The most instructive part of this week’s Opera House furore was the parade of politicians who seemed so baffled it had even become an issue. “People should chill out a bit,” advised Labor’s Anthony Albanese – himself so chill about it he apparently went to the trouble of calling into ABC radio to make the point. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Scott Morrison couldn’t understand “why people are getting so precious about it”. That, of course, is precisely what’s so damning: he couldn’t even understand it.

Alan Jones has a lengthy history of disagreeing with Opera House boss Louise Herron. Credit:Fairfax Media

It might be too perfect that Morrison was the Prime Minister for this hour; that someone who spent his pre-parliamentary career so marinated in the world of advertising and promotions happened to be governing us at precisely the moment the public became so “precious” about the crass commercialisation of everything. His defiant insistence that he “would put the Bathurst 1000 on the Harbour Bridge if I thought it would get more people there” makes the point starkly. Getting more people to an event seems the highest calling here, to be prioritised over quaint notions of non-commercial public space.

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It might have taken this perfect storm – a Prime Marketer in the Lodge, a horse race only recently dreamed up that is all money and no tradition, the most internationally famous building in Australia and of course the outrageously boorish intervention of Alan Jones – to spark the kind of reaction we saw this week. But that doesn’t mean the extraordinary backlash was merely the sum of these parts. This week happened because a deep anxiety about the health of our society was triggered. A vein was opened, but it was the build-up of ages that came gushing forth.