Federal parliamentary inquiry into insurer response to the 2022 floods & other matters gets the go ahead on 7 August 2023

Hon Stephen Jones MP, Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services, media release, 3 August 2023:

Insurance claims handling under the microscope in parliamentary inquiry into insurer responses to the 2022 floods

Today, the Assistant Treasurer will give notice to the House of Representatives tabling a motion to establish a Parliamentary Inquiry into insurer responses to the 2022 floods. The motion will be presented to the house on the next day of sitting, Monday 7 August.

The inquiry will take a whole of economy view of the ongoing challenges faced by intense and frequent flood events.

It is consumer focussed - investigating land use planning, affordability of coverage, supply chain issues, labour shortages, claims handling, and dispute resolution processes.

The February-March 2022 floods in South‑East Queensland and NSW are the costliest natural disaster for insurance costs, totalling around $5.87 billion, in Australian history.

The Assistant Treasurer has visited the communities impacted by floods in Southeast Queensland with Graham Perrett MP and the Northern Rivers with Janelle Saffin MP; and following a visit to flood ravaged towns in Central West NSW last month announced the inquiry alongside Member for Calare, Andrew Gee MP.

Today, the Albanese Government has released the terms of reference.

The committee will hear directly from affected communities, holding public hearings across the country in regions affected by the 2022 floods. A final report will be handed down during the third quarter of 2024.

The Inquiry will inform the Albanese Government’s broader program of work to address insurance access and affordability. This includes up to $1 billion over five years from 2023-24 (up to $200 million per year) to invest in measures that better protect homes and communities from extreme weather through the flagship Disaster Ready Fund.

The Government is taking proactive steps to mitigate disaster risk and build climate resilient communities. Currently, 97% of disaster funding is going toward recovery and only 3% toward risk mitigation. We want to flip that on its head.

The terms of reference for the inquiry are below.

The Standing Committee on Economics for inquiry and report by quarter 3, 2024:

1. response of insurers to the claims resulting from major 2022 floods, including:

(i) south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales (NSW) floods of February and March 2022;

(ii) Hunter and greater Sydney floods of July 2022;

(iii)Victorian, NSW and Tasmanian floods of October 2022; and

(iv) central west NSW floods of November and December 2022;

2. the inquiry shall have regard to the following matters in respect of the aforementioned floods

(i) the experiences of policyholders before, during and after making claims;

(ii) the different types of insurance contracts offered by insurers and held by policy holders;

(iii) timeframes for resolving claims;

(iv) obstacles to resolving claims, including factors internal to insurers and external, such as access to disaster hit regions, temporary accommodation, labour market conditions and supply chains;

(v) insurer communication with policyholders;

(vi) accessibility and affordability of hydrology reports and assessments to policy holders;

(vii) affordability of insurance coverage to policy holders;

(viii) claimants’ and insurers’ experience of internal dispute resolution processes; and

(ix) the impact of land use planning decisions and disaster mitigation efforts on the availability and affordability of insurance.

3. the inquiry shall also have regard to insurer preparedness for future flood events

4. the inquiry will take into consideration findings from other reports such as Deloitte’s external review of insurers’ responses to the 2022 floods, and ASICs Claims Handling review. 

The House of Representatives agreed to the creation of this inquiry on the afternoon of Monday 7 August 2023.

Tweed Shire Mayor Chris Cherry: "I think that [the 2022 flooding] has been a big wake up call for all of us."

 

IMAGE: Google Earth snapshot showing 40 Creek Street, Hastings Point & environs. Retrieved 7 August 2023. Click on image to enlarge.

In the matter of Development Application DA20/0386 for a 13 lot subdivision (11 residential lots, 1 drainage lot and 1 residual dedicated riparian lot) at Lot 156 DP 628026 No. 40 Creek Street, Hastings Point made on behalf of Queensland-based Palm Lakes Works Pty Ltd on est. 17.77 ha of flood prone, environmentally sensitive, estuary land which includes preferred koala habitat and SEPP14 wetland.

The Tweed Shire Council meeting which refused development consent saw councillors cast their votes 6 to 1. The sole councillor in support of the DA, was former National Party campaign director and former mayor Cr. Warren Polglase, who in speaking to the motion was moved to utter words to the effect that he did not believe that climate change was occurring here not having seen it with his own eyes. 

Echo, 7 August 2023:

Click on image to enlarge

The Tweed Shire Council has refused a development application (DA) for an 11-lot subdivision at the site of 40 Creek Street, Hastings Point.

The site is zoned residential but ‘has significant environmental constraints as well as being flood prone’ according to the staff report. Despite that, Council staff recommended approval of the DA.

Mayor Chris Cherry told the Council meeting (3 August) that in 2019 she had been one of the councillors to propose ‘in-principle support’ of the subdivision.

‘Looking through that and looking at what that support was based on, it was conditional support based on this application not increasing its development footprint. It was based on it complying with a number of different conditions that were very important to the council of the day and the community.’

Councillor Cherry said point six of the in-principle support stated that:

‘Any future development application that proposes to increase the number of lots, reduce the size of lots or vary any other developments controls to intensify yield or the development footprint or further impact on the buffer or environmental areas will not be looked on favourably by Council.’

Cherry went on to detail a number of ways that the current DA went beyond the basis of the in-principle support, saying that in ‘the proposal in 2019 only three of the lots were intercepting into the 75m ecological buffer zone. Now most of them are, I think seven of them now [are] into that 75m buffer zone. So the developable footprint has increased.

‘The lot for the existing house was 800 square metres in the plan in 2019. It is now 1,470 metres square.

2022 flood

‘There are a lot of changes that have been made that increased the impact of this development. But the biggest thing that has happened in the time since the in-principle support was given is the 2022 floods. I think that has been such a big wake up call for all of us. And we’ve heard today from the flooding experts, from Floodplain Management Australia and the planning expert who came forward, just how much consideration we should be giving to the location, to the impact of storm surge in a climate change future that we are most definitely going to see. And I think it is imperative that we take this very seriously. [my yellow highlighting]

‘Most of you would have seen the article in the Sydney Morning Herald [saying] that it is inexplicable that Hawkesbury Council keeps approving developments of a floodplain when they have gone through such a massive flood. It is the same for us. We can’t keep repeating the same mistakes. We can’t keep saying it will be okay. To put 2.2m of fill across this site to get flood immunity for the new residents is simply not the way. That’s not good planning. That’s not the way we need to go forward as a community…..

Full article here.

Gumbaynggirr custodians are calling for our help to protect forests of the proposed Great Koala National Park

 

Approved plans for forestry operations at Newry State Forest were made active last week.(Supplied: Bellingen Activist Network) IMAGE: ABC News, 3 August 2023.

Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales, email, 5 August 2023:

The battle to protect the Great Koala National Park is ramping up. Will you support the Newry Forest protest camp and Gumbaynggirr traditional owners to protect this culturally and ecologically significant site?

…., for the past few days Gumbaynggirr custodians, environment groups and the wider community have peacefully protested to save the forest from logging destruction.

The forest has recently won a few moments of temporary reprieve from the bulldozers in the past few days. The campaign has had a series of powerful protests and received coverage in the Coffs Coast Advocate, NBN, NITV, and The Echo.

Gumbayngirr traditional owners Sandy Greenwood, Uncle Micklo Jarrett and Uncle Bud Marshall.

But the fight is not over and those at the camp are calling out for your support.

“If we don't act now our deeply significant cultural heritage will be desecrated, our beautiful old-growth trees will be logged, rare flora will become extinct and our koalas and endangered species will literally have nowhere else to go.” Sandy Greenwood, Gumbaynggirr Custodian.

This alliance has catalysed around a peaceful protest camp at the entry of the forest. This camp has served as an important place for meetings, events and interviews with journalists.

Are you able to put your name down to help out at camp?

Sign up here to get involved

Whether you’re able to visit once or take on a weekly task—there is something for everyone to do.

“It would be a disaster and a disgrace to see some of our totemic animals like the Koala disappear for motives of greed.

“The ancestral beings gave us our lore, our culture, and taught us how to live in harmony with the land. Everything was precious – we needed these places to survive. If they keep going like this we won’t have forest left. This forest needs to be a sanctuary for our people and other animals.”

Gumbaynggirr spokesperson, Micklo Jarrett.

This campaign to protect Newry State Forest relies on people like you stepping up and working together.

Please sign up here and a camp organiser will get in touch with you about next steps.

In the inspiring words of Sandy Greenwood: “The time to act is now—we will save our forests.”......

Ed Mortimer

Organising Director

Nature Conservation Council of NSW

https://www.nature.org.au/

In 2023 Science has the tools to refine its climate change predictive scenarios, never-the-less the Earth's land masses & oceans continue to heat up because neither world leaders, governments nor industry will accept what is now the increasingly urgent evidence of their own eyes

 

“Warming oceans cause sea levels to rise, both directly via heat expansion, and indirectly through melting of ice shelves. Warming oceans also affect marine ecosystems, for example through coral bleaching, and play a role in weather events such as the formation of tropical cyclones” [The Conversation, 14 September 2021, reporting on research by Kewei Lyu, Xuebin Zhang & John A. Church]

This is a Australian Bureau Of Meteorology visualisation of sea surface temperatures around the Australian coastline on 4 August 2023 as El Niño conditions continue to be expected to arrive within weeks.

On 1 August BOM stated:

The Bureau's El Niño Alert continues, with El Niño development considered likely in the coming weeks, despite the current lack of atmospheric response. When El Niño Alert criteria have been met in the past, an El Niño event has developed around 70% of the time.

Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the tropical Pacific are exceeding El Niño thresholds, with climate models indicating this is likely to continue at least through to the end of the year. In the atmosphere, however, wind, cloud and broad-scale pressure patterns mostly continue to reflect neutral ENSO conditions. This means the Pacific Ocean and atmosphere have yet to become fully coupled, as occurs during El Niño events. El Niño typically suppresses winter–spring rainfall in eastern Australia.

And this is what is being discussed by climate scientists in our region.

Asia Oceania Geosciences Society, 20^th Annual Conference, Axford Medal Lecture given by UNSW Emeritus Professor John Church, 2 August 2023:

What do we really know about 20th and 21st Century Sea-Level Change?

Abstract: Accelerating sea-level rise in much of the world will result in growing impacts through the 21st century and beyond. Despite the clear identification of an accelerating rise, many uncertainties remain. Understanding historical sea-level change is a prerequisite for building confidence in useful and accurate predictions of future changes.

For many decades, our limited knowledge of the contributions to sea-level change could not explain the rise measured by coastal tide gauges – the sea level enigma. New and improved in situ and satellite observations of the ocean, improved understanding of the “solid Earth”, and better understanding and improved modelling of the climate system have helped resolve this enigma. A number of recent studies have argued that the sum of contributions from both observations and model estimates to sea-level change over the satellite era, the last half century and since 1900 adequately explains the observed sea-level rise, which means the sea-level budget is closed. The major contributions are from ocean thermal expansion and contributions from glaciers, with an accelerating ice sheet contributions over the recent decades.

Our recent work has explored the sensitivity of global and regional sea-level reconstructions to poorly known land motions and the factors causing temporal and regional variations in the rate of rise. With this knowledge, existing reconstructions of global mean sea level are mostly not significantly different to each other from 1900 to the present, both in the time-averaged rate and the temporal variability. However, while the average rate over 1900 to present is similar to that from the sum of contributions, the rate of reconstructed GMSL rise is significantly smaller/larger than the sum of contributions prior to 1940/after 1970. Why is this? What do we really know? What are potential explanations for this continuing enigma?

And what can we project about future sea level, both for the 21st century and beyond. And can we constrain projections for the 21st century and beyond?

One of the notable take-aways from this lecture appears to be:

..that one of the main impacts of sea level on society will be how we adapt.

“We will have to adapt to that sea level rise we can no longer prevent. Of particular concern is very significantly increased rates of coastal flooding events and eventually inundation of some coastal areas,” Prof. Church said.

“We are already experiencing more severe and more frequent coastal flooding events impacting an increasing number of people.

“This century, we could expect up to about a metre of sea level rise with unmitigated emissions. This could rise to several metres over coming centuries. Today, an estimated 200 million people live within one metre of current high tide level, and by mid-century over a billion people are likely to live in the low elevation coastal zone, which is within 10 metres of current sea level.” [UNSW Newsroom, “'Urgent action is required’: UNSW climate expert on what’s to come as sea levels rise”, 2 August 2023]

A reminder that much of the NSW Northern Rivers coastal region is predicted to experience significant levels of inundation at an average global surface temperature rise of 1.5°C.

Climate Central, north-east NSW (Northern Rivers) mapping, 2021. Click on image to enlarge

BACKGROUND

John Church is an Emeritus Professor in the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales. He has published across a broad range of topics in oceanography.

His area of expertise is the role of the ocean in climate, particularly anthropogenic climate change, and in understanding global and regional sea-level rise. He is the author of over 180 refereed publications, over 110 other reports and co-edited three books. He was co-convening lead author for the Chapter on Sea Level in the IPCC Third and Fifth Assessment Reports. He was awarded the 2006 Roger Revelle Medal by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, a CSIRO Medal for Research Achievement in 2006, the 2007 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research, the 2008 AMOS

R.H. Clarke Lecture, the AMOS Morton Medal in 2017, a joint winner of the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Climate Change Category Prize in 2019, the AAS Jaeger Medal in 2021 and the Royal Society of NSW James Cook Medal in 2022. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

Cartoons of the Week

 

A tale of two former leaders

Scott John Morrison & Donald John Trump at the height of their  political careers before the fall into public disgrace and infamy

Getty Image circa Sept. 2019

As both men are seen in Australia in July 2023

Blameless
Cathy Wilcox

In a pickle
Jon Shakespeare

A classic doorstep interview with the mother-in-law of a NSW politician

Excerpt from an article in The Sydney Morning Herald on 3 August 2023:

Outside her large home in the seaside suburb of Merewether, Santina Manitta berated reporters and warned they would be shot for asking questions about the family’s property holdings at the heart of this saga.

As for her besieged son-in-law, she had this to say: “My son is a f---ing politician. F--- you and f--- them.”

Pressed over why her son-in-law had been sacked, Manitta could not offer any explanation.

“Truly, sincerely, I don’t give a s---,” she said. “Look, you’ve got to understand politicians are there because they’re f --- ing dumb.

“I told you if my son get arrested, good, I’m happy for him ... because he should never have been a politician. It is wasting his time.”

It was only hours after Crakanthorp was sacked as a minister and referred to the corruption watchdog for failing to disclose “substantial” private family holdings and breaching the ministerial code of conduct.

tenor.com

Nationals MP for Page Hogan fails to understand that neither climate change nor the weather gods obey governments

 

No amount of intervention can stop heavy rain or high tides and, in this age of rapidly changing climate, flood mitigation is not just about building levies and dams.

Flood mitigation now means the implementation of actions to reduce or eliminate the long-term risk of flood-damage to buildings and infrastructure which include building disaster resilience into the reconstruction process, while at the same time lessening the impact on communities.

I for one am glad to see that those four tranches in the Northern Rivers Recovery and Resilience Program will make major road evacuation routes more reliable through road & bridge raising. That extra water pump capacity is entering local government systems and pumping stations will be more flood resilient. While in some council areas town drainage will be upgraded where required and in others earth mounds are being created to manage flood flow direction or provide stock refuge.

It is embarrassing to see that the National Party has learnt so little from the unnatural disasters of 2019-20 and 2022, that Kevin Hogan feel comfortable contributing nothing but grumbles and gripes.

Clarence Valley Independent, 2 August 2023:

Federal Member for Page Kevin Hogan has criticised the Albanese Government’s $100 million announcement for 20 projects in the Northern Rivers Recovery and Resilience Program as they won’t lower flood levels.

Last Friday, Federal Minister for Emergency Management Murray Watt visited Coraki to announce the latest tranche of funding which will see raised bridges, widened flood channels, and improved drainage in the townships of Woodburn, Coraki, and Lismore as some of the projects.

Mr Watt said the projects would help communities be more prepared for future disasters.

“We know the job is far from done when it comes to recovering from the multiple recent floods, and we continue to work with all levels of government to roll up our sleeves and fast-track work where possible,” he said.

“But while we’re recovering, we must also prepare for the future.

“The majority of these new initiatives will improve community connectivity and economic resilience through transport infrastructure and evacuation route upgrades, and they complement the work we’re doing through other programs, like the Disaster Ready Fund which saw over $17 million invested in Northern Rivers projects in round one.”

New South Wales Minister for Emergency Services, Jihad Dib said the NSW Government is working to reduce the risk natural hazards pose to communities across the state to build resilience.

“The Northern Rivers Recovery and Resilience Program means we can support communities in the region as they prepare for disaster, with the aim of reducing loss of life, the load on our emergency services and the overall impact of natural hazards,” he said.

Projects included in the funding include raising the level of two low set bridges at Tatham to improve access between Casino and Coraki during floods, widening Browns Creek flood channel at Lismore, new and upgraded pump stations, town evacuation plans, plus reforestation and revegetation in the Clarence, Richmond, Tweed and Brunswick catchments to provide nature-based flood mitigation.

But Kevin Hogan says the money should have been used for flood mitigation projects.

“The community would feel exceptionally disappointed by projects announced by the Federal Government today as they contain no effective flood mitigation works,” he said.

“These are all flood resilience projects.

“They are not flood mitigation projects, which is what this funding was intended for.

“Spending on flood mitigation means the level of water would be lower in future flood events.”

The 36 local projects funded under the initiative have been recommended by CSIRO following an $11.4 million review plus extensive community consultation and have been agreed by the Federal and NSW Governments.