Kathleen Folbigg has been compensated an “insulting” amount of $2m after spending two decades in prison before an inquiry found she had been wrongfully convicted for killing her four children.
Folbigg, once referred to as among Australia’s worst serial killers, was convicted in 2003 and ordered to serve a minimum 25-year sentence for the suffocation murders of three of her children and manslaughter of a fourth.
Her name was cleared and convictions quashed in 2023 by the appeals court just months after she was granted an unconditional pardon and released from prison. Her release came after an independent inquiry heard new scientific evidence that indicated her children may have died from natural causes or a genetic mutation.
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Folbigg’s lawyer, Rhanee Rego, said her client’s ex-gratia compensation offer of $2m was “profoundly unfair and unjust”.
In a statement on Thursday afternoon, Rego said the sum was “a moral affront – woefully inadequate and ethically indefensible”.
“The system has failed Kathleen Folbigg once again. Kathleen lost her four children; she lost 20 of the best years of her life; and she continues to feel the lasting effects of this ongoing trauma.
“The payment does not reflect the extent of the pain and suffering Kathleen has endured. This should be about the system recognising the significance of what it did to her.”
Rego called “urgently” for an inquiry into how the New South Wales government landed on the figure, contrasting it with Lindy Chamberlain’s compensation in 1992.
Chamberlain, who was wrongly imprisoned for three years for the murder of baby Azaria, was compensated $1.3m, only $700,000 less than Folbigg more than two decades later.
Greens MP Sue Higginson, who was heavily involved in pressuring the government to release Folbigg after the independent inquiry, said the $2m amount “barely covers what Kathleen could have earned on a full-time salary over 20 years”.
“Kathleen has not only lost 20 years of wages, she has lost her four children, her home and her employability. She has racked up legal costs fighting her wrongful conviction, she has lost her superannuation,” Higginson said in a statement on Thursday.
At a press conference later, Higginson said a more appropriate compensation figure would have been 10 times the amount, calling the payment Folbigg was offered “an absolute slap in the face and a failure of the NSW premier to uphold the principles of fairness and justice”.
“Wrongful conviction is probably one of the most heinous things that the state can perpetrate on a person. The state of NSW did this to Kathleen Folbigg, a woman who had lost her own children.”
Higginson said it was within the power of the premier, Chris Minns, to correct the wrong and urged him to meet Folbigg and address the issue.
She also called for an inquiry into the ex gratia payment system.
In July, Folbigg had released a statement saying she wanted the compensation matter resolved quickly so she could “begin to rebuild and move forward”.
Minns was asked if he would meet Folbigg, but he said he would not, telling reporters: “There’s a lot of difficult calls for me to make as premier. This isn’t one of them.”
Legal experts told Guardian Australia in 2023 that Folbigg should receive the biggest compensation payout in Australian history because no other wrongful conviction had caused as much harm.
In 2021, Victoria police reached an $11.75m settlement with a man who was left a quadriplegic after officers allegedly injured him while responding to a noise complaint in 2017.
On Thursday, the attorney general, Michael Daley announced that Folbigg had been compensated.
“The attorney general has decided to make an ex-gratia payment to Kathleen Folbigg following her application,” he said.
“The decision follows thorough and extensive consideration of the materials and issues raised in Ms Folbigg’s application and provided by her legal representatives.”
He said that, at Folbigg’s request, the government had agreed to not publicly discuss the details of the decision.
