• Our family home, where Jackie and I lived with our two young children for five years, was ruled not to belong to us by the Supreme Court of Queensland. Despite us legally purchasing the property at auction and paying for it, the court ordered its return to the previous owner due to a fraudulent mortgage scheme involving her son.
• As innocent victims caught up in this horrible situation, we were granted compensation by the court. However, the Queensland government has chosen to appeal the decision, claiming that we do not qualify for compensation as we were never the registered property owners and are not direct victims of fraud.
• We have faced tremendous challenges during this period, and we had hoped for protection and support as innocent purchasers. We believe the government has a responsibility to assist individuals affected by property fraud, as outlined in Queensland law. We humbly ask for your support to urge the government to honour the compensation order by the Supreme Court, allowing us to rebuild our lives. Your vote matters, and we are so very grateful.

In February, the Supreme Court of Queensland ruled that the home that Jackie and I and our two young children had lived in for five years never belonged to us. This is despite the fact that in 2018 we had successfully bid at public auction and had paid 1.265m for our home. The court ordered that the house should be returned to the previous owner, as a result of the previous owner’s son fraudulently mortgaging the property to the lenders that sold us the property. The Court also ordered that as innocent victims of this fraud and in accordance with Queensland law, Jackie and I should be compensated by the government for the loss of our home, by an amount of 2.7m that represented the assessed value of the home at the time of trial. In late May, the Queensland government appealed the decision of compensation by the court, arguing that we do not deserve compensation because we were never the registered property owners and we were not victims of fraud. 

For Jackie and I, this has been a crippling period in our lives. We believed as innocent purchasers we would be protected, and the government would stand up for us and support us.  However, the government argued successfully in the trial we should lose our home because we were never registered, and they argued further, though were unsuccessful, that we should also not be compensated because we were never registered. The tragic irony of this is that it was the government that never registered us as the owners of our home, despite their titles office being in possession for months of valid and signed release of caveat and title transfer documents handed over on the day of settlement by the previous owner and the lenders. The government accepts there was a gaping flaw in its settlement process, because today it mandates something called digital settlement, where everything happens on the same day - payments, release of caveat and transfer lodgements, and registration of title. This matters because if our settlement had occurred today it is highly likely we would’ve been registered as owners on the very same day, and we would still be in our home. Our settlement failed because of a flawed and since corrected government process.

But irrespective of its role in our failed settlement, we believe the government has a responsibility to protect people that are victims of property fraud simply because it says so in Queensland law. There is a statutory scheme, an insurance fund, that the government controls that was designed expressly to protect and support innocent victims just like Jackie and I. We believe that if we don’t qualify to make a claim on this fund, we just don’t know who ever would.

Now we must fight again for fairness and we ask for your support. If the government continues and wins their appeal and does not pay compensation, we will receive nothing and we will be ordered to pay their costs of appeal, in addition to the third of costs we’ve been ordered to pay to the previous owner and the government for the first trial, in addition to our own costs which currently sit at around 300k. We will have also lost our home and the money we paid for it. Though the lenders have also been ordered to pay us for breach of contract, they are all officially bankrupt or have no assets - we will likely receive nothing from them. In five years, we will have gone from owning a house outright and having money in the bank to being robbed of absolutely everything we have worked for our entire working lives. It will be a devastating loss which will be hard to recover from, financially, mentally, ever.

Please help us urge this government to show some compassion and abide by the order of the Supreme Court for compensation, to free us to move on with our lives. We have been so humbled already by the overwhelming support we’ve had from family and friends and many, many people we’ve never met. We wanted to say thank you for that. If you are one of those people, we humbly ask you please keep supporting us and please let this government know how you feel.

Please note: please don’t donate, your vote and support is enough! Any donations go to change.org to promote this petition, not to us.