This is their career and their livelihood, the way they put food on the table and pay the same taxes you or I pay.
Aussie IPL players earn very high salaries, pausing games for a month or two until covid situation in India is better controlled is not going to see them unable to feed their families.
The tax situation is debateable, if they spend more of the year outside Australia than in, they arent residents for tax purposes, so entirely possible they are paying no or very little tax here.
Many people the world over lost work and jobs due to Covid.
I lost my job last year due to Covid, it interrupted my career. Ive been fortunate to secure a new job, but its not as ideal for career as my previous one.
The world has changed very few people get the luxury of a single career, most will have 3-5 careers over a lifetime and have to reinvent themeselves and retrain to stay relevant.
I view a professional sportsperson the same as any other worker. They are essential because they work. It is not on them that they have to be overseas and be there in person in order to conduct their work and get paid.
The thing is India is not the only place they can play cricket, they go there for the obscene salaries but shouldn't put this ahead of public safety right now. Its a pandemic and some temporary sacrifices need to be made. Pause the competition, it simply isnt essential.
If Covid was being adequately managed in India, then play on. But with 350k cases a day and an overwhelmed health system, allowing privilidged foreign athletes to travel round the country playing a game is wrong.
We have project teams based in India at the moment who cant complete some work, because there are movement restrictions in many regions. The double standard is galling. An IT worker is not allowed to go to a data centre to fix essential hardware (computers that run software that keeps thousands employed) but a cricketer is allowed to go to an oval? Which one is really essential right now?