SINGING FOR OUR SUPPER
THE only annoying thing about the NSW government’s order to use the Sydney Opera House’s sails to promote gambling is that it took so long to use our national monuments in this sharp way.
So I congratulate NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian for forcing the reactionaries who run Australia’s most beautiful building to use it for the purpose for which it was clearly intended.
As in, you know, advertising. In this case, the Opera House’s sails will advertise The Everest, the $10 million horse race next weekend which NSW Racing reckons is the world’s richest on turf, perfect for hoovering tens of millions of dollars from the pockets of punters.
It is entirely thanks to Berejiklian’s courageous decision to stand for the rights of our true battlers — the biggest bookmakers and richest horse owners — that the Opera House will now have its sails lit up with the jockeys’ colours and their barrier draws, to help punters decide where to best risk their hardearned.
This is clearly what the building’s designers had in mind when they left those soaring sails blank white against the sapphire blue of the sky and the vast bay.
Just as a bare fence is merely a canvas for a graffiti artist, so those great sails are just another billboard to our corporate giants and the politicians so wisely guided by them.
To leave those sails as bare as the day they were conceived is an irritation to the likes of Berejiklian and her corporate whisperers — a gnawing reminder that a chance is being wasted to make money. Have their whiny critics any idea how many millions of people around the world might see those sails flashing racing pink or yellow or red, or see in massive letters “The Everest”, and, magicked by that sublime beauty, decide they’d better have a punt?
I am so glad that Berejiklian finally sees this, too, even if it took Alan Jones to remind her of her stern duty.
I hope that she and our other civic leaders now finally see that the Opera House and other such icons are not beautiful in themselves, as the snobs running the Opera House would tell you, but beautiful only as a way to make more money for those who have plenty already.
Now leaders like Berejiklian must move on to even bigger coups.
How about lighting up Uluru with advertising, too?
You could shine on it a picture of a can of Foster’s Lager so big that you could see it from space, or at least from seat 1A in a Qantas jet at 35,000 feet.
Berejiklian, herself, could set an example. I’ve seen her wearing jackets that just beg for corporate signs on the back. Isn’t there some struggling property developer she could help out by wearing his logo?
And clearly, the walls of our parliaments, not just in NSW but around the country, could also be conscripted to the great cause of making the rich and mighty even more so.
The Victorian government, for instance, could use the facade of its parliament to screen big ads for its union donors, or for the green carpetbaggers it’s made rich with the wind farms now vandalising the landscape.
The Northern Territory government could light up its Legislative Assembly with the lucky red of the Chinese government, to whose agents it’s already granted a 99year lease of one of our most strategically valuable ports.
And what of our great cathedrals — St Patrick’s in Melbourne, St Mary’s in Sydney, St Peter’s in Adelaide, St George’s in Perth and St John’s in Brisbane? Look at all those huge walls, disgracefully bare of any ad.
Surely, some premier with their head screwed on tight will force the churches to carry their weight, too, and devote their walls to the great spiritual cause of making money?
Yes, there will be some crazy conservatives warning against this kind of “slippery slope” — first the sails of the Sydney Opera House, next the altars of our churches painted in racing colours, too.
But they whinged like that back when this fuss over those sails first started, back when Rugby Australia projected its logo and “Go Wallabies” before the Rugby World Cup in 2015, and when Cricket Australia projected the Ashes trophy after beating England this year.
But, hey, did the sky fall in, or did we just harden up and accept that you just can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, or a fast buck without trashing the view?