Skip to playerSkip to main contentSkip to footer
  • 6 days ago
The meeting brought insurers, governments and councils together to push for action on rising flood insurance costs.
Transcript
00:00So in 1990, the water had come through, and I passed that around, that's what they had to deal with.
00:05I was an apprentice at the time, I was at the coast on the grog, didn't even know what was going on.
00:09Suddenly I was 18 years old, and actually every flood that happens here I'm away.
00:151.72, so those guys never had any insurance.
00:18What happened here in 1990 was probably the groundbreaking about how things had moved so much.
00:23We always talked about, I think, we talked about the mud army in Brisbane,
00:27but unfortunately, I always say that, we had the mud army.
00:31But in 2010, we come to this height, so that's where it lapped.
00:35No matter what you do, we had black plastic, you did anything.
00:39You just put everything up as quick as you can.
00:40As I said, it takes you two hours to get everything out, but it takes you two days to put everything back.
00:44November last year, we had 180 mils in an hour and a half up the top end,
00:51where the gully catchment starts.
00:55It's about 30k out on the Morgan Road.
00:57So that peak was half a metre higher at the gate.
01:01So what we're surmising is that if we hadn't had that gully diversion,
01:05I would have had at least that.
01:07The mitigation of the Bradley's Dully Diversion and also the Levy Bank
01:11has prevented flooding in this community.
01:14But what we are now seeing is that that is not being reflected
01:17in insurance pricing of premiums.
01:20So it's caused a lot of concern amongst communities right across South West and also lots and places in Queensland.
01:28So we facilitated this roundtable because in a situation like Charleville, Roma, the state government has taken the risk by putting the mitigation in place and also the councils are taking the risk as well.
01:41So we want to see that risk reduction reflected in premiums.
01:46There are many factors that go into the price of insurance.
01:49Flood or the risk of flood is just one of those factors.
01:53Things like the cost of building materials and labour, general inflation in the Australian economy at the moment,
01:59and international costs like the cost of reinsurance, which insurers buy globally, all factoring to the cost of your premium.
02:09We've seen places like Thargaminda that are looking to what they might be able to do to mitigate flood in their community.
02:17So we want to make sure that when we put that taxpayer's investment into those particular mitigations,
02:24that we actually are triggering, driving down that cost of insurance for those communities.
02:29We also are going to come back in six weeks' time.
02:32We'll have a working group to look at particularly the mapping and what gaps there might be in the mapping,
02:36because we're told by insurers the mapping hasn't been updated since 2014.
02:41So that's nearly 10 years ago, so we really want to look very closely at how we can facilitate councils getting that mapping information into those databases.
02:50For both sides of this, government and insurance, to fix a problem you've got to identify it.
02:55And I believe that the last couple of days, we have moved forward greatly in that space.
Be the first to comment
Add your comment

Recommended