Tiley says Tennis Australia was involved in a conflict of advice between the state and the Commonwealth

Tennis Australian boss Craig Tiley says the Commonwealth rejected a request to assess medical exemptions granted to tennis players weeks before they arrived in Australia.

The leader of the Australian Open, who spoke for the first time since the arrest of Novak Djokovic, said Age aand Sydney Morning Herald he believed that the decision to allow quarantine travel was a matter for Victoria and that Tennis Australia had been subject to an ongoing conflict of state and federal advice.

Tennis Australia and the Victorian government granted a handful of exemptions to unvaccinated players to qualify for the open. The process was based on guidelines from the Commonwealth’s top vaccine advisory body, Mr Tiley said, but tennis authorities asked the federal government twice in November to review each exemption to ensure it was approved by federal authorities at the border.

They refused, he said. We asked if they could evaluate our decisions. We said we needed help to make sure we were doing the right thing. We are in a different situation today.

The tennis chief has been pressured to explain why he advised players to seek relief on the basis of a recent COVID-19 infection after federal health minister Greg Hunt wrote to him in late November saying this was not a valid exception.

Despite Hunts ’advice, Tiley said he believed the Victorian government would approve of requiring the player to be quarantined. This view was expressed in a letter from a Federal Ministry of Health official in early November stating that exemptions from vaccination are under state discretion, as well as correspondence from Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton that previous infection was a reason for quarantine-free travel. .

We were faced with this ongoing conflict between the state and the federal government [advice] and this pandemic has highlighted this complexity, Mr Tiley said.

We believed that [Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation] the instructions are what the exceptions are [were based on] and the federal government did not approve the exceptions, but the state.