FOR FIVE days Australia’s government dragged out a decision about whether to attempt a second serve against the world’s best tennis player and perhaps its most prominent anti-vaxxer. A federal judge overturned its first attempt to deport Novak Djokovic on January 10th. The conservative government is trying again. On the evening of January 14th, as Australians headed home for the weekend, Alex Hawke, the minister for immigration, announced that he had used his personal powers to cancel Mr Djokovic’s visa for a second time. He was doing so, he said, “on health and good order grounds, on the basis that it was in the public interest”.

Australia’s Migration Act gives Mr Hawke wide powers to grant or cancel visas if he deems it in the national interest. Mr Djokovic, who spent four nights in a notorious immigration hotel after his visa was first cancelled, will now be returned to detention. If the government’s case against him succeeds, he could be barred from returning to Australia to defend his title for three years. Yet the match is not over: his lawyers have sought an injunction against deportation. His appeal will be heard on January 16th. If the federal court rules in his favour, the Serb could still compete in the increasingly unfortunately named Australian Open, which starts the next day.

The federal government has accepted that its previous line of argument failed. It no longer argues that Mr Djokovic broke its rules when he entered Australia. Neither does it suggest that he is a risk to Australians because he is unvaccinated. Rather it has adopted a “starkly different” argument against Mr Djokovic, said Nick Wood, his barrister, in the court’s initial hearing: that he might “excite anti-vax sentiment in the event that he’s present”. If that is its claim, argued Mr Wood, the government would forcibly remove “a man of good standing, who has complied with the law, and who poses a negligible risk to others.”

Australians have good reason to be angry with Mr Djokovic. Over the past few days, evidence has emerged to suggest that he has flouted covid rules in several countries. Australia’s federal government found that he had made a false declaration on an immigration document, by professing not to have travelled in the two weeks before he arrived in the country, when he had visited Spain and Serbia (he lives in Monte Carlo). Mr Djokovic claims that was a “human error” by the agent who filled out the form.

Worse, he is accused of endangering others by going out when he knowingly had the coronavirus. A document submitted to the federal court before his first appeal said that he received a positive test result on December 16th. He was photographed the next day handing out awards to children, and admits conducting an interview with L’Équipe, a French sports newspaper, on December 18th, when he knew he had the virus. Yet this story also seems muddled. Der Spiegel, a German magazine, accessed a digital version of Mr Djokovic’s results, and found that it was dated December 26th. If that was when the player tested positive, it would have barred him from flying to Australia when he did.

To many Aussies, it seems like he has fiddled the system. One angry news anchor summed up the national mood in a leaked video, asserting that “whatever way you look at it, Novak Djokovic is a lying, sneaky asshole”. Australians by and large like rules, expect people to stick to them and trust governments to solve their problems. The country is, among Western democracies, almost uniquely utilitarian, points out Ian McAllister of the Australian National University. It puts the greater good above rugged individualism. By that reasoning, Mr Djokovic has a right to be unvaccinated, but the government can protect other people by kicking him out.

Yet this looks a lot like an executive trying to overrule its judiciary. The power Mr Hawke has drawn on was designed to remove people who pose an extreme threat to the Australian community, not to deport objectionable celebrities. It is “an affront to the rule of law, because it is designed to sideline the courts”, argues Greg Barns, an Australian barrister. Federal judges “loathe this provision” and often overturn it, he says. Mr Djokovic can still hope to go from the law court to the tennis court—and not the airport.