A landlord in Adelaide has claimed that insurance companies refused to cover his property in Hindley Street because it is too risky.
Landlord Alex Radda told ABC that he owns a building in Hindley Street, where he used to lease a cocktail bar. However, his tenant’s business insurance premiums quadrupled in around 12 months.
“They’re paying around about $13,000 a year for their business insurance. [Meanwhile], we were paying $3,000,” said Radda. “That’s a really big jump in the space of, [let’s say], 12 months.”
Now, Radda claimed that he cannot find an insurer willing to cover his building in the street because it was deemed “too risky,” with businesses operating during usual business hours the only exception.
“We’ve been told by various brokers and people in the insurance game that Hindley Street has just been assessed as too high [of a] risk,” he told ABC. “Your primary insurers … literally just won’t offer insurance anymore to the street.
“If you’re in a profitable business, you have to take the good with the bad; you can’t just sort of cherry-pick and just say: ‘No, we only want the policies that are always going to be 100 percent profitable.’”
A study conducted by the Climate Council published early this year warned that one of 25 residential and commercial buildings – equivalent to 520,940 properties – across Australia will be “effectively uninsurable” by 2030, with the figures reaching as high as nine in 10 in the worst-impacted suburbs.
In a previous statement, Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie said: “Climate change is playing out in real time here, and many Australians now find it impossible to insure their homes and businesses. Over the past eight years, the Federal Government has failed to meaningfully tackle climate change or prepare Australians for the worsening extreme weather events that we are now experiencing.”
With the worsening impacts of climate change on the country, the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has called for all Australian governments to invest in extreme weather resilience. Meanwhile, last year, major insurance companies founded the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) and vowed to transition their insurance and reinsurance underwriting portfolios to net-zero greenhouse gases by 2050.
