A Federal Court judge's intervention into a horror Northern Territory airboat crash made headlines last week. But for the insurance market, the more useful story sits in a separate fight in the same court file: an insurer's refusal to indemnify a high-profile tourism operator over an alleged breach of its vessel's passenger limit.
The crash happened on May 10, 2023, when an airboat carrying 13 passengers hit a tree in the Finniss River system near Bynoe, south-west of Darwin, during a tour run by Top End Safari Camp, the tourism venture owned by Netflix "Outback Wrangler" star Matt Wright and his wife, Kaia. Two women were reportedly airlifted to hospital with serious injuries. The crash has since triggered proceedings in three separate courts, plus a criminal prosecution brought by NT WorkSafe.
At a Federal Court hearing last week, Justice Michael Lee asked why the litigation was fragmented across the Federal Court, the NT Supreme Court and the Victorian Supreme Court instead of proceeding as a single class action. Describing the situation as "beyond me," he suggested the parties consider cross-vesting the matters into one court to cut down on legal costs.
That's the headline. The interesting insurance angle is the cross-claim sitting inside the same proceeding: a coverage dispute between the operator and its insurer, Allianz Australia, that turns on named insured drafting, vessel certification limits and warranty breaches.
Read next: Tourism cover hits a wall
According to court filings, the eight applicants in the Federal Court action, members of the Payne and McFarlane families, who were on a corporate retreat, say they were given minimal safety briefing before boarding, and that the vessel had no seatbelts, no working radio and no first-aid kit on board.
They allege the driver kept travelling at speed toward a visible tree before the collision, and that passengers were left stranded in crocodile-populated waters for an extended period before a rescue boat, and eventually a helicopter, arrived. The claim seeks damages, aggravated and exemplary damages, and compensation under the Australian Consumer Law for alleged unconscionable conduct.
Top End Safari Camp, Mr Wright and Mrs Wright are contesting the claims. Their defence disputes much of the applicants' account, denies the boat driver was their employee, and argues there was no legal requirement for the airboat to carry seatbelts at the time. The Wrights also deny they personally owed the passengers a duty of care.
But the part likely to interest brokers and claims teams more than the passenger claims themselves is the cross-claim the operator and the Wrights have filed against Allianz Australia Insurance, after the insurer declined to indemnify them.
Allianz's defence confirms Top End Safari Camp held a commercial hull policy covering the airboat, known as Gale Force, but argues Matt and Kaia Wright were never named insureds under that policy. Allianz's argument is that means they aren't personally covered for any liability arising from the passengers' claims. It's a distinction that comes up often in tourism and small-business liability disputes, and one brokers get told to check at every renewal: is the policy written to the company, the individual directors, or both.
Allianz's stronger argument goes to the vessel's certification. The insurer alleges Gale Force was certified by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority to carry one crew member and 12 passengers - 13 people in total - but that 14 were on board, including the driver, when the collision occurred. The insurer says that exceeding that limit breached Commonwealth maritime law, breached a licensing and registration warranty in the policy, and triggered an exclusion for illegal operation of the vessel. The insurer says that combination entitled it to avoid the policy altogether.
Australian courts have gone this way before: breaches of a registration, licensing or crewing warranty have voided cover regardless of whether the breach caused the loss, in cases heard through the Federal Court of Australia. For an operator relying on a single hull and liability policy to cover an entire tourism business, a successful avoidance argument leaves a gap in cover at exactly the point multiple injured parties are chasing damages.
Justice Lee seemed to grasp how much turns on that one point. He asked why the insurance dispute couldn't be resolved quickly, at one point asking why it couldn't be dealt with "next week" and noted its outcome would affect the viability of all three sets of passenger proceedings, with a large amount of money at stake in litigation while the coverage question sat unresolved. He has ordered the Federal Court proceeding, including the Allianz cross-claim, into mediation before a court registrar by September 28, with the matter returning to him on October 2.
This isn't the first coverage fight to follow one of Mr Wright's ventures through the courts. A separate 2022 helicopter crash, a different incident from the airboat crash, but also involving a business Mr Wright owned, killed his Netflix co-star Chris Wilson and left pilot Sebastian Robinson a paraplegic. That crash produced its own insurance dispute, with Mr Wright cross-claiming against insurer HDI Global Specialty and broker Unity Insurance Brokers after his claim was knocked back.
The same crash also produced a criminal case. In August 2025, a Supreme Court jury found Mr Wright guilty of two counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice over the post-crash investigation - lying to police about fuel levels at the scene, and pressuring the injured pilot to falsify flight records. The jury couldn't agree on a third count, over an alleged instruction to destroy a maintenance document. None of the charges related to the cause of the crash itself. Mr Wright was sentenced in December 2025 to ten months' imprisonment, suspended after five, and was released in May 2026; he is appealing the convictions.
Two incidents, two different vehicle types, two coverage disputes: the common thread for underwriters is overlapping policies, unclear named insured structures, and warranty conditions tied to regulatory certification that operators can breach in the ordinary course of running the business.
For underwriters and brokers in tourism and marine liability, the case is a reminder to check passenger caps, crewing certificates and named insured schedules more closely at renewal than is typical, especially where the client is a mix of companies and individual owner-operators. And fragmented, multi-plaintiff litigation cuts both ways on cost: it can blow out defence spend and delay resolution for the insurer holding the risk just as easily as it burdens claimants, which is exactly what Justice Lee raised from the bench.
The civil claims run alongside a separate criminal prosecution brought by NT WorkSafe against Top End Safari Camp and the Wrights over workplace safety breaches connected to the same crash, which returns to the Darwin Local Court on October 1.
This article discusses ongoing civil litigation. All allegations against Top End Safari Camp, Matt Wright and Kaia Wright are contested and have not been proven in court.
