Kanye West has been banned from travelling to Australia, after releasing a song about Hitler.
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The country’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, has confirmed that the rapper’s visa has been revoked after his song ‘Heil Hitler’ referencing the Nazi leader was released independently on the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, in May.
Speaking during an interview with the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing programme (via The Guardian) Burke shared news of the ban after he was asked about the visa cancellation of an Israeli-American tech advocate who wrote “Islamophobia is rational”.
“Most of the visas that have been cancelled under this section have been where someone was seeking to make a public speech,” he added. “The only one I can think of where it wasn’t for public advocacy – the visa – but we cancelled it anyway, would be Kanye West.”
Burke went on to say that West whose wife, Bianca Censori, is from Melbourne, had been coming to Australia “for a long time” and had family here.
But Burke alleged the rapper, who is legally known as Ye, had “made a lot of offensive comments that my officials looked at again once he released the Heil Hitler song and he no longer has a valid visa in Australia”.
When asked if it was “sustainable” to keep the ban in place given the possibility for international concerts, Burke replied: “I think that what’s not sustainable is to import hatred.
“Every visa application gets reassessed by my officials each time. I’m not taking away the way the act operates but even for the lowest level of visa, when my officials looked at it, they cancelled that following the announcement of that song.”
A spokesperson for the home affairs department in Australia told The Guardian it did not comment on individual cases, but all non-citizens who wanted to travel to Australia must satisfy the “character” requirements under the Migration Act.
NME has contacted a spokesperson for West for comment.
It comes after a petition was recently launched against his forthcoming headline slot at Slovakian festival Rubicon next month.
It accused the rapper of “repeatedly and openly adhering to symbols and [an] ideology connected with the darkest period of modern global history”, while calling the planned appearance as “an insult to historic memory, a glorification of wartime violence and debasement of all victims of the Nazi regime”.
Earlier this year, he was also sued for discrimination and accused of texting “Hail Hitler” to a Jewish Yeezy employee.
Back in February, the rapper also wiped his Yeezy site clean, leaving only a white t-shirt with a large swastika on the chest available for sale. In previous years, Ye had delivered a series of antisemitic comments during an interview with far-right commentator Gavin McInnes.
