Australia Did Not Ban Iranian Tourists Just to Please Trump

There is a particular species of political cowardice that presents itself as administrative tidiness. When Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke announced on 25 March that Iranians holding valid Australian visas would be barred from entering the country for six months, he reached for precisely this kind of language. “Decisions about permanent stays in Australia,” he intoned, “should be deliberate decisions of the government, not a random consequence of who had booked a holiday.” The phrasing is surgical, designed to sound like responsible governance. Yet, instead, it is a government pre-emptively slamming a door in the faces of people it helped to displace and hoping nobody notices the sequence of events.

More than 6,800 Iranian visa holders were affected. Citizens of no other country faced the same restriction. Just prior, Burke had personally facilitated asylum offers for members of the Iranian women’s football team, telling a Brisbane press conference that they were “welcome to stay in Australia” and “safe here.” The distinction the government draws between these women and the 6,800 visa holders it turned away is a narrative. The footballers made good press: young women defecting from a theocracy, a story the government could tell with pride. Tourists seeking a holiday generate no such story and if the conflict worsens and they cannot go home, they become not a headline but a headache: refugees the government would be obliged to accommodate, having never intended to accept them. In other words, welcome is a selective noun, where compassion comes with an asterisk.

The Hand That Helps to Bomb

To understand the ban, you have to understand what Australia has actually been doing in this conflict. Seemingly rather a lot, despite the government’s carefully maintained fiction of “purely defensive action”.

Since February, Australia has deployed an E-7 Wedgetail surveillance aircraft and 85 defence personnel to the United Arab Emirates. The official rationale is the protection of Australian expatriates, roughly 16000 of them, in the region. But the UAE is, by a considerable margin, Australia’s largest weapons export market, with nearly $300 million in arms and ammunition shipped there in the past five years. The Wedgetail feeds intelligence into the Combined Air Operations Centre in Qatar, the facility that helps the United States coordinate military strikes across the Middle East. Richard Tanter, an academic researcher on the joint US-Australia intelligence facility at Pine Gap, believes the base is providing intelligence for offensive American action against Iran through signals intelligence satellites and early warning infra-red satellites. When a government’s surveillance aircraft is stitched into the command structure of an ongoing bombing campaign, the word “defensive” loses its meaning entirely.

The most extraordinary admission came on 6 March, when the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged that three Australian Defence Force personnel were aboard the USS Charlotte when it torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean, killing at least 87 sailors. Albanese insisted the Australians had not participated in any “offensive action”, and instead, were part of the AUKUS training, a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to promote free and stable Indo-Pacific. However, a military source familiar with the operation subsequently told The Nightly that Australian submariners had been sent to their sleeping quarters before the attack, specifically so that Australia could deny direct involvement. The choreography of plausible deniability is itself a confession. Former ALP senator Doug Cameron did not hide his distress: “Labor have always sought to pursue peace and independence, and we have given that away.”

When a government’s surveillance aircraft is stitched into the command structure of an ongoing bombing campaign, the word ‘defensive’ loses its meaning entirely.

Then there are the weapons, or, as the government prefers to frame it, the weapons components. That distinction is doing enormous work. In a single factory in suburban Melbourne,RUAG Australia manufactures the F-35’s uplock actuator system: the mechanism that allows the fighter jet to open its bay doors and fire missiles while maintaining stealth. The Israeli Air Force operates at least 48 F-35s, and on 4 March, one of them shot down an Iranian YAK-130, the aircraft’s first ever air-to-air combat kill. The component and the kill exist in the same causal chain, whilst the government’s language works to sever that chain. The government insists it has not supplied weapons, yet it has also not stopped supplying the specific components that allow Israeli jets to fire them. These positions are only compatible if the word weapons is defined narrowly enough to exclude everything Australia actually makes.

A Six-Month Ban for a Long War

The obvious question is whether the tourist ban was a concession to Washington. On 23 March, Trump publicly criticised Australia for not sending warships to the Strait of Hormuz, stating bluntly, “Australia didn’t help us.” The ban was announced two days later. Nobody in Canberra has denied the timing is coincidental, because it isn’t.

Perhaps, Canberra offered it as a signal of broader alignment, a low-cost gesture in the direction of Washington at a moment when the bilateral relationship requires careful tending, particularly with Trump’s 25% tariffs on Australian aluminium and steel already biting. It says: we are with you. It says something else too.

That the ban lasts six months is itself a confession. It is not the language of a government expecting a swift resolution, it is the language of a government that has looked at the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil and LNG supplies flow in peacetime and through which shipping traffic has fallen by 95 per cent since early March, and concluded that this disruption is structural. Australia relies on oil refined in Southeast Asian countries that import their crude through that strait. The government has already turned to “fuel diplomacy” and fuel tax cuts to limit price shocks, but elevated energy prices feed directly into broader inflation, pushing central banks toward rate rises. Voters facing higher mortgage repayments, dearer fuel and rising food costs will want answers before the May budget. The ban does not solve any of this, but it gives the government something to point to: a visible act of control in a situation rapidly slipping beyond its control.

But the deepest motive was not Washington’s approval, nor even economic anxiety in the abstract. It was four days earlier, in South Australia.

The Electoral Logic of Exclusion

The state election on 21 March delivered a political earthquake whose tremors reached Canberra almost immediately. Peter Malinauskas led Labor to a landslide, the party’s greatest result in both raw seats and percentage in its history, but the more unsettling story was on the right. One Nation, whose federal platform includes reducing annual net migration to 70,000, withdrawing from the UN Refugee Convention, and implementing travel bans on specific countries, outpolled the Liberal Party in vote share for the first time, the party’s strongest performance outside Queensland since 1998. Its vote was too geographically dispersed to translate into a proportionate seat count, but the signal was unmistakable. At the federal level, January polling had already shown One Nation approaching 23% of the primary vote. 

The fuel for this sentiment is, in large part, a housing crisis of Australia’s own manufacture. Buying or renting a home has become unaffordable for the average Australian as a result of decades of underbuilding, restrictive planning laws that have kept Melbourne and Sydney far less dense than comparably sized cities elsewhere, the steady collapse of public housing, and government policies that have transformed homeownership from a right into an investment vehicle. The Australian Taxation Office’s own data shows that homes purchased by foreign buyers in 2022-23 represented less than one percent of all sales. Migration is not the cause of the crisis. But it has become, through relentless far-right repetition, its most politically convenient symbol and Labor, watching One Nation surge, has chosen to speak the symbol’s language rather than challenge it. The Albanese government’s immigration instincts in its first term were genuinely liberal: it allowed the Murugappan family to remain after years of Morrison-era deportation attempts, abolished temporary protection visas, and granted permanent status to roughly 19,000 asylum seekers. That phase is over. In December 2023, it announced a strategy to cap annual net migration at 250,000. In November 2024, the government passed sweeping legislation expanding its powers to deport non-citizens. The Iranian visa ban is the latest step in a trajectory that has been moving in one direction for two years.

The Racism the Policy Won’t Name

The ban’s racial logic is impossible to ignore, and irresponsible to elide. The restriction does not apply to all nationalities in conflict zones. Not Ukrainians, not Sudanese, not Yemenis. It applies exclusively to Iranians, who are a population coded, in the Australian political imagination, as Muslim, as Middle Eastern, as precisely the demographic that One Nation’s voters most viscerally oppose. The choice of target was not incidental. It was a message that told a specific portion of the electorate that the government is willing to discriminate on ethnic and national grounds to prevent the arrival of people who might eventually seek protection, and it did so four days after an election in which a large section of the electorate made its preferences unmistakably clear.

Greens senator David Shoebridge said what the major parties have conspicuously declined to: “The three war parties regularly support conflict and war in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now in Iran, they cheer on the bombing, they cheer on the killing. They send Australian troops into it, and then when refugees come as a result of it, they shut the door and act with deep cruelty.” The discomfort this produces is proportional to its accuracy. The briefing document circulated to senators described “how quickly circumstances can change for visa applicants”, a sentence of such studied detachment that it requires a moment to register what it is actually describing: a government anticipating the human consequences of a war it is helping to prosecute, and legislating to ensure those consequences land somewhere else. Burke called this a “deliberate decision.”

He was right, just not in the way he intended. The surveillance was deliberate. The submariners being sent to their sleeping quarters were deliberate. What the government wishes were not deliberate is the reckoning.