Just when embattled PM Scott Morrison might think he’s out of the woods, along comes Novak Djokovic to mess things up, writes columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

AMAZING, isn’t it? As Prime Minister, you think you’re out of the woods. 

The electors are forgetting about the Brittany Higgins/Grace Tame revolt. The Christian Porter/Alan Tudge horrors are fading. The Emmanuel Macron disaster is getting lost in memory’s shadows. The torturing of the “on water” asylum seekers is pretty much historic. And Albo still hasn’t cut through as the people’s champion. I mean, how good is that?

And then comes Djoko.

Okay, he’s a goat, and not just “greatest of all time” but a “gross, overpaid, arrogant twit”. And a mad anti-vaxxer, to boot. But Novak Djokovic is a sportsperson in a country where sport is not just king, but queen as well since women have begun making headlines in cricket, soccer, tennis, AFL, netball and half a dozen other codes. It’s the full catastrophe.

Almost as bad, it’s Scott Morrison’s old friends, the Border Force – the mob he practically invented – who stuck Djoko in a crummy hotel full of asylum seekers, some of whom have been incarcerated for NINE YEARS. And when the media discovered them, they grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

“How long,” they pleaded, “are we going to be punished by the Morrison government for seeking a safe haven from persecution and violence?” 

“Good question!” we cried. 

A British Prime Minister back in the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan when asked what the greatest challenge to the political leader was, he responded: “Events, dear boy. Events.”

Sometimes they come from a clear blue sky. But in the far-off mountains, a lightning bolt has struck a tree in a grove of eucalypts; an orange spark kindles a little fire, and then suddenly the mindless, greedy exploitation of nature over the last two hundred years blankets that sky in the roiling darkness of nature’s rage. No wonder we call it a raging bushfire.

Other times, a bat bites a bloke in a Chinese wet market and two years later the so-called “supply chains” snap in far-off Australia and we wait in vain for our Woolworths delivery of essential food items. And no one in the Morrison government, which unmasked the country to Omicron, saw it coming.

Enter Djoko, stage right, darling of the anti-vaxxers.

He protests his Border Force incarceration; his clever lawyers convince a judge he’d been badly used, and he’s released. But then the Border lads discover that he’s fibbed on his visa application. So how will the Morrison government’s Immigration Minister Alex Hawke respond? 

His choice – the devil or that deep blue sea over which a deported Djoko will fly back to his European home. 

And on Friday evening, when Morrison always “puts out the garbage”, it was “Bye-bye, Novaxx”.

In the end, it really didn’t matter that much. In a poll that quickly spread around the social media, karma triumphed. The result was Morrison 52, Djokovic 48. The question? “Who would you prefer to see deported?”

robert@robertmacklin.com