It will be difficult for the Australian Open to recover from tennis players criticising the event, a branding expert has said, as people who have dealt with border closures say the grand slam highlights a “callous” double standard.
Key points:
- Marketing lecturer Abas Mirzaei says it will be “tricky” for the Open organisers to turn it into a positive overall experience
- A couple advocating for caps on international arrivals to be lifted says the event has shone a light on a “contradiction” in how stranded Australians are treated
- The Victorian Government says the event will allow more returned travellers into the state
Some players unable to train after being deemed close contacts of coronavirus cases have criticised the rules, saying they were not warned.
While the Australian Open, other players and Victorian officials have maintained the rules have been clear from the start, a small number have taken to social media to complain about the restrictions and the rooms.
“These players are international players with millions of followers,” senior marketing lecturer Abas Mirzaei said.
“And any post that suggests frustration on their Instagram page, for example, will have an impact on the perceptions and attitudes of those followers.”
Dr Mirzaei, from Macquarie University, said players’ public grievances could also create negative publicity for Australia as a country and Victoria as a state.
“So it will be very tricky for the Open to recover from this and turn this into a very positive overall experience,” Dr Mirzaei said.
He said there could be “spill-over” from the quarantine period into the event itself, if players blamed it for poor performance or the spectator experience was affected.
But he said bad PR for the event from players angry over strict quarantine measures would be much better than the possible alternative of the virus leaking out of the quarantine system.
‘Silver lining’ of focus being turned to stranded Australians
Dr Mirzaei said there were “different levels of frustration” with the event across the different stakeholders, including the players, the fans and members of the public frustrated by border restrictions.
Kate and Dave Jeffries spent Christmas in hotel quarantine in Perth, nine months and six cancelled flights after trying to first return home from Canada. Now they have returned, they have continued to lobby for caps to be lifted to allow more Australians to get back into the country.
The 1,240 tennis players and support staff who are quarantining in Australia do not contribute to the country’s current caps on international arrivals, and came on chartered flights.
“While we’re very happy that Australia is in a position to hold the Australian Open, we just see it as a massive, a very callous contradiction in terms,” Ms Jeffries said.
Limits on returned travellers have been halved in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia until February 15, in response to the highly virulent new UK strain of the virus, and plans for Victoria to increase its intake have been paused until the same date.
“And then five days later, international tennis players are allowed in. The Victorian Government and Australia have found the political will to find them quarantine spaces, and they’re also touting them as the safest quarantine spaces in the world,” Ms Jeffries said.
Victorian officials have repeatedly defended the holding of the Open as being in line with health advice, and the Prime Minister yesterday told radio station 2GB there was no preferential treatment for the players ahead of stranded Australians.
International intake caps look set to lift in Victoria from February, with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews saying he had struck agreements with the Prime Minister about Victoria lifting its capacity in hotel quarantine.
Yesterday, COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria Commissioner Emma Cassar said Victoria would be able to offer more places in international hotel quarantine after the Australian Open, using more than 1,000 staff recruited and trained for the tournament.
Mr Jeffries said a “silver lining” of attention being focused on the quarantine system was that the plight of the more than 35,000 Australians wanting to return home was again in the spotlight.
“While Australians that are stuck overseas are certainly and have every right to be angry that those tennis players are being brought in, it’s really just a symptom of a much larger issue that has been going on,” Mr Jeffries said.
Dr Mirzaei said although there would be some damage done to the event and possibly governments due to the perception of double standards, that was likely to be “very minor and short-term”.
He said research showed there was a “forgetting curve”, which suggests by any future event in 2022, only about 20 per cent of people would remember negative experiences attached to this year’s games.
Players ‘having a whinge’ when Australians are stuck
Melbourne couple Steve and Kristy Colakidis’ four-year-old daughter Samantha has been part of a trial to suppress cancer since going into remission from stage 4 Neuroblasoma.
The trial is not offered in Australia, and Kristy and Samantha were on their way home from North Carolina on Monday when they were told they had been bumped from their flight from Los Angeles to Sydney.
“So she was a bit emotional on the airplane,” Mr Colakidis told ABC Radio Melbourne on Monday afternoon.
“She was talking to the air hostess, the hostess went to the pilot, and the pilot contacted head office directly, while flying. And with a bit of haggling, they were able to get a flight back home.”
Mr Colakidis said to hear of Australian Open players “having a whinge and not being happy with hotel quarantine” was confronting when so many Australians faced an uncertain return home.
He said while the Australian Open was paying for the players’ rooms, his family was spending thousands of dollars on flights, the cancer trial and then quarantine on the way back.
“We don’t get that luxury,” he said.
Sydney red zone shrunk, some Victorians still locked out
Victoria yesterday downgraded the status of all but 10 local government areas in Sydney from “red zones” to “orange zones”, meaning many Victorians can now return home.
Prahran woman Lyrian Fleming-Parsley, her husband and toddler are in Seven Hills in the local government area of Blacktown, which is still classed as a red zone.
Ms Fleming-Parsley said she was supportive of governments taking action on borders for health reasons, and said she backed the Melbourne lockdown during the state’s second wave.
“Where it became really frustrating was when accommodations were being made to get international tennis players and their teams et cetera to Melbourne and we couldn’t even come home despite the outbreaks being obviously in control in New South Wales,” she said.
“We’ve had no idea really when the borders would open or even what conditions need to be met for the borders to be open.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) said 2,489 exemptions for people in red zones had been granted and just four had been rejected as of Monday afternoon.
The approved exemption applications usually relate to compassionate grounds such as funerals or end-of-life visits, DHHS said. About 1,000 more exemption applications were being assessed on Monday afternoon.
