And, of course, innovation corridor. That’s like that old “cultural ribbon” only serious, being about money instead of silly things like culture. What is such a corridor? I picture innovators – software genii, but also maybe concrete plant workers – able to feed only in very big, swish towers and forced to crawl overground, like koalas between blue-gums. Without the corridor they shrivel up into a swathe of tired old desiccated ideas.

Speaking of which, let’s consider the rest of the Bays Place Strategy. It’s huge, this place; at 77 hectares, it’s more than three times the size of Barangaroo. And again, public land. So we’d expect serious public benefit – or at least inspiration, right, instead of your standard developer orgy?

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Wrong. The plan’s biggest public gesture, adjacent to the power station, is the White Bay Metro station. That’s good, insofar as all public transport is good. But, given the gargantuan development that accompanies all these stations, not so good, nor so public.

The main metro line runs from Bankstown, into Central then Martin Place, Barangaroo and out, through North Sydney and Crows Nest, to Rouse Hill. All are now hugely under development, which is what we pay for the government’s cost neutrality. But the White Bay metro is on a stand-alone line, from Westmead to the city, which does not connect with the main line and whose ultimate stations – in Pyrmont and the city centre – are still undecided. Quite likely, then, we’ll get the huge public-land development without the transport that is its rationale.

So there’s a metro station, the power station, the concrete plant and the White Bay cruise-ship terminal (which Stokes says will “absolutely not” remain but which sits resolutely in his plan). Otherwise, it’s the usual guff about connectivity and Country but scant content. So let’s speculate. What should happen here?

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White Bay power station is a fabulous basilica of a space, much like what is now London’s Tate Modern. Set in a fabulous jewel of a park – carving a Hyde Park-sized piece around the power station would still leave more than 60 hectares for money-making uses – it could be the precinct’s beating heart. Perhaps we should liberate the Museum of Contemporary Art from its dull 1920s office building-with-classrooms-attached at Circular Quay, the old Maritime Services Board building, and move it to White Bay.

This would mean the MCA could show proper, large-scale artworks in a robust and exhilarating setting, as per Tate Modern. It would also give the poor old cruise passengers something worth looking at. And you could fill the MSB building with high-class offices. Apartments, even. Win-win.

Better still, such a move would pretty much necessitate keeping the wonderful Glebe Island Bridge. Just as Norman Foster’s pretty Millennium Bridge across the Thames enabled Tate Modern’s success, the Glebe Island Bridge, resuscitated as a walking-and-cycling route to the city, would make this new place hum. True, the minister’s plan talks about this. But it also says such a bridge could be “reinstated or new …”

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Why build a new bridge when you have an enchanting, state-listed old one with fine moving parts? There’s already too much new in these foreshores, rendering all these “high-performing” public precincts indistinguishable from Barangaroo, King Street Wharf, Darling Harbour and Pyrmont Point. It’s a new, vanilla-veneer style of urbanism we could just call Lend Lease.

As to tech-hub? I mean, sure, Minister, by all means flog a dead horse. But let’s not pretend it’ll make it from the starting box.

Elizabeth Farrelly is the author of Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City’s Soul. She is a board member of the National Trust (NSW).