Public Trustee

The public trustee is an office established pursuant to national (and, where applicable, state or territory) statute, to act as a trustee, usually where a sum is required to be deposited as security by legislation, where courts remove another trustee, or for estates where either no executor is named by will or the testator elects to name the Public Trustee.

The first Public Trustee is that of New Zealand; it was proposed by E.C. J. Stevens in 1870 due to the difficulty of finding reliable private trustees in the colony and adopted by Prime Minister Julius Vogel who established the office of Public Trustee (New Zealand) and installed Jonas Woodward as the world's first Public Trustee on January 1, 1873. Initially it was a part-time for position for one man, the government had not anticipated that much of the public would prefer to trust a bureaucrat with their estate - by the mid 20th century the New Zealand Public Trustee gained nearly 1/3 of the estate market in the country, was undertaking many statutory duties beyond this and employed a staff of a thousand. meanwhile the idea was spreading, initially across the Tasman, where South Australia established a Public trustee on the same model on 1 January 1881, making it the first Public Trustee established in Australia.

The office of Public Trustee was adopted by several other countries of the Commonwealth, including the United Kingdom, (founded 1906), where it plays a far more limited role, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Singapore, most Canadian provinces and all Australian states. The office also appears, in a different sense, in some states of the United States.although this has declined to just under 20 percent.

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