Right wing American media personality Candace Owens won’t be touring Australia in November after the immigration minister knocked back her visa application.
Owens was scheduled to tour Australia including a date at Perth’s Riverside Theatre on Wednesday 20th November. She had also advertised appearances in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.
Home Affair Minister Tony Burke said Owens’ application to enter Australia has been knocked back because she had the “capacity to incite discord”.
“Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.” Burke said.
Owens is a well-known podcaster and political pundit in the USA. She has often made incendiary claims about Jewish and Muslim people, and people who are transgender are a regular target of her diatribes.
Condemnation of Owens’ views has come from across the political spectrum. Shadow Home Affairs spokesperson senator James Paterson called her a “dangerous antisemite and a conspiracy theorist” during an interview on Sky News.
Owens previously hosted her podcast as part of website The Daily Wire but since June 2024 it has been produced independently. Her departure from the conservative web publisher followed a series of comments that were seen as antisemitic.
In January 2024 Owens posted to social media siter X accusing transgender people of “mass drugging children” and claimed the “LGBTQ movement brought with it a sexual plague on our society”.
In 2022 she called for parents who take their children to Drag Queen Storytime events to have their children removed by the state. The same year she falsely claimed that the perpetrator of a mass shooting at a school in Texas had a history of cross-dressing. The gunman killed 21 people, including 19 students, but there was never any evidence to suggest he was either transgender or had a history of cross-dressing.
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