The incident has also highlighted the failure of the NSW government which hand-passed responsibility to the supermarkets for environmental policy. If the state government had given its imprimatur to a ban on single-use bags the supermarkets would have been forced to work out a clear strategy.

The controversy is sadly only one example of a wider phenomenon where rational policy has stalled. For shock jocks and some shoppers, the bans on plastic bags was just another intrusion of the nanny state, this time into the sacred land of Australia’s supermarkets.

Unfortunately former premier Mike Baird, who was criticised in similar terms for his ban on greyhound racing, bought that line. At the end of 2016 he quietly told his government he had banned any future bans. That decision earned him some ridicule but Gladys Berejiklian has continued the policy. This is where this issue starts going beyond plastics and the already serious issue of the damage they do to waterways and oceans.

This should have been a fairly easy policy to get across the line. NSW is certainly not blazing the trail on this one. The change in behaviour required to stop using plastic bags is far from onerous. Motorists can just carry reusable cloth bags in the boot when they drive to the supermarket. For those who somehow forget to bring their own bag, the cost of buying a 15c bag is minuscule.

If Australians are too selfish and stuck in their ways to work out a solution to plastic bags, it would have boded ill for other more complicated problems which similarly require the public to make changes in their habits to achieve a public good like a clean environment or public health or safe streets.

Australians will have to change their electricity use and perhaps pay slightly higher prices to help reduce greenhouse emissions and they will have to change their attitude to public transport to help deal with urban congestion.

The public will eventually accept a ban on single-use plastic bags and it should be possible to convince people to accept those other changes if the policies dealing with them are well conceived and explained. The greyhound bans may have been well intentioned but were not well executed.

Unfortunately there is no simple way of drawing the line between excessive interference and positive public action. Conservative shock jocks who sneer about the intrusions of the nanny state are quite happy for the state to intrude in areas they like such as federal financial support for religious schools or banning medicinal cannabis.

Australians have a good record of balancing these tensions in areas from gun ownership laws to compulsory vaccinations to tobacco control to environmental protection. The argument that no one should ever have to change their ways should not carry too much weight.