Small businesses, not-for-profit organisations and farms in North Queensland continue to struggle to access affordable and adequate insurance, Queensland Law Society (QLS) representatives told a federal parliamentary hearing in Brisbane on Monday.
QLS deputy president Sarah-Jane Macdonald, deputy chair of the accident compensation and tort law committee Luke Murphy, and competition and consumer law committee member Paul Holmes gave evidence before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services' Inquiry into Small Business Insurance - a probe into whether insurance products are keeping pace with the risks faced by smaller enterprises.
"Our submission highlights the difficulties faced by small businesses in obtaining and affording adequate insurance, particularly in regions of Queensland that are subject to natural disasters such as flooding," Macdonald said.
The inquiry - referred to the committee in October 2025 by assistant treasurer Dr Daniel Mulino and chaired by senator Deborah O'Neill - was launched in response to the escalating cost of insurance and its reduced availability, which has left many small businesses either underinsured or uninsured. A reporting date is set for October 27, 2026.
Holmes pointed to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's northern Australia insurance inquiry as a relevant framework, noting that its recommendations - though originally focused on residential properties - had direct application to small businesses. He argued that insurers should be required to share individual risk information with business owners, enabling operators to make targeted improvements to their properties in exchange for lower premiums.
"If you put one of your buildings up higher so that any flood would pass underneath it, your insurance premium might go down by 10, 15 per cent," Holmes said, adding that a combination of broad guidance and property-specific advice from insurers would yield the best results, given that neighbouring properties could carry materially different flood-risk profiles.
Holmes also called on insurers to share the granular data they already hold to assist business owners in making risk-mitigation decisions. "If a business has been affected by two floods and it's gone through a property at two metres, one of the obvious things that if I'm an insurer I would hope I'd want to do is say to that business owner, 'if you manage to get your power points up at three metres, that's going to reduce your risk of having a major impact when this flood comes through again,'" he said.
The hearing reflects a broader national concern. Queensland's insurance revenue grew 16.2% over two years to $3.44 billion as of March, driven by the state's complex risk profile combining flood, cyclone, storm surge and bushfire exposures. Risk-based pricing has created sustained affordability challenges across parts of Queensland for many years.
A separate finding from a May hearing underlines how the regulatory framework compounds the problem. The National Insurance Brokers Association told the same committee that small businesses purchasing commercial lines - including public liability and business interruption cover - fall outside the retail client definition under the Corporations Act, leaving them without the consumer protections that apply to personal lines such as home or motor insurance.
On civil liability, Murphy defended Queensland's compensation frameworks as among the most stable in the country, citing WorkCover and compulsory third-party regimes that have operated under pre-court procedural processes since 1994.
"Our CTP regime is one of the, if not the most financially stable and sustainable CTP regimes in the country," Murphy said, contrasting Queensland's performance with that of Victoria and New South Wales.
Murphy also pushed back against characterisations of Australia as a highly litigious society, noting that fewer than 2% of personal injury claims in Queensland proceed to trial, with around half resolved without formal legal proceedings being instituted.
Macdonald said Queensland's current legislation already allows courts to appropriately limit liability and that the QLS submission found "no need for significant reform of civil liability settings in Queensland" - a position that implicitly pushes back against broader reform pressure the inquiry may yet generate when it reports in October.
