Submission to NSW Independent Bushfire Inquiry

We have made a submission to the NSW Bushfire Inquiry drawing on over 90 separate services to Australians  who were directly affected by bushfires between November 2019 and February 2020 and who continue to need legal support regarding financial hardship or an insurance dispute. 85 % of our services were to NSW residents.

Our submission highlights the ongoing failure of NSW to support residents in appropriately insuring their properties through:

• the lack of mitigation works and oversight
• making insurance more expensive through taxes, stamp duties and emergency levies on home insurance premiums – the latter was meant to be removed but NSW failed spectacularly to implement the Emergency Services Levy reforms a few years back
• not assisting in the coordination, collection and provision of publicly held data for the insurance sector and consequently consumers in adequately assessing homeowners’ risks

Some of our most important recommendations were:

• The NSW government should fund an independent home resilience assessor which could sit within the new Resilience NSW agency.
• NSW should implement a state-wide programme of grants and subsidies for individual mitigation works that can increase bushfire resilience for homes.
• The NSW Government should remove the emergency services levy from insurance premiums and collect it via a property based model as has been done interstate and reinstate the ESL Monitor