Insurance capacity, pricing, and availability for Northern Territory tourism operators are under renewed scrutiny after a series of severe weather events left some businesses facing large uninsured flood losses.
Tourism businesses across the NT are assessing the impacts of repeated storms and floods over the 2025-26 wet season, with operators indicating that the combination of physical damage, reduced trading, and limited access to affordable flood cover is affecting business operations. The recent passage of ex-Tropical Cyclone Narelle over already saturated northern catchments added to earlier heavy rain and flooding, affecting tourism infrastructure across the Top End. In March, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) indicated northern Australia was heading toward one of its wettest wet seasons on record, prompting partial closures at Kakadu National Park ahead of the Easter long weekend.
Among the hardest-hit operators is Douglas Daly Holiday Park, more than two hours south of Darwin. Owner-operator Leanne Lane said the park experienced three severe flood events in March alone, causing widespread damage to core assets. She said repair and replacement quotes so far total “about $600,000+,” covering electrical systems, plumbing, kitchen equipment and the site’s fuel infrastructure. “I’m just a local territory family [business] who put everything into the park. This is all I have – so if I go under, I’m stuffed,” Lane said, as reported by ABC. She said she attempted to secure flood insurance before the recent events. According to her, a broker approached more than 20 underwriters but was unable to obtain flood cover at a premium below about $100,000 a year. While she has insurance for bushfire and cyclone risk, she said she expects to fund flood repairs from her own resources.
Lane’s broker has written to the NT government, describing “recovery challenges that cannot be overcome without external support” and requesting direct financial assistance as well as longer-term approaches to disaster coverage, “including increased accountability from underwriters operating in the region.” Lane has also contacted the NT government herself, arguing the impact extends beyond her business to the wider regional community. The park is the only location within about an hour’s drive where residents and travellers can access fuel and collect mail, making business continuity a local service issue as well as a private commercial concern. “I really don’t know if I’ll be able to open my doors without assistance, that’s for sure, because I’m just about out of money,” she said.
Further north, on Bremer Island off the coast of Nhulunbuy in Arnhem Land, ex-Tropical Cyclone Narelle damaged a luxury retreat operated by Eileen O’Doherty and Fulvio Inserra, who took over the business 13 months ago. Several bungalows lost their canvas roofs during the storm. “I believe it does make it more difficult to get insurance next year, and that’s when the government needs to help,” Inserra said. He said community volunteers have been helping with clean-up efforts, and the couple is attempting a partial reopening over the Easter period. “We’ll certainly be impacted this weekend, but we’ve got to open. The locals are supporting us, [so] if nothing else, for them,” Inserra said.
Tourism Top End general manager Samantha Bennett said the sector is encountering insurance constraints in many high-risk areas. Insurance is “an incredibly big problem for our industry, Australia-wide. Getting insurance in a flood zone is difficult but let’s face it, visitors want to be near the water. I don’t know what the solution is, but it needs a federal government response,” Bennett said. NT Minister for Tourism and Hospitality Marie-Clare Boothby said she is working with the Australian government on support measures. “We’ll have more to say very soon about support for businesses – particularly tourism operators – who’ve been impacted by the floods,” Boothby said.
The NT experience is unfolding against a broader backdrop of what the Climate Council has labelled “climate whiplash” – rapid shifts between fire, heat, storms, and floods over short time frames – with potential implications for catastrophe modelling, portfolio management, and pricing assumptions. In its report, “Breakneck Speed: Summer of Climate Whiplash,” the council argues that record levels of coal, oil, and gas pollution are increasingly overshadowing traditional climate drivers such as El Niño and La Niña. The analysis notes that 2025 both started and ended in La Niña, historically associated with cooler and wetter conditions for parts of Australia, yet it was assessed as the country’s fourth-hottest year and the world’s third-hottest year on record.
Climate Councillor and meteorologist Adjunct Professor Andrew Watkins said: “Climate change is now firmly behind the steering wheel of Australia’s temperatures.” He said warmer oceans and atmosphere are increasing atmospheric moisture, leading to heavier rainfall during storms. According to the report, some western Queensland towns received roughly a year’s worth of rain within the first five weeks of 2026, followed by a tropical low in February that triggered flood watches “across nearly half the continent.”
The council highlights a series of summer 2025-26 events in which communities moved quickly from fire danger to flooding and back to extreme heat, including along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, across the Eyre Highway corridor in Western Australia, and in parts of South Australia that shifted from record high temperatures to intense rainfall within days. Climate Councillor and former New South Wales fire commissioner Greg Mullins said conditions once regarded as “once-in-a-generation events” are now being observed more frequently. “The climate baseline has shifted, and that means bigger, more dangerous, destructive fires flaring up more quickly, more often,” Mullins said. He added that “accelerating extremes are stretching fire services,” citing a day when Victorian firefighters were called to 200 fires, contributing to the loss of 451 homes and more than 1,000 other buildings.
Mullins said, “disasters are costing Australians dearly,” pointing to analysis that insurers paid out an average of $4.5 billion per year between 2019 and 2024, more than double the average annual catastrophe costs over the previous 30 years. He warned those costs “will continue to balloon” without faster policy action to curb emissions and expand clean energy. The convergence of NT case studies and the national climate data is likely to inform ongoing discussions about the long-term insurability of high-hazard regions, the application of risk-based pricing, and the possible role of government-backed mechanisms, mitigation investment and public-private partnerships in maintaining coverage availability and managing accumulation risk across portfolios.
