At least 31 Aboriginal families are struggling to pay for funerals for loved ones who have died since the collapse of the funeral business ACBF-Youpla, amid claims that people are collecting aluminium cans to raise money for burials.
Veronica Johnson, a financial counsellor with the Broome Circle community support group, says three of her clients have been left desperately out of pocket since the Youpla collapse in March.
“One of them was buried, but it was a pauper’s funeral that [was] funded by the government, just a very basic funeral. And the beautiful lady who passed away, she had paid religiously [into the fund] till the day that she died,” Johnson said.
“She was sitting in a morgue for nearly two months until eventually the family got the pauper’s funeral from the WA Department of Communities. So, obviously, [the] family had to become financially stressed to pay for it. And that’s not what she signed up for.”
Johnson said another family is seeking to raise $2,000 by asking people to collect tin cans so that they can cash them in to pay for their mother’s funeral.
“We want people to see this is the level of financial human disaster that this has caused,” Johnson said.
The Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund (ACBF), later called Youpla, was a Gold Coast-based private business that for decades aggressively sold funeral insurance almost exclusively to Aboriginal people, including children and babies.
Broome Circle is part of the Save Sorry Business coalition of community legal and financial advocates representing thousands of affected ACBF-Youpla policy-holders. The coalition is calling for urgent financial assistance for the 31 Aboriginal families who have already been left to find ways to pay for funerals.
It estimates those 31 families are owed $236,089 in unpaid funeral entitlements.
What is ACBF/Youpla
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- The Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund (ACBF) was a Gold Coast-based private business that for decades aggressively sold funeral insurance almost exclusively to Aboriginal people, including children and babies
- At its peak ACBF had about 25,000 clients. Trading as Youpla, it had 13,000 clients at the time of liquidation, all of whom face losing the money they paid in
- Contributions of active members to the three funds totalled $39.2m
- The liquidator, SV Partners, says there is just $11.9m left – the largest fund (Fund 3) has just $207,000
- ACBF-Youpla was investigated by NSW’s Department of Fair Trading in 1992 and by the financial services regulator, Asic, in 1999, 2004 and 2014, but the business was allowed to continue
- The company became a case study at the banking royal commission in 2018
- Changes implemented following the royal commission led to Youpla being unable to sell to new customers without a licence
- The financial ombudsman, Afca, has received 700 complaints about Youpla group since 2018, and issued 178 decisions to date, all in favour of complainants citing misleading or deceptive conduct
- Afca estimates it has awarded more than $1.4m in compensation, but 61 determinations remained unpaid, worth around $500,000
“We really want the government to listen to First Nations people, to compensate, to make these directors who’ve taken off with the money accountable for what they’ve done to all these people by misleading them for so many years and to fight for some justice,” Johnson said.
The finance minister, Stephen Jones, has been approached for comment.
Nyul Nyul woman Deborah Sebastian had paid into ACBF-Youpla since the 1990s. The 58-year-old Sebastian is from Beagle Bay on the Kimberley coast in WA, but had to move away from her family to Broome in order to access dialysis treatment three times a week for end-stage kidney disease.
Sebastian says she is worried about what’s going to happen to her hopes for a “beautiful flowery funeral,” and is saddened for other policy holders who have already passed away.
“Most of them, they died with nothing. Some of them didn’t even have some flowers to bring to the grave,” she said.
“With all of this funeral plan that they paid for, you would have thought they’d have a beautiful funeral. I’m really sorry for the people that we lost because it’s never happened. It never ever happened.”
Sebastian says she hopes any compensation will come soon. Paying families long after they have had to conduct a pauper’s funeral is not good enough, she said.
“I want a beautiful flowery funeral in Beagle Bay. I want my funeral to be colourful. I want to go to a colourful world.”
There are few other options for Indigenous people, particularly on the eastern seaboard, where the ACBF won a legal case in the 1996 that forced NSW Aboriginal land councils to stop running funeral funds.
The NSW Land Council does offer small grants for funerals, but many local councils stopped offering contributory funeral funds after the 1996 court case. The Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council still operates one, a move its chief executive, Brendan Moyle, said was partly motivated by seeing community members pay what little disposable income they had to operators such as ACBF.
In the 1996 case, the company complained to the NSW supreme court that land rights law didn’t allow the council to run a fund, and that the $40 a year the land council planned to charge undercut its fees, which at the time ranged from $104 to $675 a year.
“If the defendants commence business, the plaintiffs’ funds will become economically unviable and will cease trading within a short period of time,” ACBF said in its statement of claim. The court found in ACBF’s favour.
In 2006, the Land Rights Act was changed to allow land councils to offer funeral coverage. However, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council’s fund has been closed to new members since 1994. Its members are able to apply for a grant of up to $1,000 to help defray funeral expenses.
Darkinjung’s Moyle said the fund run by his land council was set up in the 2000s and was a not-for-profit undertaking.
The board of the land council set up the fund because they were “brokenhearted by watching people going around and having to collect and raise money, just to be able to bury their loved ones,” he said.
“But the other thing is too that we were also really tired of seeing people, when they had a little bit of extra disposable cash, go into those funeral funds and the moment they’d go on hard times they lost everything – they lost all their contributions.”
He said the Darkinjung fund didn’t act like insurance but instead members made contributions of “about a cup of coffee each week” towards the cost of a funeral.
This meant that once contributions reach the payout level of $6,500, plus an amount to cover administrative fees, the fund holds the money “in perpetuity” to cover funeral costs.
“They’re not required to continue to pay to generate profits for a third party,” he said.
