Former Greater Cities Commission boss Lucy Turnbull,another pattern book advocate,said six-storey designs would be “a radical way of delivering medium-density very quickly”,but smaller three-storey designs were more likely to be accepted by communities sceptical of more density.

“That’s how Paddington was built and how the whole inner west was built,” she said,noting European countries had designed cities with pattern books since medieval times.

President of the NSW chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects,Adam Haddow,said the devil would be in the detail,but pattern book design had a long architectural history. “You used to be able to buy a plan for a house out ofThe Women’s Weekly in the ’70s,” he said.

The government also wants to slash approval times for high-rise developments by cutting back on site-specific design excellence competitions. These will no longer be necessary if the developer chooses from a list of approved architects.

Urban Taskforce chief executive Tom Forrest,representing large developers,said the move would reduce planning assessment times by “well over a year”.

Minns said Sydney’s unmatched beauty meant people often treated it like a delicate object and wished to “let it hang in a museum,untouched”. But this was not sustainable,he said,and “that culture has to change”.

He also foreshadowed a new transparency regime which will publish housing approval times and delays for every state-significant development,and how long each NSW council takes to approve development applications.

There will also be a “a form of league table” showing housing completions in NSW compared to other states. Minns is fond of observing NSW typically builds six homes per 1000 people each year,compared to eight in Victoria and nine in Queensland.

Forrest welcomed the move but said transparency arrangements should extend to government agencies such as Sydney Water and Transport for NSW,who often took too long to respond to housing proposals.

Opposition planning spokesman Scott Farlow said he supported more data but “even if 100,000 dwellings were approved today,it would take years for the moving vans to arrive in the street”. He repeated the opposition’s call for Labor to slow immigration to allow housing to catch up.

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