Administrator to ‘fix’ land council woes

Keith Platt keith@mpnews.com.au

THE special administrator appointed to take control of the Frankston-based Bunurong Land Council (Aboriginal Corporation) says he will work to bring the organisation back to “good health”.

Peter McQuoid, who was appointed in early September, has told the land council’s members that someone in his role “helps to fix problems such as money trouble, service delivery problems or poor governance”.

“… The special administrator’s aim is to work with the corporation to fix internal problems and restore it to good health. When I achieve that, I will appoint a new board of directors and hand back control of the corporation to its members.”

The Bunurong Land Council is the appointed Registered Aboriginal Party for an area covering Frankston, the Mornington Peninsula, Kingston, Casey, Cardinia, Wyndham, and Bass Coast.

Under the terms of his appointment McQuoid, of PDM Consultancy, is due to hand back control on Friday 15 March 2024.

In his first newsletter, McQuoid said the Registrar of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation's Tricia Stroud had “formed a view that the corporation was not being governed effectively or in the best interests of the corporation and its members”.

“Problems with governance and financial management have been going on for some time. The corporation hasn’t successfully held an AGM for the past two financial years, denying members their right to elect directors to govern the corporation on their behalf.”

Financial statements on the Bunurong Land Council website for the year ended 30 June 2021 show a net profit of $1,294,887 and a “positive cash flow from operating activities” of $3,542,405.

The land council provides councils with archaeological field assessments as part of cultural heritage management plan (CHMP) process, cultural heritage advice, and information about the Aboriginal community, people, Bunurong culture, and the environment.

When announcing the appointment of a special administrator Stroud said an examination of the corporation’s books in March “identified serious concerns with respect to the standard of corporate governance of the corporation”. Stroud said positions on the board of directors had been “vacated”.

Financial risk management and governance expert in the financial services sector, Kevin Leighton, has been appointed interim CEO.

“Professionals” to be appointed this month to a corporation advisory group will, at the end of the special administration, be invited to become non-executive directors on a new board.

The latest intervention in the affairs of the Bunurong Land Council comes eight years after the Federal Court in Melbourne fined and disqualified from managing an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander corporations for a set number of years four former directors of the Bunurong Land Council. The fines ranged from $25,000 to $5000 and the managing bans from seven years to three.

The April 2015 case followed the appointment of a special administrator in January 2014 who, due to inadequate records, was unable to properly identify the source and destination of large sums of money.