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McKenzie Ross McKenzie Ross Insurance Brokers. Independent by choice. Expert by design. By your side always. And when it counts most? We see what others miss. We size risks right.

Helping businesses take control of risk—through clarity, creativity, and action. For over 30 years, McKenzie Ross has protected businesses through tailored risk and insurance solutions. We know there’s no such thing as the perfect policy—only the right one for you. From life sciences to recycling, aviation to amusements, we’ve built deep expertise across complex and technical industries. Our fiercely independent model gives us access to 100+ local and global insurers—so we act only in your best interests. Our in-house, onshore claims team becomes your secret weapon. Because great coverage is just the beginning—real peace of mind comes from knowing you’re never alone. We help you move forward—confidently.

Hosting a Halloween event this year?In the US, where the data is most thoroughly tracked, roughly a quarter of all Hallo...
05/10/2026

Hosting a Halloween event this year?

In the US, where the data is most thoroughly tracked, roughly a quarter of all Halloween related emergency room visits come from people simply tripping, on costumes, on decorations, on something that wasn't there the rest of the year. Fire related burn injuries also spike sharply around Halloween, largely from candles and open flames meeting flammable costume material. And assaults tend to rise too, a combination researchers link partly to the drink promotions that come with the night.

None of that's Australian specific data, but every driver behind it applies just as much to a venue here. Low light, costumes, candles, bigger crowds, more alcohol moving through the room than a normal night.

As risk advisors, this is the walkthrough we'd actually recommend before the night, not the standard one. Check exits and walkways with the lights down low, the way they'll actually be on the night. Swap any real candles for battery versions. Confirm your crowd numbers still make sense against venue capacity once costumes and low visibility are factored in. And if you're running drink promotions, have a clear plan for managing the crowd as the night builds, not just at close.

Small checklist, five minutes, and it's the difference between Halloween being a great trading night or an unusual claim waiting to happen.

Would a Titanic sized insurance claim actually get paid faster today, with all the technology available now, or slower?M...
03/10/2026

Would a Titanic sized insurance claim actually get paid faster today, with all the technology available now, or slower?

Most people would assume faster. History says otherwise.

In 1912, Lloyd's insured the Titanic for £1 million on a premium of just £7,500. The eventual claim amounted to roughly 20% of the entire market's marine premium income that year, one of the largest single losses Lloyd's had ever faced. Despite that scale, White Star Line was paid in full within 30 days, with nothing more advanced than a telegraph and a signature.

A modern equivalent ship carries hull cover worth hundreds of millions, sometimes over a billion. Insurers today have satellite tracking, digital flight and voyage data, drone surveys and forensic marine investigators, none of which existed in any form in 1912. And yet a claim this size today would typically take considerably longer to resolve, often months or years, once multiple insurers, reinsurers and legal teams get involved.

Somewhere between 1912 and now, more capability quietly turned into more complexity. Maybe the real question isn't why claims take longer now, it's whether 1912 got it right because there was nothing to argue about, and today there's plenty.

As brokers, we're the ones who end up chasing these decisions. A client calls asking why their claim's been sitting unto...
01/10/2026

As brokers, we're the ones who end up chasing these decisions. A client calls asking why their claim's been sitting untouched for months, we're the ones on the phone to the insurer, pushing for an actual answer. So this update matters to us differently than it might to most people reading it.

What's currently the case. Right now, there's no hard deadline forcing an insurer to actually decide a claim. The industry's own code of conduct exists, but it's largely voluntary, insurers commit to it without it being legally binding inside the policy itself. That gap shows up in the numbers, general insurance complaints rose 17% last year, and delayed claim handling was consistently one of the top issues raised. Every broker reading this already knew that number before it was published.

What's changing. The General Insurance Code of Practice has just been through a full redraft, and it's in the works to become contractually enforceable for the first time, meaning the commitments insurers make will actually sit inside the contract, not just alongside it. One of the practical changes on the table, a claim left undecided after 12 months will be automatically accepted, exceptions aside. It's still making its way through approval, so it's not landing tomorrow, but it's a real shift once it does.

Why it's happening. This follows a formal review process and a parliamentary inquiry into how insurers handled the 2022 floods, both of which found real gaps in how claims were being managed and communicated. This isn't a voluntary tidy up, it's a direct response to people being left waiting too long, too often.

What this really does is gives us a hard backstop to point to on a client's behalf, rather than relying on goodwill and persistence alone. Which insurer you're actually placed with still matters more than any code sitting behind it. Some insurers rarely go anywhere near that 12 month mark to begin with. That's the part a rule can't fix, and it's the part we still get paid to

This was a warning shot aimed at anyone who handles client payments, invoices or transfers. Which is most businesses.For...
29/09/2026

This was a warning shot aimed at anyone who handles client payments, invoices or transfers. Which is most businesses.

For years, the quiet assumption was simple. Someone gets scammed, that's on them. They clicked the link, they sent the payment, bad luck, better luck next time. That assumption just became a very expensive one to hold onto.

The Federal Court ordered HSBC Australia to pay a $35 million penalty after the bank admitted to failing to protect customers from scams, on top of $21.5 million it had already paid out in compensation. Put those two numbers together and the message from the court is blunt, protecting people from fraud isn't a nice to have anymore, it's an obligation with a price tag attached when you get it wrong.

This isn't really a banking story. It's a signal that the old logic, the person who clicked carries the loss, is shifting toward the business holding the process carrying more of it than it used to. That's a real change in where responsibility sits, and most businesses haven't updated their thinking around it yet.

The first fix isn't insurance, it's process. Do you have steps in place, or has your team even been shown what a scam invoice actually looks like?

The second fix is then the policy, for when the process fails anyway, because eventually it will. Does your cover actually respond to a scammed invoice, or only to a stolen laptop and a broken window?

Genuinely curious how many people reading this have a proper verification step in place already. If you do, what does it actually look like day to day?

Most liability insurance works on the same basic principle. Someone has to prove negligence, that a person or a business...
27/09/2026

Most liability insurance works on the same basic principle. Someone has to prove negligence, that a person or a business actually did something wrong, before compensation gets paid.

Clinical trial insurance in Australia doesn't work that way, and the reason comes down to a fairly simple asymmetry. A trial participant is taking on genuine, sometimes unknown risk, largely to help produce results that benefit other people down the track, not themselves. In early phase trials especially, there's often no real therapeutic benefit to the participant at all. On top of that, a lot of what goes wrong in a trial isn't actually anyone's fault. The treatment does something unexpected, the science doesn't behave the way it was predicted to, and there's no negligence to point to at all. Under a normal liability model, that means no payout. Under clinical trial cover, it doesn't matter, if the harm happened as a result of taking part, compensation is paid regardless.

That's why it's structured as no fault cover. The participant carries the risk, everyone else gets the benefit, so the compensation doesn't wait on working out who's to blame.

A properly structured policy usually adds a few things on top of that no fault layer. Legal liability cover, medical malpractice cover for injuries arising from the medical services delivered during the trial, and in some cases, cover for the cost of repeating a portion of the trial if something goes wrong procedurally and the data has to be discarded.

What it doesn't cover is the trial simply failing to produce the result researchers were hoping for. That's a research outcome, not an insurable event.

Fire authorities have released their national outlook for spring, and the risk is up across most of the country, south e...
25/09/2026

Fire authorities have released their national outlook for spring, and the risk is up across most of the country, south east Queensland, northern and south eastern NSW, Victoria, north eastern Tasmania, parts of WA and SA, and large parts of the Northern Territory.

It's still early enough to actually do something useful with that. Worth a proper look at property cover now, particularly for anyone in one of the higher risk areas, rather than waiting until the season's already underway and everyone's trying to sort the same thing at once.

A conversation now takes twenty minutes. A conversation in the middle of an active fire season takes a lot longer, and it usually happens under worse conditions than anyone would like.

Two policies can sound almost identical on paper and cover completely different things, and this is one of those areas w...
24/09/2026

Two policies can sound almost identical on paper and cover completely different things, and this is one of those areas where the wording genuinely matters more than people assume.

A named risks policy covers a specific list, and if the event isn't on that list, it's not covered, no matter how reasonable it might seem that it should be. An all risks policy works the other way around, it covers everything except what's specifically excluded. On the surface it sounds like a fairly small difference. In practice, it's the single most common reason a claim doesn't go the way someone expected it to.

Nobody wants to find out which one they've actually got at the worst possible moment, standing in a damaged property trying to work out what's covered. If you've never actually asked which type of policy you're holding, it's a genuinely worthwhile five minutes with your broker, and far better to have that conversation now than later.

A volcano went off in Indonesia last week, and the scale of it was genuinely significant. Over 150,000 people ended up s...
21/09/2026

A volcano went off in Indonesia last week, and the scale of it was genuinely significant. Over 150,000 people ended up stranded, and airports across Jakarta, Bali and Sumatra shut down within hours of it happening.

The insurers aren't arguing about whether the eruption happened, that's not in question, everyone agrees on that. What they're actually working through is the exact hour it officially became what they call a "known event."

That distinction matters more than you'd think. Buy your travel policy before that hour, you're covered, no issue at all. Buy it after, even if it's only a couple of hours later, and you might genuinely find yourself without cover.

I know that sounds like exactly the kind of technicality people tend to roll their eyes at, but it really isn't just that. It's the same underlying logic that applies to storms, to cyber incidents, to supply chain issues, essentially anything that builds up gradually before it actually breaks. Once you can already see the risk coming, the cover you buy stops behaving the way most people assume it will.

So if you've got a few minutes this week, it's worth actually asking where that line sits on your own policies. Ask now, while everything's calm, rather than waiting until something's already brewing. By then, it's usually too late to do much about it.

Your reminder that this started 1 July and a lot of businesses still haven't worked out what it means for their cash flo...
09/09/2026

Your reminder that this started 1 July and a lot of businesses still haven't worked out what it means for their cash flow, let alone their liability exposure.
Non-compliance isn't just an ATO fine. It's a management liability risk. If you've got a management liability policy and haven't looked at it since before this came in, worth a conversation.
Link in bio.

You're insured. But are you insured for what it actually costs if damage occurs?The average gap after the 2022 floods wa...
03/09/2026

You're insured. But are you insured for what it actually costs if damage occurs?

The average gap after the 2022 floods was $100,000 out of pocket.

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3000

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