Alex Hawke does not speak Greek, as many third-generation Australians whose grandparents fled from Greece during World War II.
But he knows the stories of when his maternal grandfather struggled against the Nazis in Chortiatis, the people of his family, in the mountains of Thessaloniki.
Hawke is grandson of the survivor of a slaughter.
The German troops burned 300 houses of Chortiatis and executed 146 Greek and civil soldiers.
Many of them were children.
It was September 1944. Hawke’s family managed to escape and emigrated to Australia.
There were many the Greeks who arrived by boat to the Pacific country fleeing the war and dragging traumas that their descendants do not forget.
Hawke does not.
The grandson of immigrants, Greek refugees from World War II, is now the Minister of Immigration of Australia.
He belongs to the most conservative wing liberal party.
Despite his family history, with two forced grandparents to flee from the war in his country, Hawke has not done anything to change the hard migration policy towards refugees and asylum seekers, who have been transferred to camps on the high seas in
Small Pacific Islands, or locked up for years in detention centers.
Hawke was promoted to Minister of Immigration after a reorganization of the Australian government in October last year.
The local press has always considered him the right hand of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Now, the name of him has left the Australian borders and appears written in newspapers from around the world because he is the key person in the first (2022) case: the Djokovic case.
On Monday, when the judge revoked the decision of the border authorities to cancel the visa of the tennis player, the figure of Hawke appeared on stage.
As an immigration minister, he can resort to Section 133 of the Migration Law that gives an exceptional power to cancel the Djokovic visa again.
He can do it if he considers that Serbian “represents a risk to health, safety or the good order of the Australian community.”
If you decide to execute power, the tennis player would probably be deported, he would face a ban in Australia over the next three years and his lawyers could appeal the decision and that the process will lengthen months.
If he does not, Djokovic will stay in Melbourne and compete at Australia’s Open to win the 21 Grand Slam of him.
On Tuesday, Hawke pronounced on the case through a spokesman, who said that the minister was still considering “thoroughly” if canceling the tennis visa.
Analysts see in Hawke the last resort of the judicially defeated Australian government to fix the disaster.
And that there is no exception for a person, whoever, who has landed in the country without being vaccinated, jumping on the border requirement that all Australians have to meet, for a lot of medical exemption, remains more time in Australia.
All the spotlights are now in the minister who has in Vilo to the ‘number one’ of the ATP.
A politician who enlisted in the army when he was a teenager.
He served for six years.
He even reached the rank of Lieutenant, until in 2000 he left the weapons to get into politics, pulling through the now Ruler Liberal Party.
In its beginnings in the political career, which combined with work like that of manager in a supermarket, managed to get at the forefront of the party youth in New South Wales.
He became a deputy in 2007 and since then he did not stop ascending.
After serving as Deputy Minister of Defense, Prime Minister Morrison named him last year Immigration Minister, after highlighting the “extraordinary work” of him in the evacuation of Australian citizens of Kabul when the Taliban took the capital of Afghanistan.
“We move to 4,100 people in a matter of seven to 10 days on emergency flights in a very dangerous, violent and chaotic situation,” said Hawke, whose career has also been wrapped in many shadows and rancid comments on matters of diversity and inclusion.
sexual.
Starting from the position of him against marriage between people of the same sex.
“For a long time I have had a conservative vision on these issues, in support of traditional marriage. The family unit is the basis of society,” he said in 2017 after voting against legalization between homosexuals.
A year later, it was one of the firm defenders of new rules that tried to allow religious schools to expel homosexual, bisexual or transgender students, ensuring that “people of faith” were being attacked in Australia.
Hawke said it was reasonable for parents to want free education from “Marxists” in religious schools where they took their children.
The minister has also received many opposition criticism for his comments related to the inclusion of immigrants in the Australian Society.
In a television interview, he suggested that immigrants should “assimilate and integrate” in response to a question about changes in Australia’s citizenship exam.
He also released in Parliament a controversial commentary on the first Muslim Labor Deputy of the country, Anne Ally, accusing her to think that her diversity is “better than other people ‘diversity”.
