Former Australian of the Year Grace Tame wants to stand on a balcony in Sydney and lead a crowd chanting 'globalise the intifada', before retreating and claiming 'I'm not the story'.
But she is the story, because she chose the words she did, undercutting the Palestinian cause as a consequence. This wasn't said in a vacuum. Her comments were delivered as Israeli President Isaac Herzog was in Australia, meeting families and survivors and paying respects connected to the Bondi attack.
And the remarks were said at a rally which turned ugly, by the way, with police and protesters clashing in scenes that made the evening news.
Imagine if the chant wasn't led by a former Australian of the Year whose public brand has long been wrapped in sanctimony. Imagine if it was led by a hardline Islamist preacher instead, at a rally that ended in scuffles and arrests, just weeks after the worst mass-casualty attack in the country's history had shaken Sydney.
The condemnation would be instant and unanimous. The Prime Minister wouldn't be issuing vague calls for everyone to calm down while carefully avoiding the name of the person who helped light the fuse.
The media would be flooded with demands for deportations, prosecutions, intelligence briefings, and emergency cabinet meetings. And not just from the political right.
Yet when the face at the microphone is Tame's, the rules bend. At least in Albo's world. He wouldn't even condemn her when asked directly to do so in Question Time yesterday. NSW Premier Chris Minns called the chant 'distressing', showing far more spine than Albo could muster. Others condemned it outright. Not our PM.
What if Islamic preacher Wissam Haddad - ordered to remove 'fundamentally racist and antisemitic material' from social media by a Federal Court judge - had said similar to Tame? But Tame exists in a protected category of Australian public life.
Why the hesitation? Because Tame exists inside a protected category of Australian public life: the celebrity activist class whose politics are assumed virtuous by default, whose excesses are explained away as passion, and whose provocations are treated as brave rather than reckless.
There is nothing to smile about, although some on the activist left would no doubt smirk at their preferential treatment.
There is also the unmistakeable undertone of personal and political discomfort when it comes to Albo's timidity around Tame.
He has previously sought proximity to figures like her when it suited him. The trouble with elevating activists as moral ornaments is that they don't stay ornamental. They keep moving. The causes harden, the rhetoric escalates and sooner or later they turn their fire on the politicians who once basked in their glow.
So the PM goes quiet to try and avoid that. Not because the chant was harmless, but because confronting it risks blowback. And that timidity tells Australians something unflattering about his government's moral posture: it is selective and shaped by who is speaking rather than what is being said.
Tame says she's not the story. She's wrong. When you globalise anything, especially an intifada, you own the consequences of the invitation you put out there.
Globalise the intifada isn't a neutral slogan. It's a phrase freighted with menace, interpreted by many as a call to spread violent struggle well beyond the Middle East. Its history includes the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians, yet Tame utters the words before sanctimoniously claiming that she's standing up for innocent civilians killed in the conflict in Gaza. The hypocrisy is astounding.
The menace in the phrase is precisely why governments are weighing whether it should be outlawed when used to incite hatred or intimidation.
Albo has previously sought proximity to figures like Grace Tame when it suited him - and he knows it
Tame can insist she meant something more abstract, more moral, more righteous. Not withstanding the hypocrisy, she probably, hopefully, did.
But public language is judged by its effect as much as its intent.
When you pick a slogan with a dark history and a predictably explosive reading, you don't get to plead surprise when people take it the way they have always taken it.