Australian Prime Minister slammed for Joy Division t-shirt

Posted On November 2, 2025November 2, 2025

The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has been criticised for his “failure of judgement” in wearing a Joy Division t-shirt.

Albanese, who belongs to the centre-left Labor party, was seen on October 23rd leaving a plane with a t-shirt that depicted the cover art from the 1979 Joy Division album, Unknown Pleasures.

In response, the leader of the Conservative Liberal Party hit out at the Prime Minister for the wardrobe choice. On October 28th, she said in a speech before parliament that Albanese made a “profound failure of judgment”.

She also suggested that the band are antisemitic. Sussan Ley explained that Albanese made an unforgivable choice in choosing to publicly support a band named after “a wing of a Nazi concentration camp where Jewish women were forced into sexual slavery.”

A spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum pushed back at that statement, sharing: “As far as we know, there is no historical records of any ‘wing’ of a concentration camp where Jewish women were forced into sexual slavery.”

Though Albanese is aware of the criticism, he has not apologised for wearing the t-shirt. Additionally, fellow Labor official Pat Gorman defended him, telling Guardian, “It’s a T-shirt of a band he’s a fan of … their music has been around for a few decades… There’s big issues in the world, I don’t think T-shirts of mainstream bands is one of them.”

Elsewhere in the Joy Division universe, bassist and co-founder Peter Hook currently heads the band Peter Hook & The Light, which performs Joy Division and New Order songs. The band are currently on a UK tour, stopping in cities such as Bath, Cambridge, Lincoln, Liverpool and Edinburgh, before heading over to Europe next March.

There are rumblings that Joy Division may be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite only existing for two years. They were nominated in 2025, but didn’t make the final cut.

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