Rochester residents were turned away from Wednesday evening’s Insurance Council of Australia information session after the limit of 100 people was reached early on Wednesday morning.
The three-hour session was an updated version of what the ICA offered to policy holders late last year, providing more information about timelines, addressing the concerns of the insured and explaining the plight of “under the pump’’ insurers.
Insurance Council of Australia’s senior manager for mitigations and catastrophe management Liam Walter was again the keynote speaker and met every person at the front door prior to the evening.
Unfortunately, there were several people who had not completed the necessary registration for the evening and had to be turned away at the front door of the 4Rs building on Diggora Rd.
They were, however, welcomed back for the second day of “walk-in appointments’’, which was conducted from 10am to 6pm on Thursday.
Organisers of the evening said the ICA had to align the available bookings to the venue to ensure it did not exceed venue capacity for safety and wellbeing reasons.
An ICA spokesman said anyone unable to register for the community information session was offered the opportunity to attend Thursday’s session — to discuss their claim.
Mr Walter said there been a significant “run of interest” on Monday and Tuesday.
He said the evening had a slightly different focus, being a couple of months after the initial meeting, but he understood it continued to be a challenging time for people.
“As part of the registration process people told us tell topics they wanted to discuss and, not surprisingly, at the top was time frames for insurance claims to be processed,” he said.
Mr Walter said there was a code of practice that applied to insurers and while there was some allowance made for the amount of claims being processed around the country, it was not an “open-ended’’ time frame.
“Insurers should be able to demonstrate they have made their best effort to complete claims,” he said.
Mr Walter and his Brisbane-based team spent two days in town and, while not committing to another date, said there may be a further information session conducted at Echuca.
He said while 2022 had been a “terrible year”, since late October there had been a bit of clear air and there was an expectation for insurers to be completing claims in a timely manner.
“Motor vehicle claims are fairly straight forward and contents claims are are also a little simpler,” he said.
“Very often those will be settled first, but the timing of this event has not helped.”
Mr Walter was referring to the Christmas/new year period, which had interrupted the process and probably added to the waiting time for policy holders to have their claims fully processed.