Now that Mr Albanese seems finally to have woken up to the problem of Australian antisemitism, nobody should be surprised if the board of the National Australia Day Council accedes to demands for Grace Tame to have her 2021 Australian of the Year title revoked. Ms Tame is as intelligent as she is telegenic, so she must know there is a difference between expressing solidarity with foreign refugees and promoting domestic terrorism. If the chant she led on the steps of Sydney Town Hall recently had been ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free’, she could claim to have been merely objecting to the territorial expansionism which successive Israeli governments have failed to curtail. But the meaning of ‘Globalise the intifada’ is less debatable, channelling, as it does, the specific ambitions of those responsible for the events of 2 October in Manchester and 14 December in Bondi – not to mention all the bombings and stabbings at synagogues and schools in Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels in the preceding years. Grace Tame must know that ‘Globalise the intifada’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘Attack Jews wherever you find them’.

Like Greta Thunberg, another celebrity who has assumed the mantle of antisemitism to extend her shelf life, Ms Tame has taken to wearing a keffiyeh for the cameras. The keffiyeh has been a badge of anti-Zionism since the 1970s and in recent years has become a luxury belief accessory for lefties throughout the West. But it has an additional significance for Australians of every political stripe. Which of us would deny that whenever we see footage of keffiyeh-clad students despoiling our university campuses, the name which springs irresistibly to mind is not Yasser Arafat but David Jones. What a shame it would be if our most famous department store had to change the design of its iconic shopping bag for fear of alienating Jewish patrons.

Reading about 2025’s Australian of the Year put me in mind of the twinkly eyed comedian Jimeoin. Be careful how you respond when someone tells you something mildly surprising, he warned an audience I was once part of. Don’t raise your eyebrows all the way up, he told us, because if the same person then tells you something really amazing your eyebrows will have nowhere to go. By passing the AOTY hat to Katherine Bennell-Pegg, the National Australia Day Council may have left itself similarly exposed. Contrary to what I read about her, Ms Bennell-Pegg is not Australia’s first astronaut. I don’t doubt that she has undergone most if not all the training you need to go into space, or that going into space is currently her ambition. But just as hating someone, and buying a big knife, and sticking a photograph of that person to a pillow and stabbing the pillow, doesn’t make you a murderer, merely training to be an astronaut doesn’t quite make you the finished article. As Adam Creighton pointed out in the Australian recently, Katherine Bennell-Peg has spent less time in space than the pop singer Katy Perry. And it seems Ms Bennell-Pegg won’t get a chance to follow Ms Perry into orbit for at least another year. So what if, having enjoyed all the perks of being Australian of That Year, she then pikes out? Decides – on the advice of her parents or partner, perhaps – that locking herself inside a massive steel tube a few metres above an enormous, prolonged explosion might not, in fact, be such a great career move.

But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. If only to vindicate the National Australia Day Council’s decision let’s assume that she stays the course and is picked for the next manned Nasa mission. And let us hope it is a mission which makes her the first Australian to stand on the moon. In the 55 years since men first went there, the moon won’t have changed much physically, but the world Katherine and her crewmates would hail from is a very different one, politically, from the blue planet eulogised by the crew of Apollo 11. And since Neil Armstrong made his ‘one giant leap for mankind’ speech, nine other people – ten if you count Michael Jackson – have followed in his footsteps. It’s been quite a long time, then, since the surface of the moon was terra nullius. So if our Katherine does get a guernsey for the next lunar landing, she will surely get the speaking role. Who better qualified than an Aussie, after all, to deliver the first extra-terrestrial Acknowledgement of Country.