The Insurance Challenge for Residents in Flood-Risk Zones

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Sam Halloran wished to raise his son in the house where his father Leigh had raised him.

However, their dream became a nightmare as the largest flood in recent memory swept through their community in May.

The Manning River rose swiftly, trapping Sam, his wife, and two-year-old son on the second floor of their riverside home near the Taree CBD, in Glenthorne, NSW.

In a dramatic rescue that Sam captured on video from their balcony, his wife and son were airlifted to safety by helicopter.

“It was a big ordeal,” Sam shared with SBS News.

“My wife and son were airlifted by PolAir first. Then they returned to retrieve my roommate who has been living with us downstairs.

“They intended to take me too, but they couldn’t take our two dogs.”

On Facebook Sam wrote of the rescue: “Probably the most traumatic thing I’ve ever endured having to restrain my beautiful two year old son in this bag screaming while his mum was being lifted up and pass him onto the roof to be lifted into the air with her.”

Sam said he decided to stay and wait for a State Emergency Service boat.

“They eventually did come. They came and got me with the two dogs,” he said.

“There was a moment there where we thought we might not get the dogs out, so when that did happen, it was quite a relief.”

Sam said he launched straight into the cleanup and hasn’t fully processed being rescued and coming back to a house left ruined by floodwater, mud and debris.

Sam’s two-year-old son has been having nightmares about the helicopter rescue, he said.

“I’ve got to be here [for the cleanup], but it’s getting harder to get out of bed.”

A dirt street lined with miscellaneous rubbish and debris, covered in mud, with a fire burning in the distance. Floodwater is next to the street, with a line of trees in the distance.

Sam Halloran and his neighbours were forced to start a fire to clear debris left by the floods, with their entire street covered in mud, household items, pieces of fencing, and walls, as residents initiated a large-scale cleanup drive. Source: SBS News

Insurance ‘skyrocketed’ after 2021 floods

Protecting Sam’s dream home and his young family’s future was put at a very high price.

“We had one insurance company that would have insured us, but it was over $30,000 a year, which we couldn’t afford,” Sam said.

The quote provided to Sam in August last year, seen by SBS News, shows the annual premium for standard building and contents insurance on their home was priced at $29,817.91.

Insurance premiums in the area soared out of reach for most after floods in 2021.

This year in the Manning Valley, the flood reached more than a metre higher than four years ago, so the insurance problem is only expected to worsen.

“There’s going to be people that were insured that won’t be insured moving forward,” Sam said.

Leigh, Sam’s father, says he purchased insurance on the same home in 2002.

“I think I paid about $700 to insure the house. Yes, it was 20 years ago, but it’s not comparable, is it?” Leigh said.

“Insurance companies, sure, they’re there to make a profit. I understand that. They wouldn’t exist without profit.

“But at the end of the day, they’re putting premiums up far beyond the average household’s budget.”

The Hallorans said they’d only heard of one person in the area who was insured, but their premium was still over $10,000 a year.

On their street, they didn’t know of anyone able to afford the exorbitant premiums.

“No one in this entire street has flood insurance because they are all quoted around the $30,000 mark,” Leigh said.

In April, financial comparison site Canstar published its analysis of average annual premiums for home and contents insurance across Australia.

In NSW, the average combined policy costs $2,210, based on homes valued between $300,000 and $1.5 million with $50,000 in contents cover.

A young Caucasian man in his thirties smiling and looking off to the right. Wearing a beige cap with sunglasses on top of it, a black hoodie and light grey shorts. In the background is a street seen at sunset, machinery in the background, and signs of damage all around.

Looking forward to raising his son on this scenic street in Glenthorne, NSW, Sam Halloran says insurance was unaffordable for him and all his neighbors. Source: SBS News

Insurance companies, government under pressure to address growing problem

The Insurance Council of Australia has declared the recent NSW floods an ‘insurance catastrophe’, with nearly 8,000 claims processed as of Saturday.

Up to 10,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed, with more than 800 already declared uninhabitable.

During a visit to Taree on Tuesday, SBS News asked Insurance Council of Australia CEO Andrew Hall whether he would support reforms to assist people who can’t afford to insure their properties or businesses in flood zones.

“When we see that happen and particularly in events like we’re going through here at the moment, it underscores the point that we have been making now for a number of years to government,” Hall said.

“Insurance prices [relate to] the risk, and we know that in Australia there are around 220,000 homes that are built in high-risk flood zones like where we are right now.

“We need to come up with a flood defence fund that can better flood-proof those properties, that can lift the home out of harm’s way and, worst-case scenario, we may have to look at buybacks.”

A huge, dense wall of debris including branches and pieces of doors, pushed up against the back porch of a home. The photo taken from inside the home, shows the back door, smashed side window, and how close the debris has been pushed up against the house.

Huge amounts of debris washed up against the back porch of this home in Taree show the scale of the damage caused by the floods. Source: SBS News

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, also speaking in Taree on Tuesday, acknowledged “there are longer-term issues that need to be looked at” to address the insurance problem.

“We recognise that people are doing it really tough. I’ve said that more support is going to be needed,” Albanese said.

“We expect insurance companies to do right by their customers and swiftly process claims. They’ve set up an office here so that they can be dealt with swiftly.

“But our focus now is on the cleanup and recovery from this event. That’s our focus, the immediate needs.”

Federal Minister for Emergency Management Kristy McBain also told ABC’s RN Breakfast program on Wednesday that insurance in flood-prone areas was a “significant concern”.

“We know for a number of the businesses and the farms that we spoke to, they either haven’t been offered insurance or insurance was too expensive for them to take up,” McBain said.

She said she and Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino would be having direct discussions with insurance companies and the Insurance Council.

Sam Halloran told SBS News that the immediate relief provided by the federal government wasn’t proportionate to the scale of the cleanup and recovery facing the community.

“Seventy people from the [Australian Defence Force] … we’ve had more volunteers than that just in our street alone in the last week, so I don’t know what 70 ADF members are supposed to do,” he said.

“I’ve got people here working that have run their own businesses, they’re sole operators, and they’ve donated their time to help me.

“We need machinery. At my place alone, there is something like 400 trucks worth of silt to get rid of.”

Insurance hike set to become ‘unfathomable’

A few doors down from the Hallorans, Daryl Hammond owns a farm. His main business is producing feed.

The seasonal nature of his business, he says, means insurance is nearly impossible for him to get.

“I can’t insure anything because last month I had over 1,000 bales of silage. Come the end of July, August, I might have 50. How can I insure something like that?” Hammond told SBS News last week.

“I’d be onto the broker every second day. It would cost me $20,000 [to] $30,000 a year just to have everything insured if I could insure it. And, I mean, mostly [the insurance companies] just shake their head.”

An older man with shoulder-length white hair, wearing a black graphic cap, and red tartan shirt and sunglasses. He is speaking to a dark haired reporter holding up a red SBS News microphone. In the background is a farm scene with blue sky above.

Feed producer Daryl Hammond told SBS News his business was impossible to insure, given the seasonal nature of his industry, and the flood-prone area in which he operates. Source: SBS News

For Hammond, the Hallorans and their neighbours, they want to see change. The community wants to keep living where they have deep roots and connections, but also wants a way to protect their future.

“Houses like this are not a river frontage, there is a farm between us and the river. At the end of the day, yes, it’s in a flood zone, but [the insurance] is becoming unfathomable,” Leigh Halloran said.

“Sam spent his teenage years here. It’s a great community. Everyone just gets on perfectly, and it was a great place for him to grow up, and he wants to raise his son in this community, you know? Which is really, really nice.”

Sam Halloran says it’s impossible to predict what Mother Nature is going to do, but all levels of government need to work harder to prevent the impact of disasters on regional communities.

“The 100-year flood development control in our local council area is, at the moment, 5.2 metres,” he said.

“Anyone building a new house had to have a floor level of 5.7 metres. This flood was nearly 6.5 metres. So, someone could have built a brand-new house close to the river, had full insurance and still had this water through the house.

“It’s something that we can’t control. You can’t not live near the river.”

Sam says with the level of damage seen in the homes and businesses of Taree, insuring “is going to get worse, not better”.