Fiduciary Duties in Australia

• Australian concepts of fiduciary duties mirror those developed under English common law and widely held in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada. At their most basic level fiduciary duties are requirements to act for the benefit of another without putting your interests ahead of hers. In Australia, fiduciary duties occur only in certain service-related relationships that require one party to have entrusted power over another in order for the services to be accomplished. These relationships include the attorney-client relationship, the trustee-beneficiary relationship, the relationship between business partners and the relationship between a director and a company.
  
  

Prohibition Against Self-Dealing

• A core tenet of fiduciary duties in Australia is the prohibition of self-dealing. This means you may not use your position as a fiduciary to advance your own interests to the detriment of the person(s) or organization you hold a duty to. Moreover, even when you are advocating for the interest of another, you may not acquire or usurp a benefit meant for the person who entrusted you with the power to act on his or her behalf.
  
  

Duty of Loyalty

• Another fundamental fiduciary duty in Australia is the duty of loyalty, which requires that you act for and only for the party you have a duty to. This includes acting consistent with the goals of the party on whose behalf you are working. For example, in a criminal case, if a lawyer explains the downsides of going to trial to a client but the client still wants to go to trial, the lawyer would not only be required to follow the client's request but do so to the best of his ability.
  
  

Duty of Care

• The final component of fiduciary duty in Australia is the duty of care. The duty of care holds that when acting on behalf of another, the fiduciary has a fundamental responsibility to do so as any reasonably prudent person would do if put in a similar situation. Accordingly, if the intended action required a basic knowledge and the fiduciary performed the act without that basic knowledge, the fiduciary could be liable for a breach of her duty of care.