So far, industry response to the Insurance Brokers Code Compliance Committee's (IBCCC’s) damning strata review has varied in tone but there is clear recognition, including from the National Insurance Brokers Association (NIBA), that more needs to be done. Some stakeholders say the broking profession is running out of opportunities to fix problems it has known about for years.
Tyrone Shandiman (pictured), a strata broker and chair of the Australian Consumers Insurance Lobby (ACIL), said the report released Tuesday - which found all seven strata brokers reviewed in breach of the Insurance Brokers Code of Practice (the Code) – has reconfirmed concerns his organisation has raised repeatedly. His message to the industry: address the conflicts of interest now, or have a solution imposed from outside.
"The findings are disappointing, but they are not surprising," Shandiman said. He welcomed the IBCCC’s willingness to investigate brokers but noted more than two years have passed since an ABC Four Corners exposé publicly revealed serious concerns around conflicts of interest and price gouging allegations in parts of the strata insurance market. That the IBCCC considered two cases in its review serious enough to refer them to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) was, in his view, telling. However, Shandiman suggested this level of enforcement action is a long time coming.
"One would have expected the industry to have taken stronger steps to address these issues by now," he said.
"We were told the 2022 Code of Practice was sufficient," he said. In 2024, he said, ACIL raised further concerns about weaknesses in the Code and was told to wait for the next Code review.
“When NIBA released its response to the Code review earlier this year, we said it had completely missed the mark on strata insurance," said Shandiman. "Today, the IBCCC has identified exactly the types of failures we warned about, demonstrating why NIBA's decision not to strengthen the Code is such a missed opportunity.”
Insurance Business reached out to NIBA's CEO Richard Klipin (pictured right) with questions and the broker peak body responded with a statement welcoming the IBCCC report.
"NIBA acknowledges that governance of representative arrangements must be tighter and conflicts need to be actively managed, not just disclosed," said the statement.
However, the peak body said the way the offending brokers in the report "moved quickly once the gaps were identified" to update agreements and strengthen oversight was "a demonstration of continuous improvement in practice."
"This is the Code framework doing what it's designed to do," said the statement.
However, for Shandiman, the IBCCC review points to deeper problems the voluntary broker code is not effectively dealing with.
"The core issue is that some business models create conflicts of interest that are extremely difficult to manage," he said. Where a strata manager also acts as an authorised representative, distributor, or holds a financial interest in the placement, commercial incentives can pull away from the client's interests – the precise structural risk the IBCCC identified in its review.
ACIL has taken that argument into the rewrite of the broking rulebook. In a joint submission to NIBA – lodged with the Owners Corporation Network of Australia and the Unit Owners Association of Queensland – the group argued that a voluntary code should do more than mirror existing law. It called on NIBA to prohibit arrangements that induce strata managers to breach their fiduciary duties, to curb inflated remuneration structures that lift costs to consumers, and to address joint-ownership, joint-venture and dual-role arrangements that it considers create conflicts incapable of being managed at all.
The submission also pressed for comparative commission disclosure - showing remuneration on the current placement against the prior year, with any material change explained - so clients can judge whether a recommendation has been shaped by a shift in what the broker is paid. It pointed to ASIC's Regulatory Guide 181, which requires licensees to avoid conflicts that cannot be effectively managed and to Productivity Commission concerns that commission-based arrangements in strata extend across the distribution chain, brokers included.
Shandiman's strongest warning concerned self-regulation itself. A voluntary code, he argued, should set a higher standard than simply restating legal obligations - and the consequences of failing to do so now reach beyond any single firm. "Ultimately, self-regulation is a privilege, not a right," he said. "If the revised Code does not meaningfully address the issues that have repeatedly emerged through investigations, regulatory reviews and media scrutiny, then government intervention will become increasingly difficult to avoid.”
ACIL has also argued that the IBCCC should be given greater power to impose meaningful sanctions.
NIBA is now consulting on a revised 2026 Code, following the independent review by Phil Khoury that concluded in December 2025 with 14 recommendations.
The takeaway for brokers in the strata sector is reputational as much as regulatory: The conflicts once again revealed by the latest strata review are issues the industry can still fix on its own terms - but perhaps not for much longer.
