With global warming happening and fire and flood levels rising, some of the saddest images on the nightly news are people standing in the ashes of their home, their melted car beside them saying they ‘lost everything, but the clothes they’re standing in’, and even worse, they had no home insurance.
The cost of home insurance has gone through the roof and is unaffordable for most. But who can afford NOT to be insured?
As heat waves make the bush crackle or big rains make floodwaters rise, so do stress and cortisol levels rise. The constant anxiety the uninsured feel every time a heatwave or heavy rains come has a BIG health cost.
When I was younger we all bought our home insurance from the GIO, the Government Insurance Office, owned by the people of Australia and managed by public servants. GIO was big enough to spread the risk over the entire population, so when a disaster occurred the whole nation shared the cost. This kept premiums really low.
GIO ran on minimal profit and paid no dividends to shareholders. But they always honoured claims. As a bonus, GIO mark II could give ‘cash-back’ to customers any year that passes without flood or fire emergencies.
Today, with private corporations running home insurance, their incentive is to maximise profit for shareholders, and minimise claim payouts to their customers, while charging impossibly high premiums for hundreds of thousands of us living in high-risk fire- and flood- prone areas. And for millions of us lucky enough never to have made a claim, what a monumental waste of money home insurance has been!
Corporate home insurance is failing Australians. It is past time to nationalise home insurance again.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
