The Cape York Aboriginal Charitable Trust (the Trust) was created in 1995 after a resolution from the 1994 Cape York Land and Health Summit held in Rocky Crossing, Wenlock River. The Trust was created to carry out activities aimed at raising the overall living standards of Aboriginal people in Cape York.

The Cape York Aboriginal Charitable Trust is a special form of legal trust known as a perpetual charitable trust, which is quite different from private (unit or discretionary) trusts.

A charitable trust is a trust for a public purpose, not for a person. Charitable trusts are created to benefit the community rather than to personally benefit particular individuals. The Trust Is classified as a Public Benevolent Institution (PBI) for tax purposes.

The essential feature of a charitable trust is that it must be for the benefit of the public and not for private purposes. There are many charitable trusts in Australia created for all sorts of different purposes that have a similar structure to the Cape York Aboriginal Charitable Trust.

Cape York Corporation Pty Ltd is the appointed Trustee, and is entrusted to manage the Trust. The Trust Deed sets out the purpose of the Trust, what kind of activities the Cape York Corporation Pty Ltd can carry out as Trustee, and how the Trust's assets or income can be spent.

The rules governing the Trust stipulate that it can not be privately owned, can not distribute private benefits to people and can only be used for the charitable purposes stated in its objects.

It is the duty of the Crown, through the Attorney-General, to protect the property of a charitable trust. The Attorney-General can stop the trustee from breaching the trust deed. Any court proceedings involving this charitable trust would automatically include the Queensland Attorney-General.

Charitable trusts and their trustees are subject to a range of legal checks and balances. Because of the public element of a charitable trust, the courts and parliament have developed various controls to ensure that these trusts function for the benefit of the public.

Some of those checks and balances include: "the trustee must act honestly, within its power and only for the purposes set out in the trust deed. If the trustee engages in any misconduct of mismanagement of the trust, it may be removed."

There are various ways in which the trustee company, Cape York Corporation Pty Ltd, could be removed:

• Under the trust deed, the members of the governing committee of the Cape York Land Council Aboriginal Corporation, acting jointly, can remove the trustee and appoint a new trustee; and
• Under the Trust Act 1973, any person "interested in the due administration of the trust" (such as an Aboriginal person from Cape York), the trustee itself, or the Attorney-General may ask the Supreme Court to remove the trustee and appoint a new trustee. The court's power to remove the trustee is very broad - it may do so for "any other reason whatsoever [if the trustee] appears to the court to be undesirable".

Objects

The objects of the Trust are to apply trust income: for the purposes of relieving the poverty, misfortune, destitution, disadvantage, distress, dispassion, and suffering amongst Aboriginal people or and in the general vicinity of Cape York Peninsula including providing housing, health care, services and facilities, transportation and communication services, land under secure title for dispossessed people, education and training. Any funds flowing through the trustee company and the trust itself, must be used for the above purposes.