The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) is returning to Port Pirie for a second round of face-to-face insurer sessions this month, nearly eight months after a severe storm struck the South Australian regional centre. The repeat deployment is not simply a consumer support measure – it sits inside a documented and deteriorating industry-wide pattern of extended claims resolution timelines, one that current ICA data, Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) complaint figures, and a draft rewrite of the General Insurance Code of Practice are all responding to simultaneously.
The ICA’s July 15 announcement does not mention that this is not the first visit. In early December 2025, the ICA and several insurers held an initial hub at the same Royal Port Pirie Yacht Club venue, at which point insurers were already handling more than 1,400 claims linked to the storm that struck on Nov. 22, 2025. The return on July 29 and 30, from 9am to 4pm each day, signals those claims have not all been resolved. At the sessions, policyholders will be able to meet face-to-face with representatives from multiple insurers to discuss existing claims or lodge new ones, while ICA representatives will be available to explain the claims process, outline dispute resolution pathways, and provide general insurance information.
ICA director of mitigation and extreme weather response Liam Walter acknowledged the prolonged recovery. “The storms that affected Port Pirie late last year caused significant disruption for many residents, and insurers continue to support customers as recovery progresses. These consultations provide an important opportunity for policyholders to speak directly with their insurer about their claim and any questions they may have,” he said.
The Port Pirie event was not declared a standalone ICA catastrophe – it was handled within the broader industry response framework as a significant event, which means it does not carry its own closed-rate figure on the ICA Data Hub. However, the hub’s May 2026 data for the concurrent declared catastrophe – Cat 255, the Queensland and New South Wales Severe Storms and Hail event – provides direct context for the claims environment Port Pirie policyholders are competing within. As at May 2026, Cat 255 had generated 92,700 claims and $2.03 billion in incurred losses, with a closed rate of just 60.2% and $1.15 billion still outstanding. That means more than one in three claims from that single event – the costliest weather event of 2025 – remained unresolved more than six months after it struck, drawing on the same pool of assessors, builders, and loss adjusters that Port Pirie policyholders rely on.
The broader 2025 catastrophe picture compounds this. Across all declared events in 2025, insurers processed approximately 294,000 claims – close to six times the 2024 volume – with the average cost per claim rising 39% to $16,471 and full-year insured losses revised to $4.8 billion, a 727% increase on 2024. ICA CEO Andrew Hall has flagged that the long tail is structural, not incidental: “Storms and hail are complex events that often have a long tail, meaning claims continue to grow months after the event as more are lodged and assessed,” Hall said.
The regulatory backdrop leaves no ambiguity about how AFCA views extended claims timelines. In 2024-25, AFCA received 34,231 general insurance complaints, a 17% increase from the prior year, with the ombudsman noting that high complaint volumes persistently highlight the need for industry to do more to prevent avoidable complaints, particularly where claim delays are the issue. AFCA’s annual review identifies delays in claims handling as the top issue across all weather-related complaints, and while acknowledging that unavoidable delays can occur during significant events, states explicitly that dealing with natural disasters is not new for the general insurance industry and that insurers are expected to have robust plans in place. AFCA chief ombudsman David Locke has framed chronic delays as a failure of internal resolution, not operational capacity alone. “Persistently high volumes of complaints about general insurance demonstrates there is more to be done by the sector to prevent complaints reaching AFCA, particularly in cases where escalation could have been avoided if the issue was simply a claim delay,” Locke said.
The Port Pirie hub arrives as the industry’s own rulebook is being rewritten to address exactly this problem. The ICA opened public consultation on a redrafted General Insurance Code of Practice on June 24, 2026, with the draft introducing automatic claim acceptance for home and motor claims left undecided after 12 months – subject to defined exceptions – and making key insurer commitments legally enforceable as part of insurance contracts for the first time, pending Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) approval.
For compliance and claims leaders, that 12-month automatic acceptance provision converts what has historically been a reputational and AFCA-escalation risk into a hard contractual deadline. Applied to Port Pirie, where the November 22, 2025, storm date means the 12-month mark falls in November 2026, the draft Code – if adopted – would give unresolved claims a defined outer limit. Consultation closes July 21, 2026.
The ICA Data Hub currently lists active catastrophe and significant events stretching back to early 2025, spanning Queensland, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, and Victoria – each carrying its own tail of unresolved claims against which the new Code’s standards would ultimately be measured. Port Pirie is the smallest of those events. The resolution problem it illustrates is not.
