A sacred place to meet with your family and friends, to explore and celebrate Māori culture, to welcome visitors and farewell your departed. The marae – a complex of buildings and grounds belonging to a particular iwi – is a vital part of Māori society in Aotearoa New Zealand, with most iwi, hapū and even small settlements having their own marae.
Marae are treasured by the iwi they house, however, finding insurance protection for them has proved costly and at times extremely difficult to obtain. Marae usually house many valuable cultural artefacts- taonga, and few insurers are willing to try and price and cover the risk of their damage. The difficulty of ensuring that marae are earthquake compliant has also driven up insurance costs, as has the general remoteness of sites and lack of adequate water supplies for firefighting purposes.
Awataha Marae CEO Anthony Paetawa Wilson commented on the difficulty back in 2016, telling Te Ao Māori News about the challenges of trying to insure the whakairo housed by marae.
“We’ve tried to insure our whakairo,” he explained. “There is no one who is willing to accept or to give evaluation to value our whakairo so we can’t actually fully protect them. It is a concern for us, because it means that all of the taonga that we have here and all of the marae throughout the country are at risk at any one time all of their cultural assets.”
“We are currently paying tens of thousands of dollars now just to cover the basics, public liability is a minimum cover of two million dollars.”
The New Zealand branch of global insurance brokerage Willis Towers Watson currently has a practice specifically dedicated to securing insurance protection for marae. When speaking to Tainui Group Holdings CEO Chris Joblin, Willis Towers Watson account director Vedi Angjelinovic was faced with these very same obstacles to obtaining insurance. That’s when a project was initiated to assess the insurance needs of marae in the Tainui region, and to create a collective insurance scheme focused specifically on their needs.
“We started this practice approximately four years ago,” Angjelinovic told Insurance Business.
“There were about 63 marae in the Tainui regions which needed some form of insurance, and those that already had it were definitely paying very high premiums. So we asked a select group of marae for their insurance policies, documents and invoices, and we found that the premiums were all over the place in terms of cost, but all were very expensive and coverage needed improvement.”
“We then reported those figures back to Chris Joblin, and we decided to put together a group insurance scheme, where Tainui Group Holdings would pay the insurance for all the marae in the iwi.”
32 marae joined the scheme within its first year, and by the end of that year, almost all the marae in the region had come on board. Previous UK-based policies protecting valuable cultural artefacts had previously been geared specifically towards museums, but Willis Towers Watson negotiated a policy specifically tailored to the needs of marae, managing to secure a broad range of cover.
Angjelinovic says the scheme was a huge success, and ultimately, premium costs for the iwi were reduced very significantly.
“The scheme also gave the marae a lot of certainty around the coverage,” he explained. “Insurers tend to have control over how claims are settled, so we managed to give the reasonable control back to the individual marae – so they had more say in how a cultural item would be replaced, for example.”
“It was a big success – great coverage, and everyone is getting insurance which is all paid for and organised by the iwi,” he continued. “We saw that the smaller community marae were also impacted quite severely by premium costs, so we formed the iwi practice out of that to provide the cover required. Overall it has been a really satisfying sector to work with, and we’ve managed to provide reasonable solutions to the needs of many people- a lot of whom were losing sleep over not having any insurance at all.”
The practice is now in full swing, and is assisting marae across the country with their insurance protection needs. Angjelinovic says it has also opened up other markets for the company, as insurers are now knocking on their door to find out more about the iwi practice – something they certainly weren’t doing before.
“In that sense, we’ve managed to reverse some of the perceptions among insurers that marae are difficult to insure,” he commented. “It’s definitely one of the most successful schemes that we’ve ever set up for a group of clients.”
