Michael Bailey: What are people around the table doing in terms of improving the members’ general understanding of what TPD actually means, and the definitions around what they’re exactly covered for around income protection? Arleen Hatton: It depends. Some will say if you educate members too much, claims will go up. And others say if you don’t educate them properly, claims will come down. So it depends which side of the fence you’re on. One of the other contributing factors is the late notification of claims. The minute you have a late notification of claim you have to start working in the past and it’s very difficult to work retrospectively in the past with somebody’s impairment. When were they impaired? When did they become impaired for the first time? Then eligibility becomes a problem. There’s a whole lot of other factors that play a role. So we should educate customers to submit claims sooner rather than later. Richard Weatherhead: We’re all in favour, actually. In a perverse sort of way, the more people claim, the value of insurance is better perceived.

And even if cost go up, I think as an industry, we’ll be in a much better position. Michael Bailey: Can we talk about solicitors for a moment. Michael Rooney, I know you’ve spoken in the past about how they can be a hindrance to the claims’ experience of a member. Can they also be a help to the process? Michael Rooney: They do have a place. My concern with involving the solicitors is quite often they become the cause for delays. Quite often they’re getting paid to help members for what, if the member contacted the fund, would be a simple claim. I’ve got numerous claims I can see on my file where it was a clean and obvious claim. This guy– some cancer, some heart attacks et cetera – would just never work again. And yet, of the $100,000 we’re paying out, 30 or 40 per cent goes to the solicitor for the work they did when this was always going to be a payout. We also find that when you’re dealing with a solicitor, often, for example, if you needed to write to a couple of doctors and you write to the claimant seeking medical authority, the solicitor will say, ‘Until you actually tell us what doctor and why you’re writing to them, we won’t give it to you.’ So they’re building up their costs and delaying the process.