A Snowy Mountains property client of Finsura Insurance Broking pays about $300,000 a year for a property insurance program and still cannot buy the bushfire cover it needs. Barry Sonter (pictured), Finsura's head of national accounts said the market will write only about 40 per cent of the bushfire limit required, leaving the rest uninsured.
That is often the arithmetic of Australia's affordability problem. For brokers with clients whose properties face some risk of extreme weather - in this case bushfire - this is happening in a market generally considered to be soft.
Sonter, NIBA's 2023 National Broker of the Year, was talking with Insurance Business at this week's NIBA Convention on the Gold Coast. He joined the industry in 1981 and has been at Finsura since 1993. He was direct about where the current rate relief is going and where it is not.
"If the market's still tough for certain industries right now and we're supposed to be in a soft market, what's going to happen when it hardens up?" he said.
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It is a question with an uncomfortable answer for brokers managing catastrophe-exposed books, because the headline numbers suggest a market awash with capital. Marsh's Global Insurance Market Index put the Pacific composite rate down 12 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, the largest regional decline worldwide. Aon's Q1 2026 Global Insurance Market Insights report described Australian property pricing as soft at minus 11 to minus 20 per cent, with capacity "abundant" and limits increasing. Those declines have continued: Marsh recorded an eighth consecutive quarter of global rate decreases in Q2 2026, with property down 12 per cent.
None of that reaches a bushfire-rated risk in the Snowy Mountains.
Sonter's account of the shift is a geographic one. Before the 2019-20 bushfires, he said, placing full bushfire ratings through that part of southern New South Wales presented very few problems. Capacity has returned somewhat over the past few years, but some risks on his book are still only 20 to 30 per cent placed.
The pattern he describes – abundant capacity for clean risks, rationing for cat-exposed ones – is consistent with what underwriters themselves are signalling. Catastrophe-exposed property continues to attract close scrutiny in flood, bushfire and cyclone-prone regions even as the broader commercial market softens, according to market commentary from Meridian Lawyers' 2026 Australian insurance market update.
Sonter's more pointed claim is about pricing conduct in areas where the modelled exposure may not match the ground truth. Better mapping and better underwriting tools have sharpened pricing in genuinely high-hazard locations, he said. But he argued the same tools are being applied to localities that do not carry the exposure attributed to them.
"I think underwriters are taking advantage of that fact and increasing premiums significantly," he said.
That is a broker's assertion rather than a documented finding and insurers would contest it. But the affordability data gives it context. Finity's analysis put the average Australian home insurance premium at $2,938 in October 2025, up 51 per cent over five years from $1,940. The Actuaries Institute's most recent Australian Actuaries Home Insurance Affordability Index, covering the year to March 2024, found 15 per cent of households – about 1.61 million – were paying more than four weeks of gross household income for home cover, up from 12 per cent a year earlier. Those stressed households spend an average of 9.6 weeks of gross income on the premium.
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Sonter put retail premium movement higher than the national averages, citing household premiums he has seen move from around $3,000 a couple of years ago to $6,000 and $7,000 now. Those are his observations in specific high-hazard postcodes, not a market-wide measure and the gap between them and the national mean is itself the point: averages conceal the geography.
The loss experience behind the pricing is not in dispute. The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) reported in April 2026 that extreme weather generated $4.8 billion in insured losses during 2025 across about 294,000 claims – a 727 per cent increase on 2024 – with more than $4.1 billion of that from Queensland alone. The average cost per claim rose 39 per cent to $16,471.
Sonter does not expect the commercial easing to hold. He is seeing improvement of perhaps 5 to 10 per cent on the genuinely good risks, but he thinks the cycle will turn, as it always has. His advice to younger brokers is about what they do with the soft market while they have it.
"You've got to realise which underwriters helped you when the market was tough," he said – a warning against moving accounts around purely on price while capacity is cheap, then needing those same underwriters when it is not.
That has a practical edge for anyone broking cat-exposed business. Capacity relationships built in a soft market are the ones that get tested in a hard one and a client who has been shopped three years running is a weaker proposition at renewal when the market tightens.
It also lands close to what two of this year's state Broker of the Year winners told Insurance Business ahead of Tuesday's national award. KBI's Brooke Tarr framed affordability as a three-way arrangement between client, broker and insurer, and argued that premiums follow the preventative risk work. Aon's Alison Gemmell pointed to the interaction between legislation and market availability. Sonter's contribution is the market-conditions caveat sitting underneath both: none of it changes the fact that in certain flood and fire locations, the cover either cannot be bought or cannot be afforded.
"But will it get easier? Don't think so. Not in my opinion."
