Following Wednesday’s national cabinet meeting, the federal government announced new measures to try and stop violence against women. Prime minister Anthony Albanese said $925 million will be invested over five years in the Leaving Violence program. Other actions include moves against harmful online content like deepfake pornography.
The Centre for Women’s Economic Safety (CWES) recently released a report that looked at how to make the Insurance Contracts Act 1984 (IC Act) safer for women. The report’s author was Catherine Fitzpatrick, adjunct associate Professor at UNSW’s School of Social Sciences.
The IC Act provides standards for insurance policies and covers industry issues from flood definitions to fairness and transparency,
“But nowhere does it address domestic and family violence and financial abuse,” said Fitzpatrick.
Leanne Ho is a partner with specialist insurance law firm Wotton + Kearney (W+K). Her team provided pro bono research on how the IC Act could be modernised.
“Ninety-nine per cent of cases of domestic violence involve some form of financial abuse,” said Ho. “Insurance can be used as a tool of financial abuse.”
One focus of the research was finding out how many Australian insurance firms have product innovations in their insurance policies, like a “Conduct of Others” clause, to address financial abuse.
“The Conduct of Others clause enables payouts for intentional damage that would otherwise be excluded,” said Ho. “This means in cases where the damage is caused by a perpetrator of violence as part of an attempt to abuse a partner or ex-partner, that payouts can still be made.”
The CWES engaged an advisory panel of women whose experiences are detailed in the report. The testimony of women like Maddy and Liz (their names were changed) show how important protections like the Conduct of Others clause can be.
“He threatened to burn the house down with us inside it,” said Maddy. “[Then I] discovered that the home wasn’t insured…they’d cancelled the policy and given him the refund as he’d asked them to [even though] the policy was in joint names.”
Liz, another member of the panel, held a joint motor insurance policy with her former partner.
“[He] took the whole insurance payment for himself when the car was written off, despite our joint policy,” she said. “[There was] no query or follow up or intervention from [the insurer].”
Statistics show that these situations are not uncommon.
“It's crazy,” said Ho. “That you can have a situation where a victim survivor of violence has no idea that she has no insurance – because it's been cancelled without her knowledge.”
Ho and her team also looked at insurers in other countries.
In the UK, US and Sweden, she said, there are some “green shoots” of insurance innovations that directly target domestic violence.
“For example, where the victim survivor doesn't have to pay an excess where the perpetrator has caused intentional damage to a vehicle,” said Ho. “Or where the insurer actually pays a couple of thousand dollars to support a victim survivor where they're a customer who's needed to find safety in a shelter.”
Ho said it’s very important to send a clear message to insurers about what they can do.
“The report asks that terms and conditions make it clear that misuse of policies simply won't be tolerated and if you're using insurance policies as a weapon of abuse, your products and services may well be cancelled,” she said. “In fact, you might even be referred to law enforcement.”
The first CWES report of this kind was aimed at Australia’s banks. Fitzpatrick said 14 banks have adopted the new terms and conditions.
“We want to fix loopholes that enable perpetrators to cancel or change policies without the knowledge or consent of the survivor,” said Ho. “We're saying that both parties should be treated equally by an insurer.”
The CWES report, Designed to Disrupt: Reimagining general insurance products to improve financial safety, proposed a Financial Safety by Design framework for general insurers.
19 recommendations are in the report, including calls for the industry to include Conduct of Others clauses as standard.
A report released this week by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) said 34 women were killed by an “intimate partner” in 2022-23, an increase of eight on the previous year.
According to Counting Dead Women, which keeps an updated register of women killed by violence in Australia, 28 have been killed since January.
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