Certainly, there’s exhilaration here, as well as destruction. Corbusier’s soaring delight on first seeing Manhattan erupt from the sea inspired an entire century of architects (including Howard Roark, the protagonist in Rand’s novel The Fountainhead ). But the job of balancing the excitement against the destruction is critical and must fall to a politically neutral planning system. The Star casino-tower epitomises this bristling arrogance in form, in function (catering exclusively to the fly-in-fly-out mega-rich) and in its distortion of due process. The Premier’s rash intervention may yet signal the end of planning as we know it. Alan Jones is pushing heavily for the government to approve Star's Pyrmont proposal. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Story so far. The old Star City casino was approved in the 1990s as Sydney’s first. Laughably tacky with its wavy walls, columnar aquarium and garish carpets it was decidedly Philip Cox’s nadir; a good architect’s rather feeble attempt at true vulgarity. When in 2013 O’Farrell approved the Crown tower de facto by quietly signing-off on its license, he guaranteed that, sooner or later, Star would try to follow. It did, last August lodging a 66-storey “modification” to the existing low-rise building. This tower, like an envious sibling, emulates Crown in everything - except that, unlike Crown, it sits within a village where 66 storeys is more than eight times the local limit.

As if to argue their purity, these two rival towers eschew Cox’s faux-Vegas kitsch for the sleek and silver-skinned. The heights are similar. The forms vary as much as phalluses can – a bulge here, a split there. But beneath the celestial slick they’re every bit as tacky as the old. So far, so predictable. The surprise came last month when the Department of Planning found some backbone and recommended against Star’s tower. More remarkably still, minister Stokes backed their rejection. That’s when Jones got riled. Loading Citing as exemplars Queensland’s hideous Ritz Carltons, Jones called the tower “outstanding” and the minister “delinquent”. Then Jones took it to the Premier. “I’m sorry Gladys, where the hell are you?” he fumed. Ten days later, Premier Berejiklian reacted. To Jones’ classic puppeteering she offered a classic kneejerk. The department had rejected the tower on several tightly argued grounds including overshadowing, view loss, wind, height, public amenity and urban context. Unsurprisingly, for a tower whose relationship to its low-rise surrounds makes Seidler’s Blues Point Tower look self-effacing, the planners emphasised its lack of “strategic justification”. This is essentially its inappropriateness to context, though the technical term is more concise. Dog’s balls.

Berejiklian should have backed her department. Planning should be proactive not reactive. If she wanted to re-strategise Pyrmont, especially given the project’s long lead-time, she should’ve seen this coming. Like the Queen and the dairymaid, she should have asked her minister to ask the department to rethink the peninsula with enough time properly to consider shadowing, services and transport. Instead, Berejiklian tossed the replanning of Pyrmont as a little six-week plaything to her pet Greater Sydney Commission - an unaccountable body run by a former prime minister’s wife with far less expertise than the department and a weirdly parallel role. But also, six weeks? It’s a ridiculous time-frame, likely to prove as ill-advised and overhasty as contracts for the Allianz stadium and the light rail. It’s also a ridiculous structure, since the GSC will make its off-the-cuff recommendations to the Premier, who will then have to work out how to involve the department in doing its own job. What a mess. An artist's impression of the Star's proposed tower at Pyrmont. Credit:NSW Planning Even politically, which should be strategic planning’s lowest-rung concern, this “review” manoeuvre is likely to backfire.