Australian Politics
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
After 18 months of battling, I’ve lost any faith I once had in our insurance industry
Cover for flood damage has always been big issue with no clear answers
Last Friday, the House of Representatives standing committee on economics released its report of the inquiry into insurers’ responses to the 2022 major floods. Anyone expecting them to intervene and enforce stricter standards and accountability across the insurance sector shouldn’t hold their breath.
As a commercial lawyer, I’ve witnessed some shocking conduct over the years. From fighting over a cowboy hat and the cost of horse semen, to dysfunctional families battling it out over multi-million dollar succession plans. But the actions of Australia’s biggest insurance companies, enabled by the government and local councils, sets a new standard in appalling behaviour.
In November 2022, Molong, in NSW’s Central West, and its surrounding districts was rocked by a one in 500-year thunderstorm. What can only be described as an inland tsunami brutalised the neighbouring town of Eugowra, resulting in damage to 80 per cent of homes and insured losses of around $150 million.
I live and work in the community, and following the devastation I provided pro bono services to 12 businesses that required assistance with their insurance claims. Eighteen months and more than 250 hours later, I’ve lost any faith I once had in our insurance industry.
I dealt with all the big insurers, as well as smaller, boutique agencies, and can confidently say they’re all the same. I sat through non-apologies, blame-shifting, inconsistent offers and misleading information. In one case, offers were continuously miscalculated and grew smaller with each conversation. In another, I was informed that one client’s claim was delayed simply because she had retained a lawyer.
Across the board, insurers sought to minimise payments on legitimate claims. They were greedy in signing up new customer policies and then callous in claim denials. They relied on overly technical arguments based on fine print in their product disclosure statements that, according to the Insurance Contracts Act 1984 (Commonwealth) should be front and centre before the contract is entered into.
Deloitte assessed insurers’ response to the 2022 floods in South East Queensland and NSW and found that a total of 242,351 claims were lodged – six times higher than the average for similar events in 2016. A year after lodging, almost 40,000 claims were still outstanding, and of the 34,269 complaints made by policyholders, 44 per cent were related to delays in claim handling.
Ultimately, the businesses in my community were successful in securing a total payout of more than $1 million. Payouts they were entitled to. Payouts they had paid premiums on for many years to protect themselves should this kind of event ever occur. That they had to fight so hard to get what they were entitled to was a disgrace.
Most of my clients suffered secondary trauma and were forced to seek counselling after dealing with insurers whose lack of empathy left them not only financially devastated but emotionally scarred. And even with their respective payouts, $150,000 on a $500,000 loss barely touches the sides.
Insurers told to clean up their act in high-risk flood zones
As reprehensible as it is, insurance companies are beholden to shareholders and no one else. Despite catchy slogans, they are not “here to help”, they exist for profit, as demonstrated by the close to $1 billion profit IAG recorded in 2024.
Federal and state governments, along with local councils, are complicit in this egregious financial, mental and emotional abuse of their citizens. Because while insurance isn’t a public function, there need to be checks and balances on how the private companies administering it operate. And this problem is only set to get worse with more life-changing climate-related disasters predicted.
Within the committee’s report are 86 recommendations, including that insurers must decide on claims within 12 months or be forced to pay; that insurers provide clear guidance on the operation of averaging provisions to commercial policies (which is already being legislated in the Insurance Contracts Act); and that insurers communicate key customer policy information in plain English.
While the recommendations are sound, they are undercut by language like “should consider” and allow too much wiggle room for an industry already committed to dodging obligations wherever possible.
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Australian councillor says he was forced to fly back to Russia to speak freely
London: A regional West Australian councillor says he has travelled to Russia to speak openly about how free speech is suppressed in Australia and warned he has been persecuted for his views on Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Adrian McRae, a member of Port Hedland Council, doubled down on his praise for “Russian democracy” ahead of the three-day BRICS summit in Kazan, a city in south-west Russia, telling journalists he has been slurred as being “pro-Putin” for questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and for praising the Russian electoral system.
McRae, who contested the last federal election as a candidate for The Great Australian Party, founded by former WA senator and conspiracy theorist Rod Culleton, in the seat of Durack, previously travelled to Moscow in March to act as an independent observer for the presidential election.
“The reason we are at 11.59pm on the nuclear military conflict clock, it’s primarily because ... if the world understood what you know, those of us who dare to look outside the mainstream narrative for information,” McRae told journalists on Tuesday.
“If the world understood both sides of the conflict in Ukraine ... and they were able to talk openly and discuss it, then the decency of, I think people all over the world, would not allow their governments to get away with the nonsense narratives that were constantly being spoon-fed through our television sets.”
McRae, whose comments have previously been condemned by Australia’s Ukrainian community and WA Premier Roger Cook, said he had been turned into a villain by Australia’s mainstream media for airing his “informed” opinions, as well for his recent successful council motion, which urged authorities nationwide to immediately stop the use of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
The motion passed by the town’s council, based around 1800 kilometres north of Perth, was centred on an unverified study from Canada in 2023 which found “high levels of residual plasmid DNA present in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 modified mRNA vaccine”.
“The fact that we no longer have any sort of semblance of free speech in our country – I have to come here to Russia to talk in a mainstream way because such a thing will never be permitted in Australia,” McRae said.
“Again, the usual smear is I’m pro-Putin, in the hope that this slur will be enough to make anything that I say across Australia be viewed as some sort of conspiracy or lie, which is quite frightening.”
He said he’d previously travelled to Russia with preconceived media-driven notions about the country and was embarrassed to say that everything he saw “left any democratic and election process that I’ve seen, certainly in my country or anywhere in the West, it in its wake”.
McRae’s latest comments were widely shared on several pro-Russian channels on social media following a weekend interview on Sputnik News, where he applauded Russian state-owned media organisations for “giving an alternate voice”.
Along with John Shipton, the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, McRae has travelled as a guest to the summit, the biggest gathering of foreign leaders in Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
BRICS is an alliance started by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The meeting comes 19 months after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on war crimes charges.
In the same weekend interview McRae quoted Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi political theorist, while attacking mainstream media reporting on the recent Russian election. The comments were first reported by the North West Telegraph.
“I think it was the German philosopher that said: ‘You have to have an enemy figure to create a cohesive society’. And of course, the enemy figure at the moment in the Australian media, in the Australian narrative is Russia,” he said.
In a social media post following his interview, McRae wrote that he was unsurprised the Australian media was acquainted with Schmitt’s work, since it had applied Schmitt’s “Friend & Foe” theories in “a desperate attempt to destroy my reputation”.
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Jordan Peterson a no-show at Australian conference after visa fail
It seemed that everyone on one side of politics has been clamouring to hear from Jordan Peterson, the reactionary Canadian psychologist best known for apocalyptic ramblings about the death of Western civilisation and life advice for teenage boys who just can’t seem to get a girl. But alas, the big guy was a no-show at his own conference in Sydney on Tuesday.
Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative think tank which counts a number of past and present Coalition figures on its advisory board, held its annual conference at the International Convention Centre on Tuesday, with the star attraction forced to Zoom in after failing to get an Australian visa. What are the chances?
CBD hears Peterson only applied for the required visa last Friday. It didn’t arrive, and since then, the doctor was called to deal with a family matter back in Canada. Guests were forced to hear from local favourites like Tony Abbott and Peter Costello instead.
Former prime minister John Howard, ex-deputy PM John Anderson, and frontbenchers Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Andrew Hastie are all on the ARC’s advisory board. And given the strong antipodean flavour at the ARC’s maiden London event last year, Sydney was the natural choice for the sequel.
But Peterson’s late scratching didn’t deter a healthy crowd of conservative thought leaders, including former prime minister Abbott, his old chief of staff Peta Credlin, ex-deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, and former minister Keith Pitt and Matt Canavan.
And rebellious Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming was in the audience but her attention was divided. She was spotted by CBD’s spies absorbed in her phone, live-streaming the final submission in her defamation case against Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto still afoot back in Melbourne
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Abortion too sensitive to be discussed
The Coalition’s senior female frontbenchers are seeking to shut down a national debate over abortion laws, labelling it a concern held by “fringe parties” as the controversial issue engulfs Queensland’s state election campaign.
Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley, Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie and Liberal Senator Jane Hume on Wednesday morning refused to endorse their colleague, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who had called for abortion to be on the national agenda.
As the issue derails the Queensland Liberal National Party’s state election campaign, the federal opposition frontbenchers said abortion laws were firmly a matter for states and territories and not on the agenda of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.
Price, the opposition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman, on Tuesday told this masthead that the Coalition should not shy away from the debate in the name of political convenience, as she declared pregnancies ended after the first trimester were immoral and argued late-stage abortions were akin to infanticide.
But Ley said the Coalition had “no intention to change the settings from a federal health perspective”.
“Obviously, individuals have their own views, and Jacinta is entitled, as a member of the Nationals party, to her own view. But the federal Liberals have no intention of changing the settings when it comes to this issue,” she said on Sky News.
Hume was even clearer in her attempts to quash the conversation. “This is an issue that is the purview of the states … It’s not an issue for the federal government,” she said, also on Sky.
“What I can assure you, and assure your viewers, and assure all voters, is that a Dutton-led Coalition government has no plans, no policy and no interest in unwinding women’s reproductive rights.
“It has been an issue raised by fringe parties in a state election. It is not an issue for federal politics.”
McKenzie, when asked about the issue on ABC’s RN Breakfast, said Price had “very strong views on the issue”. She did not weigh in on the debate herself, saying it was an issue for state and territory governments.
“This is obviously a topic that has to be approached very respectfully, very sensitively. So she’s made those views clear,” McKenzie said.
Their comments suggest the Coalition is desperate to avoid a federal debate on the issue after the Queensland LNP was wedged by Katter’s Australian Party leader, Robbie Katter, who said he would force a vote on walking back abortion if the LNP was elected this weekend.
While Queensland LNP leader David Crisafulli said he had no plans to change abortion laws, he has not revealed whether his MPs would have a conscience vote on Katter’s bill, keeping the issue on the agenda because many of his MPs have signalled they favour unwinding the laws.
Dutton did not venture into the debate when asked by ABC radio on Tuesday. “To be honest, I don’t think it’s a debate that is shifting votes one way or the other,” Dutton said.
Senior Queensland Labor sources, speaking anonymously to discuss confidential research, said the abortion debate had, above other policy fights, helped tighten the race.
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https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
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