Page 145 - Be Reasonable – Do It My Way , Peter E. Daly AM, My Story

CHAPTER 13 - NORWICH WINTERTHUR INSURANCE AUSTRALIA LTD
financial adjustment, Unfortunately the partner had agreed as long as the adjustment was in the books in the hope that the matter would be rectified, but this never happened. In my particular case, I was totally unaware of what was happening and hence his inability to attend the meeting and explain the issue was most embarrassing.
I found Australia very different to South Africa in many ways. We have State Governments and both Federal and State legislation applying to insurance. The Trade Practices Act meant that there was strong competition on pricing and a little in the way of industry agreements, although it took a long time for the Marine insurers to actually understand that. We were also competing with State- owned Government Insurance Offices in every State and Territory. It wasn’t a level playing field, especially as they were not subject to regulation by the Insurance and Superannuation Commission (ISC). Finally, of course, we had to deal with a unionised workforce.
Insurance was seen as a soft touch by governments and insurance was heavily taxed both to fund the Fire Brigades and to pay stamp duty. It is amazing that the movement to change Fire Brigade funding onto council rates or other mechanisms is still meeting resistance mainly in New South Wales, after all these years.
So, what did we do? Well, first of all we rounded up an awful lot of the agency and orphan business and literally gave it to members of staff or other agents, who took it on as managing agents or preferred agents. Many of them started their own businesses for the first time in their lives.
We developed Brokers and we particularly developed partners. We tried to introduce the South African Home Plus concept but found that monthly policies simply wouldn’t work in Australia because the list of requirements and a combination of the Insurance Contracts Act and State taxation made it impossible to have a pure monthly policy, paid monthly at an affordable price.
One of the most successful things we did was to introduce self- insurance, especially for workers compensation through the
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