(LifeSiteNews) –– Candace Owens has praised the LifeSiteNews petition, signed by over 30,000 people, calling upon Australia’s immigration minister, Tony Burke, to lift a ban preventing her from keeping her speaking engagements Down Under.
“I want to shout out the Australians because they are not taking me banned sitting down,” Owens declared on her Candace show earlier this week.
“They have started a petition,” she continued. “… They’re saying they’re going to drop it off at Tony Burke’s office. It just makes me so happy to know that people are fighting for free speech.”
Owens namechecked LifePetitions.com and said the effort on her behalf was “incredible.”
Australian LifeSiteNews contributor and freedom fighter Monica Smit brought the petition to her nation’s Parliament in Canberra on LifeSite’s behalf.
“I think you can call this democracy in action because in these two large, heavy folders, I have 31,000 signatures on a petition directed at Tony Burke, who is the Minister for Immigration,” she said.
“Tony Burke is the one responsible for denying Candice Owens her visa to come to Australia.”
Smit reflected that Owens has already sold 15,000 tickets to her tour across Australia, which is scheduled to begin next week. She reflected on the injustice of preventing Owens from addressing in person the thousands of Australians who want to see her.
“Candace Owens is a Catholic mother of three,” Smit reflected. “She has no criminal record. She has never incited violence whatsoever. So Tony Burke, we would like you to explain the real reason why you denied her visa. And if you can’t, then you need to reinstate it and allow Australians to hear what she has to say.”
Monica Smit was not allowed to meet the Minister of Immigration, whose staff she said was nasty to her, so she gave the two fat folders containing a printout of the petition to Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts.
“Malcolm Roberts has actually taken the folders himself, and he will table the petition in Parliament, which is absolutely incredible, and he will make sure that Tony Burke and his staff know all about the petition,” Smit promised.
Roberts thanked Smit for her part in developing the LifePetition, which he extoled as “all about free speech,”and praised Candace Owens as a “fantastic speaker” even though he doesn’t necessarily agree with what she says.
“She’s said a few things that have upset people,” he acknowledged. “She’s never been convicted of a criminal charge, never. And she’s not that sort of person. So there’s no grounds for not letting her into the country. To the reverse, she should be let into the country, and we can hold her accountable with open debate. Public debate is the best scrutiny of the truth. And what this is all about is freedom of speech.”
Owens is scheduled to give talks in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, and Adelaide on such topics as free speech and “why Christ really is king.” Late last month, Australia’s Minister of Immigration publicly declared that he denied her a visa.
“Candace Owens has the capacity to incite discord in almost every direction,” Tony Burke claimed on October 27, pointing to what he implied were previous antisemitic remarks. “Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.”
Owens and her supporters in Australia have launched a legal appeal.
As earlier reported by LifeSite, Burke appears to have been motivated to cancel Owens by Jewish pressure groups. This summer, the Australian-based Anti-Defamation Commission accused Owens of antisemitic remarks, which she dismissed on her podcast as a worn out “Hitler hoax” strategy.
“The determined punishment for me for not turning a blind eye to [atrocities committed by the Israeli military] … has been ‘I’m going to take away your money and I’m going to ruin your reputation; I’m going to have journalists that are Zionists try to essentially assassinate your character online,’” she said.
“I accept that because to me I’m not going to remove my humanity for money, it doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t work for me as a Christian,” Owens also remarked while sharing footage of Palestinian children with their limbs blown off.
In November 2023, when Owens first began to draw attention to the victims of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, she and her then-employer Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the Daily Wire, had a public falling out. During the spat, Owens declared that “Christ is King,” which some pundits claimed was an antisemitc remark.
Australia is developing a reputation for censoring foreign visitors through exclusion, including Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic.