03/04/2026
From the President
I share the concern over increasing insurance costs. Perhaps an explanation of the background and the process we follow for renewal will be helpful.
Historically, the insurance industry’s understanding of what our sports involve was generic, based on a typical dog show and not much more. Two years ago, at renewal time, we found ourselves facing questions that had never been asked before. The whole insurance industry was sharpening its pencils and getting everything clear because of the shock it had experienced with the recent round of floods and similar events.
Now they learnt about car parks beside shows, traffic control obligations, catering, and all the administrative and logistical activities around the show and the show ring itself. That, plus the increases in costs across the whole industry, was where last year’s premium increases came from. This year there were more questions.
We had to explain that we didn’t just show dogs, we did obedience, agility, Rally-O, scent work, trialing, gun dog trials, field trials, lure coursing, and we are interested in developing other activities like dogsprint. I personally wrote narratives describing each activity. All of this information was passed on to the industry across the whole country by our professional insurance broker, through whom the industry had sent us the questions.
Only three companies in the country were willing to consider insuring us at all. We are too complicated and assessing our risks is too hard. After more questions back and forth about how often shotguns were discharged during gundog trials, one of those companies dropped out. We asked the broker to get us prices for two sets of cover, one for the gundog trials clubs and the rest of us separately, and another for both groups.
He went away to get the best deal he could, and the best offer that emerged was from Vero, who decided to impose no additional costs because of a relative handful of people who occasionally let off shotguns. The total cost is pretty much the same as it was last year.
This process took nearly three months. The Treasurer and I spent around five hours altogether in meetings and discussions with the broker. There was more to it than ringing AMI and getting insurance for the house and car!
Now we get to the question of passing the costs on to clubs. Costs were previously weighted across associated, affiliated and recognised clubs on the basis that affiliated clubs had more voting rights than associated and recognised had none. That never made sense to me. Insurance applies to everyone equally.
Changing the allocation so that associated clubs paid more was an initial step towards the situation that will apply from next year forwards, when some more equitable allocation will apply. We don’t know what that will look like yet.
If we added an insurance levy to the membership fee that would cost each member around $12.50. What do people think of that? Just asking, for information purposes, not saying it’ll happen.
