What white Anglo male over the age of 50 can honestly say they’ve never worn a Nazi uniform? When I was young, attending fancy dress parties in second world war military attire was almost a rite of passage; the closest my generation could come to the conscription and national service imposed on our fathers and grandfathers. And since the Hugo Boss-designed serge of Wehrmacht officers was so much more stylish than the baggy wool and khaki clobber of their Allied counterparts, panache often trumped patriotism. Where Dominic Perrottet went wrong, of course, was in not including in his 21st birthday ensemble an old-fashioned leather briefcase. This would have allowed him to reassure us that far from being evidence of youthful fascist sympathies, his costume was in fact an homage to wannabe Hitler halter Claus Von Stauffenberg.

Australia took in more Holocaust survivors per capita than any country except Israel, so Mr Perrottet was right to apologise to their descendants. But he will take heart from the fact that being photographed wearing a swastika didn’t stop a 20-year-old Prince Harry becoming (hard to believe now) the third most popular royal, just as goose-stepping across a Fawlty Towers set in 1976 shouting quotes from Mein Kampf didn’t diminish John Cleese’s national treasure status. And there were a lot more Holocaust survivors around in 1967, when a jack-booted Mel Brooks sang ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and a Hollywood not short of Jewish influence gave him an Oscar for his troubles. The Fawlty Towers episode in which Basil does the silly German walk was pulled from the BBC’s streaming service a few years ago after accusations of racism (none of them from Germans, interestingly), but you can still watch The Producers in its entirety on Netflix and Apple. Why? Because Mel Brooks is Jewish, and when a Jew tells a joke about Jews it is deemed not offensive. Just as when an African-American character or performer refers to another African-American character or performer with the N-word, he does so without fear of censure, let alone cancellation. Identifying the boundaries of what might be called lexical trespass is more difficult than identifying other examples of cultural appropriation because it is often a work in progress. Not long ago, nobody would have referred to a member of the LGBT community – or any subject pertaining thereto – as queer unless they intended to cause offence. And even after people who identified as gay or non-binary began to use it to confront prejudice, and Q got added to the list, it was still off-limits to everybody else. Today, the capitalisation of the word by universities in the naming of degree courses has presumably made it okay for heterosexual students who sign up for those courses to deploy it in normal conversation, but it will be some time before anyone else feels comfortable doing so. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most of Australia’s vocabulary grey areas pertain to indigenous affairs. Many young white Australians would be shocked to know that the word ‘blackfellas’ was a default appellation for their grandparents, and perhaps even more surprised to know that indigenous people didn’t find it problematic back then. Today, it is a term which no white Australians of any age would use, so unless the indigenous community renews its currency it will likely be consigned to the archives along with post war terms like ‘digger’ and ‘durry’.

Fancy dress parties, being celebrations of cultural appropriation, will presumably soon also be a thing of the past. And in the meantime, politicians of every stripe must live in fear of their old costumes being outed on social media. But as Justin Trudeau discovered, even wearing blackface needn’t need be career-ending if you’re a darling of the left. Going forward, though, it makes sense even for them to choose costumes which are unlikely to alienate you from your base and, ideally, which identify you with someone you admire rather than despise. I don’t know what sartorial skeletons lurk in Daniel Andrews’ closet, but if he ever gets invited to a fancy dress party again he could do worse than go as Xi Jinping. You can buy a Xi mask online for $7, and Dan wouldn’t even have to change his suit or hair colour to be a dead ringer with the man for whose rule he has expressed such admiration. There’s a chance it  would offend China’s Uighurs, who outnumber Weimar Germany’s Jews by about  five million, but it would be a small price to pay for the brownie points it would accrue with the man who has overseen their persecution.