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John Quiggin 
Local politicians can identify land that is about to be rezoned before the owner of the land knows about it to their advantage. How do you stop such politicians from taking advantage of this knowledge given that declarations of interest are routinely ignored and that politicians can routinely enlist others to do their buying and selling?
One suggestion would be to make rezoning decisions but then, subsequently, to publicly advertise the decision and then to auction off the rezoned land after enough time for the information to get around. That works does it not? Maybe it is already used?
In Australian capital cities I see the following type of caper going on repeatedly.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/1-3m-one-day-property-profit-for-father-of-council-employee-20190111-p50quf.html
There is a need for some sort of “insider trading” regulation. Of course this will be hard to enforce through legislation. The insider trading legislation for stock markets is infamous for being too hard to enforce on a regular basis. Perhaps some moratorium on the implementation of any rezoning approval may give the notification process a chance to limit the rorts.
The difficulty I see on reflecting about my own suggestion – a difficulty that arose in the case I cite – is that insiders speculate on what they believe will be rezoned. The expectation may be firmly based on insider information but maybe hard to prove. Rethinking the history will inevitably be disputed.
Grey gifts hc.
“A great example of how easily grey gifts are given – and how hidden they can be in complex rules systems – played out in Queensland in 2016 during a review of planning laws. The State planning laws and regulations determine the processes by which major projects are approved for development — including the rules councils must comply within their own planning system. It was proposed that instead of council officers assessing a developer’s application, developers would be able to nominate a private certifier to make the discretionary assessment of the merits of their application.
https://gameofmates.com/2017/05/02/excerpt-from-chapter-4-grey-gifts/
Local council near me magically rezoned mayors ‘lifestyle’ blocks to suburban trippling value. All it took was for one coucellor to abstain. Looked like kellyville was and looks like kellyville now.
@KT2, I was thinking of Paul Frijters when I first saw this – great stuff. What they did to him at UQ was disgraceful.
Eddie Murphy discovers, “White people give each other stuff for free!”
Time to change passwords. Again and again… 87 Gb if you want the whole set. I am in two minds as to searching as I assume this search function will be watched. Paranoid? Or just risk averse?
“THERE ARE BREACHES, and there aremegabreaches, and there’s Equifax. But a newly revealed trove of leaked data tops them all for sheer volume: 772,904,991 unique email addresses, over 21 million unique passwords, all recently posted to a hacking forum.” …”The silver lining in Collection #1 going public is that you can definitively find out if your email and password were among the impacted accounts. Hunt has already loaded them into Have I Been Pwned; just type in your email address and keep those fingers crossed. While you’re there you can also find out how many previous breaches you’ve been a victim of. Whatever password you’re using on those accounts, change it.””
https://www.wired.com/story/collection-one-breach-email-accounts-passwords/