Kanye West Blocked From Entering Australia Following ‘Heil Hitler’ Release
Kanye West has been indefinitely denied entry to Australia, following the release of a controversial song praising Adolf Hitler.
Speaking to the ABC, federal Immigration Minister Tony Burke confirmed that Kanye, whose wife Bianca Censori is from Melbourne, had a valid visa cancelled by his department in May.
“He’s made a lot of offensive comments that my officials looked at again once he released [that] song,” Burke said. “He’s got family here … It wasn’t a visa for the purpose of concerts. It was a lower-level [visa] and the officials still looked at the law and said if you’re going to have a song and promote that sort of Nazism, we don’t need that in Australia.”
It’s unclear if Kanye, who now goes by the name Ye, has been permanently banned. Burke, who was addressing a broader discussion on visa policy and hate speech, noted that visa applications would be reassessed on their merit, in accordance with Australian law.
“If someone argued that antisemitism was rational, I would not let them come here on a speaking tour. And if someone has the same view of Islamophobia, I don’t want them here when the purpose of the visa is to give public speeches,” Burke remarked.
He added that while a “stricter line” is usually applied to visitors intending to speak publicly, Kanye’s was “the only instance I could recall” of a visa being cancelled that wasn’t for advocacy purposes.
The rapper’s “Heil Hitler”, released in May as part of his album WW3, drew immediate backlash for its extreme subject matter. Its music video featured a group of men in animal skins chanting the song’s title, its lyrics promoting Hitler and referencing the Nazis.
“Heil Hitler” was subsequently banned from a stew of streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.
Shortly after its release, Kanye said he was “done with anti-Semitism” and released a new version titled “Hallelujah,” with earlier references to Nazism replaced with lyrics relating to Christianity.
The damage, however, appears to be be done.
“I’m not taking away the way the act operates,” Burke added. “But even for the lowest level of visa, when my officials looked at it, they cancelled that following the announcement of that song. We have enough problems in this country already without deliberately importing bigotry.”
It’s not the first time Kanye has come under scrutiny for his far-right views.
Earlier this year, hip-hop mogul Lyor Cohen wrote an open-letter to Kanye, in light of the artist’s strange, and very public, shift to the fringes.
“I am deeply disappointed and troubled by your recent actions involving the use of Nazi symbols and antisemitic rhetoric,” Cohen wrote. “Your words and actions are not only offensive but triggering to all decent people who recognize the horrors of the Holocaust and the suffering of millions.”
Cohen’s comments followed Kanye’s extraordinary trolling exercise at the 2025 Super Bowl, American sport’s holy grail, for which he booked an ad for Yeezy.com. Viewers who clicked through on the site were confronted with an inventory of one single item: a swastika T-shirt, for US$20.
In 2023, Australia’s education minister Jason Clare put the “Black Skinhead” rapper on blast for “awful” comments on Hitler and the Holocaust, and suggested he be barred from entry.
The year before, in 2022, German sportswear giant Adidas ended its partnership with Kanye, and deleted the popular line of Yeezy sneakers, when Kanye declared himself a Nazi. Late last year, Adidas reached a settlement to end all legal proceedings with the artist.