Alex Hawke, the homophobic and anti-immigrant hawk who holds Novak Djokovic hostage, is the grandson of Greek immigrants who fled the war and the Nazis in September 1944 and arrived by boat in an Australia that was certainly more hospitable than it is today. it locks up refugees and asylum seekers in camps on tiny islands surrounded by the Pacific.
Until a few days ago, few outside Australia knew the name of the man who rose to power to become Minister of Immigration at the age of 44 and right-hand man of Prime Minister Scott Morrison. But the hard punch against the number one in world tennis has turned the ex-lieutenant with the good-guy appearance and the toughness of the consummate politician who took it on to save the face of the Canberra government into a celebrity after the fool. remedied when the judge overturned the border authorities' decision to cancel the tennis player's visa.
He doesn't speak Greek, says El Mundo, and that grandfather who fought the Nazis in the mountains of Thessaloniki and escaped the massacre that almost annihilated the people of Chortiatis, his village, is a distant memory. Now, on the front line of a very different front, there is him, at the head of the Immigration Department since last October, appointed following a reshuffle thanks to the merits acquired by Deputy Minister of Defense for the "extraordinary work" carried out in 'evacuate Australian citizens after the Taliban conquest of Kabul.
Hawke belongs to the more conservative wing of the Liberal Party and is a fierce opponent of gay unions, against whose legalization he voted in 2017. Position reaffirmed and strengthened the following year, when he fought for new rules to allow schools religious to expel homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people in the name of an education free from "Marxists".
But his masterpiece is perhaps the attack on Anne Lay, the first Muslim Labor MP, accused of thinking that her diversity is "better than the diversity of other people".
