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.
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.
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.
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.
