Mildura is cleaning up after flash flooding this week, just a few years after the Murray River flood event tested the region for months in late 2022. In Alice Springs, where the Todd River has repeatedly roared back to life in recent years, Monday’s flood emergency declaration by the Northern Territory Government has again underscored how quickly “rare” events can become familiar.
For brokers, that shift changes the tone of every conversation. A first-time claimant may be anxious. A repeat claimant is often exhausted and measuring each promise against the last claim’s delays and each next step against the memory of how long it took the last time to get a home or business back on its feet.
“Take some of those really hard-hit areas like around Gympie and the Mary River and Lismore,” said Kate Middleton (pictured top right), deputy chair of the Association of Insurance Building and Engineering Consultants (AiBEC) and head of commercial claims at ARC Projects. “Then you’ve got those central and western New South Wales areas that just seem to get hit every year.”
In these situations, the claims processing scenario comes down to trade availability. So once the emergency work is done, the make-safe is complete and the immediate danger is contained - the timeline is frequently dictated not by goodwill or effort, but by capacity. Brokers can escalate, advocate and chase updates but if the same regions are being hit repeatedly, the queue of damaged properties can quickly exceed the number of builders and specialist trades able to do the work.
This reality is also shaping the industry’s agenda as a key issue at the Claims Leaders Summit in Sydney on May 12, a national forum on streamlining claims handling, improving the customer experience and lifting operational efficiency. Middleton is taking part in a panel focusing on the claims challenges after a nat cat event: Beyond supply chain issues: The real cost and delay drivers post-event
Middleton’s warning to brokers is that the second phase of the claim - the stretch after the emergency response - can be where time expands and trust erodes. When catastrophes stack on top of catastrophes, communities often begin the next event with an invisible backlog already in place. The shortage is not always a distant supply-chain problem; sometimes it’s hyperlocal. In hard-hit regions, trades may be flood-affected too, because they live in the same towns and suburbs as the claimants they’re meant to help.
The broker’s job, then, becomes part advocacy and part translation: explaining to a stressed client why the claim hasn’t “stalled” even if they can’t see progress.
Her advice is to tighten the triangle between insurer, appointed builder and insured early -particularly after the initial report-and-scope stage, when customers tend to assume the “real work” is about to begin.
She urged brokers to be in close contact not only with the insurer, but with the appointed builder, to understand realistic turnaround times and to advocate quickly on the practical steps that can keep a job moving. That means pushing for scope agreement and excess payment, so the repair can be prioritised rather than parked behind a growing queue.
However, Middleton advised brokers against making one commitment that they are often tempted, sometimes pressured into making: providing a completion date.
“I think the worst thing that can happen is if there is a distance between the genuine project schedule and a commitment being made to the insured,” she said. In a trade-constrained market, optimistic timeframes can quickly become liabilities. They create an expectation the repair ecosystem can’t guarantee especially when materials, sequencing and labour availability may not be confirmed until much later.
For repeat-impacted customers, that risk compounds. These clients arrive with lived experience: they remember the last rebuild’s long pauses, the sudden reschedules, the “we’re waiting on…” explanations that didn’t come with any sense of control. If this time they’re given a confident timeline that slips, it doesn’t feel like bad luck - it feels like the system hasn’t learned and the broker hasn’t levelled with them.
Middleton said there are actionable levers brokers can use to positive effect during a challenging claim process: obtain early authority to proceed, within policy limits - particularly for the initial make-safe - so risk is mitigated and momentum begins earlier. That step is not just about stopping further damage. It can establish a builder relationship sooner and if that builder is already an authorised insurance builder on panels, the broker can advocate for a faster assessment and cleaner handover between stages.
Her second lever is communication discipline - tight, realistic and continuous. Middleton said brokers should set expectations that after the initial quote and report, it may take weeks for authority to come through and then further weeks before there’s a “significant update” because trades are being scheduled and materials ordered. Crucially, she said silence can be misread: no weekly update does not mean inactivity.
Even when there’s nothing new to report, Middleton said the builder or broker should still check in with the customer so the customer doesn’t assume the claim has vanished into a void.
If floods are becoming repeat chapters in a client’s life, then the broker’s value is increasingly measured not only by technical proficiency but by steadiness: pushing early where it counts, refusing false certainty and protecting trust while the rebuild has to wait.
