By Clarke Towson, CEO – INTJ Billing / Spotswood Trailers
It started, as many scientific breakthroughs do, with a simple question:
"Can a zoning map really override a land title?"
The answer, I assumed, would be buried in legalese. What I didn’t expect was that a single government document — dry, technical, and rarely read — would be the breakthrough about my mother's land.
The land in question — 7 Cullen Court, Spotswood — is owned by my elderly mother. It had been transferred out of Crown hands in 1978 via Instrument H323270, following a formal Executive Council order. That wasn’t hearsay. I had the title. I had the gazette notice.
Yet VicPlan showed the land zoned TRZ2 – Transport Zone 2. That didn’t make sense and I have known since the early 2010's when the land was zoned RDZ1 that something wasn't right about that. There was no road. No public transport facility. No reservation. Just a small patch of privately owned freehold land with an overgrown mess of weeds and a long history of being overlooked not just by the authorities but by my own family as well. But not me - I had long flagged the land as interesting but I couldn't quite put my finger on why exactly it was so interesting to me. It had bugged me for years. As a Myers Briggs type INTJ my intuition is very strong and my intuition told me something is wrong.
During gardening works in March I asked myself something no planner or compliance officer had:
Does the zoning map have to comply with any legal standard — or can it just say whatever it wants?
That question led me to a document most people never look at:
Ministerial Direction – The Form and Content of Planning Schemes.
It’s not exciting. It’s not glossy. It’s not even that well-designed. But it’s binding in law.
And when I read through it carefully — cross-referencing its structure with the Planning and Environment Act 1987 — something became clear:
A zoning map must follow rules. It must be lawful. It must reflect reality. And it cannot override a land title.
In that moment, everything clicked. I discovered clause 23:
That's when I decided to find out for myself whether or not written consent by the Head, Transport for Victoria existed for the property. I FOI'ed The Department of Transport. Here is the FOI request I submitted to them.
Then I waited patiently.
Over a month later I received a reply from my dear neighbour who refuses to maintain their TRS2 zoned land adjacent, The Department of Transport. The required consent from the minister was missing from my mother’s property — see here and here. The zoning is ultra vires — beyond legal power. It's a clear breach of ministerial direction.
The TRZ2 zoning on my mother’s land had no legal basis.
It violated both the letter and the intent of the Ministerial Direction.
And if that zoning was invalid — or ultra vires, as the law calls it — then every planning assumption based on it collapsed.
That’s when I realised:
If I had applied for a permit to activate the land’s TRZ2 zoning properties, the system would have punished me. But if I followed the law, documented my actions, and activated the site properly — the system would have no power to stop me.
So that’s exactly what I did.
In the end, that obscure planning directive wasn’t just a legal reference.
It was a reminder that process without accountability is dangerous.
That titles matter. That law matters.
And that sometimes, the only way to protect something important — like your mother’s land — is to read what everyone else ignores.
I didn’t beat the system.
I just read the fine print it forgot to follow.
Then I decided NOT to take advantage of the opportunity by calling Slap Em Up Harry at Meriton in Sydney who could exploit the opportunity to make an absolute fortune buying up cheap privately owned TRZ2 land, proving it's zoning is ultra vires then flipping it or developing it. I decided I would help the government fix the problem before the market noticed and took advantage of it.
As an early Bitcoiner I also didn't need the money.
