Australia has refused entry to Kanye West after his latest and arguably most controversial song to date, "Heil Hitler." The announcement, which Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke finally ratified on July 2, 2025, sparked worldwide debates over the boundaries of free speech and the obligations of celebrity power.
"He has a long history of these kinds of things and my officials have looked at them again since he released that song," referring to West's increasing number of offensive pronouncements, Burke said in a statement sent in reply to questions from the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
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The song at issue, which samples a speech from 1935 by Adolf Hitler and extols Nazi ideology, has been removed from several streaming services in response to overwhelming backlash. The song has drawn fire for its explicit antisemitism, and governments appear to be finally reacting.
Kanye's visit was not associated with a concert or public performance. The rapper was applying for a less prestigious visa, likely due to personal reasons, as his wife, Bianca Censori, is a Melbourne-born woman and her family still resides in Australia, Burke reported.
"He's got uncles and stuff here in Australia," Burke conceded, "but if you're gonna make music and promote that type of Nazism, we don't need it in Australia. We already have enough problems in this country without importing bigotry intentionally."
Australia has a history of taking an unapologetically brutal line on hate speech and public safety, and the ruling further entrenches this approach, even with a high-profile celebrity at the center of the debate. Although stopping short of being definitive on whether the ban would be permanent, Burke said that all visa applications are judged on their merits and that Australia would not be influenced by fame or celebrity.
Around the world, Kanye's performance at Slovakia's Rubicon Festival on July 20, 2025, is drumming up controversy. A petition demanding his removal from the lineup, which began in 2018 and has already garnered thousands of signatures, continues to gain more support. The petition alleges that West is "one of the most prominent antisemites of the world" and criticises Slovakia for not including a clause in the law criminalising Holocaust denial that could be interpreted as a ban on the display of Nazi symbols, which are explicitly envisaged as criminalisation under Slovak law.
The petition organizers say that having West at the festival would legitimize hate-based ideology and lead to unsafe events disguised as entertainment. It's yet another surprising chapter in the long, increasingly divisive career of Kanye, a onetime musical revolutionary and cultural instigator. For many, this is no longer about the debate but about the fallout.
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