A low pressure system originating near Antarctica is forecast to bring damaging winds, heavy rain, hail, snow, and low temperatures across five states and one territory – Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, and the ACT – between Saturday, August 8, and Monday, August 10, opening a concurrent multi-state claims window for brokers operating across a market that ranks second only behind the US for economic and insured losses per capita over the past 45 years, according to Munich Re data.
According to Weatherzone, the low-pressure system is tracking northeast from the Antarctic edge and is forecast to travel more than 4,000 kilometres between Wednesday and Saturday, passing to the south of Australia over the weekend while drawing a mass of polar air northward across the Southern Ocean. Western Australia faces the first impacts, with the cold front expected to arrive in the state’s southwest on Friday night into Saturday morning, bringing rain, thunderstorms, gusty winds, and the possibility of small hail. Perth’s maximum temperature on Saturday is forecast at 16°C, with wind chill expected to make conditions feel below 10°C for most of the day. South Australia follows, with the front crossing the state from Saturday afternoon into Sunday. Adelaide faces a forecast maximum of 16°C, damaging wind gusts in parts of the state, and widespread rainfall as the system moves through.
The broadest insurance exposure is in southeastern Australia. Weatherzone reports cold air is forecast to spread across Victoria, New South Wales, southern Queensland, and the ACT from late Sunday into Monday, with Tasmania to follow on Monday. Damaging to destructive wind gusts are forecast across Victoria, New South Wales, and the ACT, with blizzard conditions expected in the Alps. Some areas may receive 50 mm to 100 mm of rain within 24 hours, with the heaviest falls concentrated along the ranges of central and northeast Victoria and southern New South Wales.
No Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) event declaration had been made at the time of publication. It is too early to determine the insured cost of the latest weather system or whether it will trigger an ICA event declaration. However, for insurers, brokers, and risk professionals, its significance extends beyond any individual claims outcome, as the event adds to a succession of severe weather incidents that continue to shape Australia's insurance market.
That context is precisely where the broker’s value is most visible. National Insurance Brokers Association (NIBA) CEO Richard Klipin, writing in the Insurance Outlook Report 2026, stated: “When something goes wrong, the first person you call is your broker.” The report identifies brokers as increasingly central to how organisations think about resilience – not just risk placement – as climate events, cyber incidents, and operational disruptions become more frequent.
Under an ICA catastrophe declaration, claims from affected policyholders are prioritised and triaged to direct urgent assistance to the worst-affected property owners, ICA disaster response specialists are mobilised to work alongside government agencies and emergency services, and an industry taskforce is established to address insurance-related issues. A significant event may be escalated to an insurance catastrophe if there is a material increase in claim numbers or complexity, or if the geographical spread of the event extends.
For brokers with clients across the affected corridor, a system arriving simultaneously across five states and one territory within a 48-to-72-hour window compresses the timeline for client communication and claims lodgement support. Commercial clients with outdoor assets, construction sites, agricultural operations, or supply chain dependencies spanning multiple affected states face concurrent exposure across several insurable lines.
Australia’s insurers recorded almost $3.5 billion in extreme weather losses across 264,000 claims in 2025, across five events formally declared significant or catastrophic by the ICA – the North Queensland Floods in February, Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred in March, the Mid-North Coast floods in May, and two severe storm events in October and November. Released in August 2024, the ICA’s Insurance Catastrophe Resilience Report 2023-24 found Australian insurers have paid an average of $2.1 billion a year in claims from declared extreme weather events over the past 30 years. Over the past five years, that annual average has more than doubled to $4.5 billion, driven largely by the growing cost of flood losses. Loss estimates also continue to develop after an event is declared. According to the ICA Data Hub, Cat 255 – the Queensland and New South Wales severe storms and hail event of November 2025 – had recorded $2.22 billion in incurred losses, with $1.01 billion in outstanding claims.
Each weather event now lands against a deteriorating structural position. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) released its Insurance Climate Vulnerability Assessment (Insurance CVA) in March 2026 – the first stress test of its kind globally to focus on the insurance protection gap through an analysis of affordability. The home insurance protection gap widens under both climate scenarios modelled, from an estimated one in seven households uninsured today to one in four households by 2050, equivalent to an additional one million homes without adequate cover.
In the higher physical risk scenario, expected national weather losses could increase from less than $7 billion annually in 2024 to over $16 billion annually by 2050. Between 2010 and 2025, Australian home insurance premiums rose by an annual average rate of 7.2%, while wages grew annually by 3.1%. That premium-to-income divergence is already being felt in underinsurance rates across regional communities – precisely the areas that recurrent multi-peril winter systems tend to affect. For brokers, these figures are not abstract projections. They represent the client base most likely to be underinsured at the moment a claim is lodged – and the environment in which the broker’s advisory role carries the most weight.
Brokers with clients across Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, the ACT, and Tasmania are advised to monitor ICA and Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) warnings as the event develops. The State Emergency Service can be contacted on 132 500 for emergency assistance; triple zero should be called in life-threatening situations.
