Border wars highlight gamble of NRL AFLs each-way bet on vaccines

September 30, 2021 â€" 11.00am

As you read this, it can’t be set in stone that the NRL grand final will actually take place on Sunday, as scheduled, in Brisbane. A rugby league showpiece north of the Tweed has long been Queensland’s fever dream, but it’s one that could still be dashed. What a time to be alive.

Should there be a dozen new positive cases in Brisbane on grand final day, on what justifiable grounds could Queensland’s Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk acquiesce to the admission of a now-three-quarter-full house at Suncorp Stadium? Surely, wiping down the uprights and crossbar with hand sanitiser won’t cut the mustard.

The answer, of course, is that the Premier could quite easily proceed on precisely that basis, should past actions be an indicator of future decision-making.

We are speaking here of the same leader who, in July, publicly demanded halving the total number of overseas arrivals allowed into Australia each week, on account of the associated public health risks. The effects of such a draconian approach to the repatriation of our fellow citizens, actually included preventing family members from being beside the bed of dying relatives.

But of course this also is the same Premier who jetted off to Tokyo to hobnob with the great and the good of the International Olympic Committee on the pretext of being required to do so lest Brisbane’s chance of becoming an Olympic city be left in peril.

In actuality it was already a fait accompli that Brisbane would be awarded the 2032 Games.

Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium is set to host a first-ever NRL grand final on Sunday.Credit:Getty

The optics are just as abhorrent now. So if past history is actually to serve as a reasonable form guide, of course the grand final will proceed as planned, replete with maniacal, XXXX-swilling crowds. I have complete faith that if there’s any politician in the whole of Australia who could manage locking down a city, while simultaneously permitting crowds to protect rugby league’s biggest non-Origin spectacle, it’s Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Indeed, there’s more chance of a total of zero more players being filmed this side of Christmas behind a coffee table adorned with a pile of Ajax (or dandruff flakes or whatever it was) than there is of the NRL’s Brisbane extravaganza being at any risk at all.

What the crystal ball offers up more generally, though, is something that can’t be foretold with any necessary accuracy. Cricket Tasmania this week recalled its entire Sheffield Shield squad from Brisbane, fearful that a score of players and staff might otherwise be captured within a a lockdown/lockout vortex ignited by a single-digit number of cases in Queensland. Cautious, yes. Ridiculous, maybe.

What actual hope there can reasonably be then, that The Ashes shall proceed as scheduled in less than two months - the first Test is, again, in Brisbane - is anybody’s guess.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.Credit:Matt Dennien

The abiding fear that England’s cricketers and their families will refuse to accept Australia’s international quarantine arrangements is perfectly legitimate. That said, I’m not exactly sure when a touring Ashes squad travelling with families became a quasi-mandatory precondition, to a Test series proceeding.

The same goes for the Australian Open, scheduled to commence in January. It’s telling that, right now, just four months out from the start of a tournament that attracts half-a-million spectators in an average year, there are no tickets yet on sale.

All of these matters duly considered though, it’s what’s shortly on the horizon for the professional athletes plying their respective trades throughout Terra Australis, which might be of the most pressing concern.

It’s reasonably certain that the governing bodies of Australia’s premier professional sporting codes - the AFL and NRL, being prime examples - won’t mandate that athletes participating in their leagues be inoculated against COVID-19 as a precondition to continuing participation. Analysed through any prism of reasonableness and sensibility, this stance makes little sense; the reluctance smacks of kowtowing.

It’s increasingly certain that unvaccinated professional footballers won’t be able to perform the required functions of their employment.

Though the red carpet of welcome has been furiously unfurled in Queensland in 2021, does anyone reckon Palaszczuk will reprise that level of generosity next year, for unvaccinated footy players who object on conscientious, religious or cultural grounds, and where the objector holds no medical exemption?

That’s hardly a probable outcome. It’s an increasingly certain future reality that unvaccinated professional footballers in Australia absolutely won’t be able to perform the required, inherent functions of their employment, absent having been vaccinated against COVID-19. AFL teams domiciled in Victoria won’t be able to travel for matches in Perth, because airlines likely won’t allow them to fly and The Republic of Western Australia won’t let them set foot in the place. Same goes for Sydney NRL teams journeying to Queensland.

Already both Travis Trice and Tai Webster have been released from their NBL contracts with the Illawarra Hawks and New Zealand Breakers, respectively, because of their stance against mandatory vaccination. The inescapable reality is that there’s a veritable tsunami of similar cases that will soon strike in other codes. For a variety of sensitive reasons, which must be respected at least, rugby league is especially vulnerable.

Sports codes, and the employer franchises that operate within each code’s league framework, have immutable obligations imposed on them to ensure the safety of all of their employees. That’s a difficult obligation to discharge in a contact sport-playing and training environment. Players work in close proximity daily, and that dynamic doesn’t fit with a proportion of employees remaining unvaccinated against the ravages of a virulent and deadly disease, for reasons other than a justifiable medical exemption.

Earlier this week, the full bench of the Fair Work Commission, in a split decision, refused an application for leave to appeal, made by a dismissed former employee of a NSW aged care provider.
The employee had eventually been fired in 2020 after refusing an influenza vaccine. The refusal was allegedly made because the employee suffered an allergic reaction to the flu shot in an earlier year, but likely also because the dismissed employee preferred non-scientific methods of disease prevention.

One of the bases relied upon by the Commission’s majority, in refusing leave to appeal, was that the public interest weighed “entirely against” granting permission to appeal in the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, lest the Commission give encouragement to spurious objections to lawful workplace vaccination requirements.

Party time (of sorts) it might well be in Brisbane this weekend. But oh my, what curious times beckon thereafter.

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