Major insurers are failing Australians with confusing ‘fire’ cover

If your home is lost or damaged by fire, you should be able to rely on your insurance to cover you. It’s what you’ve paid for.

But right now, there is no standard definition of ‘fire’ across insurance policies. This means individual insurance companies are free to define ‘fire’ however they like – and these definitions can give them leverage to deny your claim.

There’s already a standard definition of flood which insurance companies have to use, but this only happened after overwhelming public pressure to put an end to this unconscionable practice following the 2010-2011 Queensland floods.

It should be easy to know what you’re covered for when you buy insurance. Right now, insurers are making it too hard to understand if you’re covered for disasters by relying on tricky terms and vague language.