In Victoria, he has long volunteered in bushfire recovery – rebuilding farm fencing, helping with dead livestock clean‑ups and supporting farming communities, including during recent blazes in the Grampians. His home in Ballarat has even operated as an informal refuge, taking in evacuees arriving with caravans and livestock as fires advanced.
That background meant he thought he understood what disaster looked like on the ground. Bloomfield, a small Far North Queensland community still dealing with the aftermath of Tropical Cyclone Jasper’s 2023 floods, changed that.
“Bloomfield was a once in a lifetime experience,” he said. “I’d never walked into a town where people’s houses were simply gone.”
Still was in Bloomfield in September as part of Vero’s community engagement program aligned to the National Insurance Brokers Association (NIBA) Young Broker of the Year Award. For three days, the five 2025 finalists joined local volunteers to restore the town’s central community hall, the Tin Shed – an old RSL building that became a crucial hub during and after Jasper.
For a broker whose catastrophe focus had been overwhelmingly fire‑related, the scale and nature of the damage were confronting.
“Floods were new to me - I hadn’t seen anything like Bloomfield,” said Still.
The group heard accounts of water reaching 16–18 metres – higher than two‑storey houses – and residents clinging to tree branches to avoid being swept away. In some cases, the only evidence of a home was a bare concrete slab and a patch of tiles where a two‑storey house once stood.
The work in Bloomfield centred on turning the Tin Shed back into a functional, safe community hub. The visiting brokers helped install a full kitchen, tile and refit the interior, supported by Vero funding and community grants. The aim was to give residents still living in caravans a place to access food, showers and basic services while longer‑term rebuilding continued.
That physical work was matched by sobering conversations. Bloomfield’s population is less than 300, but two years on from the flood, its impacts are still very present. About 10 people are still homeless and living in caravans.
For Still, one of the most striking features of Bloomfield was how little formal insurance protection had been in place. Many residents either had no cover at all or lacked flood cover that could respond to the event that actually hit them. When the water took their houses, it effectively wiped out their wealth.
That underinsurance challenge is not new to the industry. But seeing it concentrated in a single, small community – one where, as locals told the group, very few outsiders had physically come to help – sharpened the issue in practical terms. It also shifted flood from a theoretical exposure into a personal priority for Still.
“Coming out of this experience, flood [cover] is definitely going to be something I’ll recommend to everyone, because I wouldn’t want any of my clients to go through that, to lose everything,” said Still.
The visit highlighted the structural difficulties around flood cover that brokers and insurers have been grappling with for years: affordability for high‑risk properties, availability in remote and regional areas and the tension between actuarial pricing and community expectations. Still acknowledged those pressures but argues that the sector needs to be more ambitious in finding ways to extend meaningful protection.
“I’m going to work really, really hard to make a flood policy that is available to every person here in this country,” he said.
Bloomfield was not just a volunteer exercise; it was designed as a leadership development and policy‑shaping experience. The experience is feeding into a broader conversation about how the industry and government share responsibility for increasingly frequent and severe natural catastrophes. Still and his peers are already discussing the role of government‑backed mechanisms, such as the existing cyclone pool and whether similar approaches are needed across a wider range of perils.
“It’s great to have insurance bodies that are looking after a lot of the insurance stuff, but with natural disasters coming through left, right and centre now, you can’t expect insurance companies to pick up the bill,” he said.
That stance goes to the heart of an emerging policy debate: how far private insurers and global reinsurers can realistically carry the risk of climate‑charged catastrophes and at what point the government needs to step in as the backstop for essential protection. Still’s view is that natural disaster recovery should increasingly be treated as a national resilience issue, with government ultimately ensuring citizens are not left destitute after major events.
The NIBA–Vero program is giving a cohort of young brokers a channel into that discussion. With NIBA CEO Richard Klipin and senior Vero executives engaged directly with the group, there is an expectation that the lessons from Bloomfield will feed into advocacy around flood, underinsurance and the design of future catastrophe arrangements.
For Still, the trip has already changed how he thinks about risk – and about the people behind each policy. Bloomfield has become a case study in what happens when extreme weather, structural underinsurance and geographic isolation collide. It has also become a catalyst for a group of emerging industry leaders to push for solutions that go beyond a single town, towards a more coherent national approach to natural disaster protection.
