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An embarrassing visa blunder has exposed serious failures in Australia’s Home Affairs Department — and raised uncomfortable questions about who is really keeping Australians safe.

An American YouTuber has been kicked out of the country after my Sky News colleague Sharri Markson brought attention to antisemitic comments he had made online.

Which raises the question: is it now up to journalists to vet visitors applying for visas?

Why did it take Google searches by Sharri Markson to discover that Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy — who goes by the name Sneako — was not a fit person to be granted a visa?

Most Australians use Google before buying a new toaster. And yet staff in Tony Burke’s Home Affairs Department can’t even use it when deciding who gets to come into the country at a time of unprecedented division.

Or perhaps those in the Home Affairs Department just aren’t terribly curious when it comes to antisemitism.

A Hateful History Home Affairs Failed to Check

It’s all very well for Home Affairs to revoke the man’s visa after his anti-Jew comments came to light … but why should that be the case?

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke announced yesterday that Sneako had been kicked out of the country and he had been issued a permanent ban.

Burke told journalists:

“Our government has made it very clear we will use every power available to us to protect our community from people coming to this country to spread hatred.”

That might be believable if the government had used a one-minute Google search before issuing Sneako with a visa.

Sneako has been repeatedly banned from various social media platforms and has a mixed ideology of Neo-Nazism and Islamist extremism.

Video clips show him chanting jihadist calls for Jews to be killed, and he has repeated Nazi slogans.

And yet no one in the Home Affairs Department was capable of discovering that.

Total Shambles

Sneako is now out of the country… not because of the government, but in spite of them.

And Tony Burke wants credit?

Let’s be honest, Sneako wasn’t deported because he has antisemitic views. Sneako was deported because, after Sharri Markson shone light on whom the Albanese Government had allowed into the country, it was untenable for the government to keep him here.

So this is modern Australia…

We require Virgin aircraft pilots to keep watch on Chinese warships off the coast of Sydney.

We require Indigenous people wandering around the Northern Territory to watch for boat people trying to break our northern border.

And we now require Sky News journalists to do the Department of Home Affairs visa background checks.

In Australia, it’s all hands on deck, because the people at the helm are either utterly incompetent or deliberately trying to destroy the country.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report.

Image via X/@sneako.