adjournment was until Monday rather than tomorrow (it's 2200 on Thursday now). Perhaps they want to give the parties enough time to resolve it themselves. As you said, the drama continues!

Perhaps he should have known, but the Immigration Department official who issued the visa should have known better that it was the wrong visa and either not issued it or issued the correct one. I see red tape as being unnecessarily complex rules, this is a case of apparently clear rules being incompetently administered.

This is absolutely extraordinary, and has been an evolving story since his flight landed in Melbourne at 1130 pm last night (0730 US EST). His visa has just been cancelled, although his lawyers are appealing the decision. I really don't know how this will play out in the court of public opinion. He will no longer be the focus of all the discussion, but rather the various decision processes are likely to be. It will variously be seen as 'the government' not being able to make up its mind (not differentiating between the state and federal governments), one or other of the governments being seen as grandstanding or playing political games with the other, or just more generalised bureaucratic failure. Whatever else, it is likely to see Djokovic pass the 'villain' hat to someone else. There will also be a sense that they made up their minds and couldn't stick with a decision. People may not have liked the original decision, but will have moved on. They may still have booed him on the court more as a pantomime villain, but this decision will likely confer a level of sympathy on him. The two governments concerned have some rusted on supporters and detractors, and some of the response will be coloured by those opinions, but most people here won't look at the issue through a political lens.

On the evening news panel program last night I learned that in addition to Dryuary, this month is also Veganuary. The 'also' is my characterisation, not one that its proponents made. I can assure engaged forum members that I will be giving this initiative the same excited and enthusiastic consideration as I am giving Dryuary.

One reason for the recent slowing of results for PCR tests being cited here is that in the past they would batch test four samples together and only test them individually if a batch returned a positive result, and few did. Now, almost every batch would contain at least one positive sample so they have to test every sample separately at the outset.

Further to my previous post, just now I saw this on twitter https://twitter.com/MattWalshMedia/status/1478321873477771264?s=20

The degree of cynicism here on this issue, on Twitter and in the general conversation, is off the scale. The public communications about the wider Covid / Omicron issue is confused and confusing. Rules then exceptions,, mandates then changes to them. Australians in general have a low tolerance for special dispensations, but there was surprisingly little resistance to exceptions being made for sports people to enter and leave the country when they wouldn't have been able to as private citizens In those cases, however, the rules that were waived were about who was allowed to enter and exit, not the conditions when they did so. They still had to undertake the same quarantine periods, although teams were allowed to organise their own quarantine facilities if they met the same standards of supervision and the like as state-operated facilities. This exemption doesn't pass what is called here 'the pub test', medical reasons my arse.