Wandering along Mackay St on a quiet Wednesday morning Australian Insurance Council chief executive officer Andrew Hall had a chance encounter with Criterion Hotelier Craig Mann.
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The door at the intersection of Mackay and Gilles was open and Craig was covered in sawdust as he worked to repair the floodboards and replace the bar of the hotel he and his family have been operating for less than 12 months.
Mr Hall stuck his head in, inquired as to how Craig was going and was given an understanding — using a line on the inside of a door — of how the water had completely engulfed the popular watering hole.
Only hours before the impromptu bar tour Mr Hall had disembarked a flight in Bendigo to attend a community meeting at the 4Rs building in Rochester later that night.
He had a series of meetings lined up before that meeting and then was bound for Melbourne on Thursday to continue discussions about the vital role the insurance council and its members were playing in the recovery process.
On Friday he was bound for the central west of NSW, Forbes to be exact, where the town had suffered two flood events in quick succession.
Since February it has been non stop for the insurance council chief, who has only been in the national insurance role for two years.
He was meeting with Member for Murray Plains Peter Walsh and had a zoom meeting planned with Federal Member for Nicholls Sam Birrell (COVID-19) — having met a week earlier with Victorian Premier Dan Andrews
Mr Hall said it was about keeping the community, and its leaders, informed about what was happening on an insurance front.
He has been juggling the most recent flood events while keeping one eye fixed on NSW and its Northern Rivers region, which was decimated by two flood events in a short time frame.
His attention had also been drawn to extreme weather events in South Australia as La Nina weather patterns continue to decimate the country.
He said all insurance records had been broken on his watch and the BOM weather app had become his go-to resource.
“Everyone missed the drought breaking in February 2020 because of COVID,” Mr Hall said.
“There was flooding last year in some areas and we normally have tropical cyclone activity that causes heavy rain.
“But nothing like this.”
Mr Hall described the weather of October like an “airborne tsunami’’.
He had just completed a “quick drive around’’ when we met at the Cafe Rochester and a Rochester resident overheard him say insurers were 12 to 14 months behind schedule.
“I can’t be out of my home that long,” she exclaimed.
It has been a consistent story, and one with no end, as insurers handle 266,000 claims in Australia.
Mr Hall said all insurance companies were represented at the Rochester meetings and he expected a face-to-face meeting to provide a better understanding of what was happening.
While there is no good timing for an event of this kind, further complications have occurred because of the recent purchase of a major insurance underwriter of Comminsure — heavily criticised in many social media circles for failing to respond to inquiries.
Mr Hall said the fact many claims teams were “brand new’’ had also added to the backlog.
“No-one should feel sorry for us, but 40 per cent of their claims teams are new this year,” he said.
“They (members) are training people who are new on the job and this is, in many cases, their first experience.”
Mr Hall said, in what he termed an “understatement’’ that there was a lot of tension on the system.
He said there were bound to be people who were unhappy with their treatment, and situation.
“We are telling people where they can get free legal advice,” he said.
“I am conscious, however, that there will be disaster chasers out there.
“They tend to show up in these cases and take a commission for promising to take up people’s cases with the insurer.
“People should be very careful.”
Mr Hall said the “disaster chasers’’ were more regulated now, but during a time of extreme financial pressure people were open to any idea, which resulted in an outcome.
He said the Australian Financial Complaints Authority offered a free service for any claim up to $1 million.
“Their decision is binding on insurer,” he said.
The overarching message was patience.
“I know that’s a hard message, but add a massive trade shortage to the mix and the waiting period could blow out even further,” he said.
Mr Hall said people who were considering a cash settlement on their property, which happened after the Gippsland bushfires, should take everything into account.
“Mortgage and warranty are the two big considerations. In some cases the bank will have first say on cash settlement,” he said.
Mr Hall said the challenge, going forward, for towns like Rochester was having a better engineered solution for flood events.
“We released a report in February, a week before it started raining, calling for the government to commit to resilience and mitigation,” he said.
“Levee banks are generally the solution.”
Mr Hall said re-builds of homes needed to be completed in a manner befitting the potential for future events.
“I would not expect there to be as much carpet in houses, but even that is difficult because insurers are obliged to replace like for like,” Mr Hall said.
He said there needed to be more flexibility in this space.
Mr Hall said the future of insurance in Rochester was also a difficult proposition, with the recent Australia wide events set to impact heavily on premiums.
“Everything that is done in the rebuild needs to be preventative,” he said.
“There are still places allowing new homes to be built in one-in-20 year flood zones. People build and then can’t afford the insurance.”
Mr Hall said the Rochester re-build, in comparison with isolated communities in the central west of NSW, were at least within a couple of hours of Melbourne.
His final advice for responsible authorities was to stockpile relocatable homes.
“One of the big lesson is that there needs to be a stockpile of mobile communities.
“I am a strong advocate of seeing mobile home pods on the block of land where people live. That way they are still in their own community,” he said.
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