Controversial right-wing pundit Candace Owens has been denied entry into Australia over fears she may incite “violent or radical action”.
ABC News reports that the country’s High Court unanimously upheld the decision to deny Candace Owens a visa based on the Migration Act’s “character test,” citing a risk that her presence could “stir up or encourage dissension or strife … of a kind or to a degree that is harmful to that community or segment.”
She was originally rejected for an Australia visa in 2024 due to her well-documented inflammatory remarks, including her denial that Nazi medical experimentation on Jewish inmates took place in concentration camps during World War II. At that time, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke rejected Owens’s visa on grounds that her rhetoric might lead to “increased hostility and violent or radical action,” Al Jazeera reports.
Owens, who has called LGBTQ+ people a “sexual plague on society”, was subsequently refused an entertainer’s visa to enter New Zealand because she’d been barred from Australia. However, in December 2024, a ministerial intervention reversed that decision and granted her a visa, with the New Zealand government citing “importance of free speech.”
The right-wing commentator, who has hounded French president Emmanuel Macron’s wife, Brigitte Macron, with false claims that she is transgender – which has led the couple to launch defamation proceedings against her – won’t be setting foot in Australia anytime soon, as she has once again been denied a travel visa after appealing the initial decision.
Owens argued that the rejection of her visa infringed on her right to free speech.
On Wednesday (15 October), Australia’s High Court rejected her appeal, agreeing with the initial assessment that she could incite “increased hostility and violent or radical action.”
In a unanimous opinion, judges Stephen Gageler, Michelle Gordon, and Robert Beech-Jones noted the appeal had been rejected due to Owens’ invalid claim that it infringes on her freedom of political communication.
They added that visas will be rejected “where, in the event that the person were allowed to enter or to remain in Australia, there is a risk that the person would stir up or encourage dissension or strife in the Australian community, or a segment of that community, of a kind or to a degree that is harmful to that community or segment.”
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