Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.There was nothing more Rick Maloney could have done when the floods hit his home town of Mooroopna, in Victoria’s north, in October 2022.
The real battle would begin months later when Maloney lodged a claim with his insurer, AAMI, to repair the damage to his home. Between February 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority received more than 45,000 general insurance complaints, a 39 per cent increase compared to the same period a year earlier.
“There seems to be a cultural problem with insurers,” she says. “Their starting position is they’re looking to decline a claim, rather than looking for ways to accept it.”As climate change increases the severity and frequency of natural disasters, the horror floods of 2022 and the intense bushfires of 2019, dubbed once-in-a-century events, will likely become more regular occurrences.
“There’s been a policy vacuum because no one’s known this is a problem,” Settle says. “Most of the people in parliament are probably insured and don’t realise there’s an issue. Financial counsellors, in the wake of disasters, report huge rates of underinsurance, but there’s been no data. It’s a difficult problem to resolve, but we don’t have state intervention the way other countries have, so it’s left to the market.
“We’re experiencing more frequent and severe natural hazard events, which is making insurance costly and exposing gaps in insurer capacity to process claims,” says Labor MP Daniel Mulino, the chair of the parliamentary inquiry. “We expect insurers to improve their communication with consumers and do the right thing by their customers by addressing any gaps in their processes.”QBE’s revenue increased 10 per cent to $20.8 billion in 2023, while its profit jumped 118 per cent to $1.
Many of the issues ASIC found are echoed in a landmark Deloitte review into the industry commissioned by the Insurance Council of Australia, which found a failure of systems, processes and resources. In his letter to insurance companies, Kirkland wrote he was concerned insurance companies were still not adequately resourcing their dispute resolution teams.