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British citizen faces deportation for allegedly displaying Nazi symbols, Burke confirms
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British citizen faces deportation for allegedly displaying Nazi symbols, Burke confirms

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Australian Federal Police (AFP) arrested the 43-year-old earlier this month after launching an investigation in October into the British citizen, who allegedly shared and spread pro-Nazi ideologywhich advocates violence against the Jewish community.
Weapons, including swords with Nazi symbols, axes and knives, were seized from his home in November.
Burke told ABC News on Wednesday that when it comes to visa cancellations, he “has no time for hate.”

“If you come to Australia on a visa, you are here as a guest. Almost anyone with a visa is a good guest and a welcome guest in Australia, but if someone comes here with hateful intent, he can leave,” he said.

Speaking about proposed changes that would increase the minister’s power to revoke visas, Burke said the department currently must prove someone has committed hate speech or defamation, as well as its impact on the Australian community.
“My opinion is that incitement to hatred should be enough,” Burke said.
“That in itself means that you are not a welcome guest in this country and that we should be able to revoke visas on that basis alone.”

Earlier this month, South African neo-Nazi Matthew Gruter left Australia after his visa was revoked for attending a rally outside the NSW Parliament organized by the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Network.

Gruter was one of 60 black-clad protesters who gathered outside the NSW Parliament on November 8, shouting Hitler Youth chants and holding a banner calling for “abolition of the Jewish lobby”.
Burke said at the time that the department was “setting a standard for Australia”.
Alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Burke on Monday announced proposed changes to the minister’s power to revoke visas, as well as proposed changes to customs laws to make it easier for hate symbols to be intercepted at the border and to establish a new form of registration for organizations not listed as terrorist organizations.

Burke said on Tuesday: “We want to ensure that those hate preachers who have managed to stay on the legal side of Australian law will lower the threshold so that the speech that any reasonable Australian would have considered abhorrent and which has no place in Australia will become criminal.”

“Similarly, for organizations like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the neo-Nazis who have only adhered to the legal side of Australian law, but never to the side of the Australian community… the thresholds will be lowered to allow them to be listed as organizations under a new regime,” Burke said.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is a global Islamic political party founded in 1953.

Hate Crime Database

A new national database published by the Australian Institute of Criminology was launched on Tuesday to help law enforcement agencies track and tackle hate crimes.
Burke told ABC News that the database, which was fast-tracked after the December 14 Bondi terror attack that killed 15 people, is an “additional tool we have to measure how effective our hate laws are”.
According to the National Hate Crimes Database, there were eighteen hate-related charges under Commonwealth law between July 2024 and June 2025.
While neither the federal nor state and territory governments have included specific ‘hate crime’ offenses in law, the institute said the data covers crimes with characteristics that could be interpreted as hate-related under the legislation.

The charges include one offense of threatening violence or violence against groups, four offenses of publicly displaying symbols of banned terrorist organizations and thirteen offenses of publicly displaying banned Nazi symbols or giving the Nazi salute.

However, the number of violations does not reflect the number of perpetrators, because one person can be charged with multiple violations.
The dashboard is in its first phase and Burke said it will be further developed over time.
“I want to, to dig deeper into this over time, be able to get better categories than we currently have, and potentially also look at not waiting for convictions, but also getting a sense of charges and reports.”
SBS News has contacted the Ministry of the Interior for comment.
– With additional reporting by the Australian Associated Press

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