maglog

Austbrokers Conference honours award winners

This year’s Austbrokers Conference welcomed more than 250 industry professionals to celebrate the achievements of leading figures in the industry. The conference, hosted from May 9 – 11 at the Mantra in Salt Beach, Kingscliff, had the theme of “stronger together”, emphasising a message of resilience and relationship-building. The event featured inspirational former NSW rugby trainee Alex Noble, who was paralysed at the age of 16, and mindset coach Ben Crowe as keynote speakers. Industry brokers and partners also took part in educational breakout sessions hosted by their insurer partners. Winners of the Austbrokers awards were announced at a gala dinner, honouring excellence in the industry. Senior Account Manager Barry Sonter at Finsura Insurance Broking was awarded the Frank Earl Award, which recognises professionalism, continued development, mentorship, and success within the insurance industry. The Austbrokers Young Professional Award was handed to Managing Principal of Adroit Insurance and Risk Jesse Thorp, while the Austbrokers Life Adviser Award went to Austbrokers Financial Solutions Principal Ben Donald. 0

maglog > By Terry McMullan Publisher

After many years of inaction on climate change, Australia has moved on from a long-serving but eventually ineffective government to one promising fresh starts on issues vital to the community and the insurance industry. These include a natural catastrophe mitigation program that does more than pay lip service and some serious plans to deal with the causes and effects of climate change.

One hopes that our industry’s various high-level touchpoints with the opposition parties were maintained during the period that the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison administrations were in control. Bitter experience has taught me that large companies, industry bodies and lobbyists tend to ignore the opposition parties, or at best use them as fallbacks. In today’s environment that would be silly.

Business groups all too often also tend to lean towards conservative governments rather more than they do the “progressive” side of politics. For some, it’s hard when the “socialists” move in. (Not that we can regard the Labor Party as particularly socialist – it’s centre-left, for sure, but only in comparison to a coalition that moved right under Tony Abbott and even further right under Scott Morrison and the Nationals. But I digress.)

When the electorate decides the focus is too much on the economy and too little on other things that worry them– like higher prices, falling pay packets and, in this case, a lack of climate change action – it will switch.

Rising prices and stagnant wages don’t affect middle-class voters much compared to the impact in lower socio-economic areas. But climate change affects all Australians, rich or poor. And as was proved in this recent election, when a government deliberately plays games with such an issue, voters will look for alternatives.

The climate change issue in Australia should never have become as contentious and politically poisonous as it has, and long inaction on such meaningful mitigation measures as protection for exposed communities is costing the insurance industry dearly. affairs, confused by irrelevancies, lies and misquotes, enormous amounts of bluster and angry debates that achieve nothing other than disillusionment. It’s only after an election, when a new administration is confronted with the realities of what they have inherited that we see how far we have to go. A faltering economy with a massive debt is not something that any incoming government wants, but all too often it’s what it gets.

Which leads one to wonder just what the Treasury has in store for the insurance industry with the costings used to design a reinsurance pool scheme for cyclone-affected northern Australia. Those costings weren’t available before the election – no one seems to know why – and neither did the Coalition make a big deal about it during the election campaign.

That and the Coalition’s reluctance to engage over expanding the reinsurance pool scheme to include all natural catastrophes across Australia may indicate the savings to insurance-buyers wouldn’t have been a vote-winner. Or, having “solved” the insurance affordability problem in the conservative-minded north, they weren’t bothered.

The great old political commentator Laurie Oakes once said that with one or two notable exceptions the voters get it right in federal elections. That’s remarkable when you consider the distractions intended to bury any real incisive examination of the parties’ policies and abilities – what there were of them.

Labor’s decision to slip into power with a low-profile campaign was built around the then-prime minister’s “problem” with female voters, his take-no-prisoners style and lack of any real future-looking Coalition policies – in particular climate change. With much of Australia’s east coast suffering a spate of floods, and lingering memories of massive bushfires, it cost the Coalition many of its most rusted-on electorates.

It now means the insurance industry has an opportunity to stand alongside the new Federal Government as a key supporter of effective climate change-related policies, and it’s encouraging to note the Insurance Council’s positive reaction to the election result on behalf of the insurers and reinsurers. It’s a good start.

As things stand insurance is either unaffordable or even unavailable to those who live and work in high-risk communities. It’s a situation that can’t continue, but the issues associated with climate change are vast in number and size. Solutions will take much time and effort, and when the going gets tough the industry needs to maintain its push with the politicians to keep them focused on outcomes.

Let’s go off on a tangent to note that good grammar won’t help climate change, but is nevertheless essential for good communication. While journalists are – with some startling exceptions – paranoid about achieving the clarity that correct grammar provides, such care wasn’t always so evident elsewhere in the election campaign. Morrison’s carefully crafted daily zingers were designed to get a run on TV news and headlines, and contrasted with Albanese’s cautious and often annoyingly vague-but-serious approach. And there wasn’t much to admire about any of the parties’ advertising campaigns, either.

Advertising “creatives” often murder the English language in the battle to be noticed, and I do wonder if the Coalition inadvertently influenced the still-large cohort of Australians raised at school on hefty doses of English grammar to look elsewhere. (We’re a vanishing breed, I know, but we still vote.)

So when the Coalition’s advertising geeks chose to spearhead their campaign with the slogan “You won’t find it easy under Albanese”, I’m sure they weren’t aware they were sending a subliminal message that they knew Albanese would win the election.

“Won’t” is a contraction of “will not”. It was like saying, “You’re not going to find it easy under Albanese” – a definite statement about the future.

The word they needed was “wouldn’t”, to say that “If Albanese was to win, you wouldn’t find it easy”.

Armed with a Coalition prediction of its own impending demise, how many grammar-raised Australians started looking at the alternatives?

Alas, we’ll never know. 0