After the flood 79
A strong and effective insurance lobby has been successful in opposing calls
for government intervention and subsidisation (Dolk & Penning-Rowsell
2020). The Australian non-life insurance industry is the most profitable
in the world (Dolk & Penning-Rowsell 2020), and is highly motivated to
minimise government’s role with regard to insurance (ICA 2011; Konrad &
Thum 2012). Governments have been strongly influenced by the technical
and actuarial discourse of resilience, and national and state disaster preparedness materials increasingly cite insurance knowledge, and use of insurance calculators as necessary for resilience, implying moral norms of ‘good’
levels of insurance (Booth & Harwood 2016).
More than financial resilience
Despite their very different insurance contexts, in both Australia and the
United States, financial resilience via insurance is represented in government and insurance discourse as community resilience. As Weinkle (2019,
p. 3) notes:
Rhetoric surrounding the insurance industry… shifts attention away
from the political activities embedded in technical practices, assuming
these practices as separate from the social realm.
In many ways, Hobart and Houston are on opposite ends of the urban spectrum. However, their cases present complementary evidence of how different household insurance regimes reproduce community-level financial
and technocratic resilience discourses while cloaking insurance decisionmaking and further entrenching disadvantage.
In both Hobart and Houston, post-flood resilience was experienced differently by those with differing levels of (dis)advantage. While being insured
offered some financial resilience, insured participants’ perception of their
resilience was dependent on their capacity to manage uncertain and technocratic insurance discourses. Far from the advertised expectation that being
insured allows one to hand over the problem (and the worry) to the experts,
flood victims found that in practice, resilience involved keeping records of
interactions with insurers, doing interim repairs themselves, and necessitated arguing for their entitlements. While participants with time, education, and negotiating experience were largely successful, this process further
entrenched inequality as disadvantaged flood victims were persuaded to
settle for less, or decided in the end to drop out of the insurance process.
Both cases provide examples of how flood insurance can reinforce resilience for some and undermine resilience for others. Renters found themselves outside of the flood insurance system – uninsured, underinsured, and/
or unaware of their flood risk. Insurance-driven recovery processes left renters doubly disadvantaged, often paying for rent on an uninhabitable home
while searching for new or temporary residence. In some cases, property
A strong and effective insurance lobby has been successful in opposing calls
for government intervention and subsidisation (Dolk & Penning-Rowsell
2020). The Australian non-life insurance industry is the most profitable
in the world (Dolk & Penning-Rowsell 2020), and is highly motivated to
minimise government’s role with regard to insurance (ICA 2011; Konrad &
Thum 2012). Governments have been strongly influenced by the technical
and actuarial discourse of resilience, and national and state disaster preparedness materials increasingly cite insurance knowledge, and use of insurance calculators as necessary for resilience, implying moral norms of ‘good’
levels of insurance (Booth & Harwood 2016).
More than financial resilience
Despite their very different insurance contexts, in both Australia and the
United States, financial resilience via insurance is represented in government and insurance discourse as community resilience. As Weinkle (2019,
p. 3) notes:
Rhetoric surrounding the insurance industry… shifts attention away
from the political activities embedded in technical practices, assuming
these practices as separate from the social realm.
In many ways, Hobart and Houston are on opposite ends of the urban spectrum. However, their cases present complementary evidence of how different household insurance regimes reproduce community-level financial
and technocratic resilience discourses while cloaking insurance decisionmaking and further entrenching disadvantage.
In both Hobart and Houston, post-flood resilience was experienced differently by those with differing levels of (dis)advantage. While being insured
offered some financial resilience, insured participants’ perception of their
resilience was dependent on their capacity to manage uncertain and technocratic insurance discourses. Far from the advertised expectation that being
insured allows one to hand over the problem (and the worry) to the experts,
flood victims found that in practice, resilience involved keeping records of
interactions with insurers, doing interim repairs themselves, and necessitated arguing for their entitlements. While participants with time, education, and negotiating experience were largely successful, this process further
entrenched inequality as disadvantaged flood victims were persuaded to
settle for less, or decided in the end to drop out of the insurance process.
Both cases provide examples of how flood insurance can reinforce resilience for some and undermine resilience for others. Renters found themselves outside of the flood insurance system – uninsured, underinsured, and/
or unaware of their flood risk. Insurance-driven recovery processes left renters doubly disadvantaged, often paying for rent on an uninhabitable home
while searching for new or temporary residence. In some cases, property