Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Are the insurance companies doing us a favour on flood-prone areas?

The thing we’d been warned about with climate change has now happened - AA Insurance has stopped offering new insurance policies for Westport because of the risk of flooding.

At the very end of last year, AA Insurance wrote to the Buller District mayor advising that the company would be putting a - what they call temporary - stop to new insurance policies for properties in the 7825 postcode, which includes Westport, Carters Beach, and Cape Foulwind.

If you listen to the experts, this is just the start. It’s already happening in flood‑risk towns in Australia, it’s now happened here, and it will keep happening until these towns find ways to keep themselves safe through measures like flood defences.

You don’t need me to tell you what this is going to do to property prices. They’re only going in one direction - down. Not least because you need insurance to take out a mortgage.

And you know what happens next, people start putting pressure on the Government to bail them out from dropping property values. They want the Government to buy their houses. They want the Government to provide insurance.

Because that’s what we always do when things go wrong, we turn to the Government to bail us out.

But the Government absolutely should not bail out anyone. Not just because the country cannot afford it - if every homeowner who loses insurance cover because of climate change in the coming decades, or who needs to be bought out for the same reason asks for help, it will cost the country billions of dollars we simply do not have.

But also because, as harsh as it sounds, if an insurance company will no longer cover your house, maybe your house should not be where it is. Maybe the insurance companies are doing us a favour by forcing us to make decisions we’ve been avoiding.

We’ve been dragging our heels on this stuff for decades. But you can’t argue with the market. We are still building in the wrong places - but you can’t argue with the market.

If insurers won’t cover it, taxpayers absolutely should not.

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