The Chaser Report - An Uninsurable Truth

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Finally people who don't own a home in Australia have caught a break! Dom and Charles bring good tidings to all ye who rent, bearing the news that thanks to climate change, all homes in Australia will soon be uninsurable. Plus, which Aussie cities will be the first to sink?---The Chaser Report: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/chaserreport Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 Buy the Wankernomics book: https://wankernomics.com/bookListen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, according to ABC News, and political reporter Jake Evans specifically, nine hours before we record this, Charles, slightly concerning for, look, not everyone. If you don't own a home, this is probably good news for it. It doesn't impact you. At last, there's good news for non-year-old.

You might actually have a little bit of Schadenfreude as part of this. I hope not. But because we've got to care about each other's faces. The reason is that one million Australian homes could become effectively uninsurable by 2050. Oh, is this? Due to climate change. Is this rising sea levels? Yeah, among other things.

It's not just sea levels. Okay, this is great. Let me just briefly explain what this means. So, they're very high risk zones. The insurers won't insure that. This is based on the national climate risk. assessment. And the wider economy is expected to take a hit from climate change as well. Of course. So what this means is a $611 billion property value loss because of the, and by the way,

this is under the two degrees. I love how the only way to convince Australians of climate change to do anything about climate change is to say, but it'll affect property prices. Yeah, well, apparently it will. Catastrically. And by the way, this is if it's two degrees, not if it's more. And it may be more. We know it'll be more. There's also reduced labour productivity of $211 billion. Oh, that's good. We work less. Because we'll be, well, I think it'll be more that we'll be busy trying to defend our

houses from bushfires and floods. You'll be working. Get back to work. It'll just be sandbagging your previously. Work from your flooded home. WFFH. Work from flooded time. Just goes to show we don't need standing desks.

We need stilt desks. Yay. Okay. So even under two degrees warming, some areas will become too costly to live in. Planning laws love to change. And this is the context of the 2035 target. that's going to be announced. So this obviously is a red flag for some.

For others, Charles, in the interest of balance, it's not a reason not to cancel net zero, which the coalition seems to be tearing itself into pieces over. Well, I think Andrew Hastie might have taken himself off the front bench just in the last 24 hours. Potentially, yes. He says all the state parties are looking at this. So there's a big fight over climate for the umpteenth time within the coalition,

watch this space. So they're not particularly. spring into action as a result of this. But it is troubling. I mean, I recently moved house and the new house that I moved into, the insurer that I was with before said it was actually uninsurable. Due to flooding. And I was kind of,

but you insured me around the corner. And they're like, no, no, the new place we reckon uninsurable. Fortunately, other insurers were either more negligent or kinder or whatever it was that they were. But yeah, it was, pause for thought.

Charles, pause for thought. Yes. And that's why, you know, this episode has the possibility of sounding like doom and gloom. But there will be details in it all the way through. Like, this is going to be a fantastic episode.

This is a happy news episode. It is a happy news episode. Partly because, you know, Dom's house is uninsurable. But there's lots of other good shard... And maybe underwater. Yeah. But, Charles, there's also... There's also, just to tip things in the other direction,

what about all the risks they haven't thought about that might make every Australian home basically uninsurable? So let's... We'll get about that. We'll make it even more, do me. I mean, where's the asteroid mitigation in the midst of all this? All right. Let's just take a little ad break, and I'm just going to call my insurance broker and double check that I am, in fact, insured, and then get back to you.

Now, so, Dom, I looked into this a couple of years ago because I read this book, hideous book called The Uninhabitable Earth. Have you read that book? Of course not. Not with a title like that. I want to know. It's by a guy called Bill Cribbon, I think, who now writes for the New Yorker. Of course he does. I think back then he was like the New York Times weather, corrosy.

respond. David Wallace Wells. Okay, maybe I'm getting my do-my gloomists. A story of the future. Yeah. And one of the fascinating things, he goes through all the different types of climate disaster you can do. Yeah. And one of the early chapters is all about the flooding, the rising sea levels. And if you actually think about it, all the projections are actually like, oh, by 2050 this, by 2070 that, but, you know, and then the really catastrophic things are like in a hundred years time, right? You're going, well, there's not that bad. Like, who cares?

Like, you know, just like, okay, so we make sure our grandchildren know how to use a kayak. But, like, it doesn't really directly affect us, except when you then overlay it with a map of Australia, right? So this is the fascinating thing. Actually, most of Australia is a few metres above sea level. Yeah, we have tended to build pretty close. We haven't done the Florida thing of building below sea level. And we haven't done the Netherlands thing of literally having whole towns that are like genuinely like 10 metres below sea level using dikes, which...

Like everything is a bit above sea level, right? So then that gives you maybe a decade or two's grace, except for Glenelg in Adelaide. Really? Yes. If you go to like all the charts, there's maps. You can look up maps and it's like what will happen under various sea level scenarios. and the first place to go always is Glenel. And you just go, well, I don't think that's necessarily that bad.

The chance to Glenelg's a bit of a dump. But the tram, the historic tram in the Adelaide. The reason why they build a tram was so that people could leave Glenel. I see. But it only goes to Adelaide CBD. It should keep going. It doesn't go far enough. It should go up to the Adelaide Hills.

All right. So that's what I'm saying. And then you start looking at other scenarios. He's like, okay, let's just push it a bit. But it's, it's things like, oh no, the eastern suburbs is under threat. Well, we've known for a while that Malcolm Turnbull's $100 million property order, whatever it might be, be one of the first to go. Yeah, point piper.

And to be fair to Malcolm, who is always thinking, he's always thinking, Charles. Of himself. He kayaks. He's been kayaking for years. Well, there you go. They're not going to flood Malcolm Turnbull. He will be there going, give me your best shot. I'm a master kayaker.

I'm going to kayak off to high ground. So there's that problem, and that, I admit, is a big problem. But the whole point is that what the government has already started doing is becoming the insurer of last resort. Right. Like, if you try to build a house up in the northern rivers, no insurer is going to touch you, right? Yeah, I mean, you can literally... The Lismore CBD is a bit of a tough sell. You can set your watch.

South Lismore is like, it's probably flooded today. It's probably underwater right now. If it isn't flooded as you hear this, then the chances are incredibly high. And look, it's incredibly sad for those people. But essentially the only way, and, you know, like in fairness to the government, they've only taken about five years to come up with a plan to sort of move the residents up the hill. But, you know, even there, there's now, like the federal government has started introducing

schemes where they're sort of not entering the retail insurance. market, but entering the sort of people who then are behind that, which is called the reinsurance market. So if you're CGU or Aliance or whatever and you sell a whole lot of home insurance, what you do is you offset some of that risk by selling that on to reinsurers. And what both sides of politics seems to think is a good idea is, well, what we should do is we should just set up a scheme so that the government becomes the insurer of last resort, because we can't possibly have people being uninsured, right? And you're just going, that's a terrible idea.

That is a terrible idea. Like, I'm all for socialism and everything like that. But essentially what it's doing is it's underwriting incredibly risky activity that just shouldn't happen. But it's also, it's kind of remandcing the US housing thing with the ninja loans and all like, if the federal government is only insuring the shittiest, riskiest properties. Yes. And the insurance companies are still able to make profits.

from, like, why would they not just only, like, massively downsize what they insured are only the ones that have no chance of flooding if the government, because the whole point is that the places that are more likely to get the flooding are offset by the ones with no chance at all who are still buying insurance. Well, the argument would be that, you know, over time and in the competitive market, you know, what happens is it just decreases the price of the risk that, you know, very, you know, blah, blah, blah. Like the, you can set up a reintroduce.

insurance scheme that essentially just sort of subsidises the insurance rather than completely covers all the risk. But still, you're just going, no, no, no, we've got to move to the great dividing range, Dom. That's a very good idea. And we've got to... The planes, Charles. There's, I mean, not just dividing range.

The whole of the tablelands, I mean, New South Wales is well stocked with table land. Yes. And they're all a long way off the ground. Yes. And there is a slow. chance in some of these places of riverine flooding, which is actually the biggest risk. It's actually not sea levels. I've just found this Climate Council report, which actually...

Oh, because it's all the, it's the fact that as that your climate increases, your capacity of your, of the moisture in the clouds goes up exponentially. So for every degree, like, it's not a logger, like, it's not a linear thing where it goes up by one degree. No, you get saturation. It's like literally, for every degree, it's like, literally, for every degree, you double the capacity of the clouds, basically. So it's actually interesting to look at, just briefly, to look at this data.

Now, admittedly, this is the Climate Council, which many demonise, and many think actually does legitimate research. So form your own view on that one. But if you believe the Climate Council, Charles, guess which state or territory? Why wouldn't I? Well, they're in favour of net zero. I mean, that's become very suspect these days. Charles, which state or territory do you think is the most susceptible to flooding

by a factor of, like, double anywhere else? Oh, is it New South Wales? No, it's Queensland, because it's Riverine. Oh, that's fine. Yeah, so 192,000 companies in Queensland. So we've got Queensland and Adelaide getting it in the neck. Who cares? Like, what are we worried about?

New South Wales is number two, particularly because of the Northern Rivers, that's 3.3%. Everywhere else is lower than that. So, yeah, there's been enough room to move people to the tablelands. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, and maybe the Brisbane Olympics in 2032 can be like the farewell to Queensland. It's the Queensland swan song. Or they could do the Queensland solution, which is Charles, I don't know whether you've been

to the Gold Coast lately, but there are a lot of artificial canals. I don't know whether you've seen. Yes, where mermaid waters, broad beach was all this stuff. It's the Venice of the North, isn't it? If you don't take ascetics into account, it's absolutely the Venice of the North. All they need is just a shitload more canals and massive. They need dikes, basically. What they need is some marketing, some good marketing, so that as the sea level,

rise, it just becomes visit the Gold Coast. So it's not really, you don't want to focus on the coast anymore, Charles, because obviously all the beaches. Check out the traditional gondolas of surface paradise. So the beaches of broad beach, it can't be called surface paradise. It's gondoliers paradise now. Gondoliers paradise. Because you've got to, think about it, you've got to turn the beach into a giant dike. You've got to have a huge seawall that's much higher even than the condos.

I'm thinking like a 10 metre high seawall all the way up and down the gold coast. But you'd paint it Or you'd get an LED screens So that you could see the horizon And the sunset You can have a fake beach And the sunset Yeah it would look better

It would look better You wouldn't have bad And you could bet You could bet on what type of sunrise You're going to get You can have horse races Digital horses Running along the beach

Yeah Brut magnificent Brumbies The Chaser Report News you can't trust And what you could do Is you could just have a little A little lock a loch.

Oh, yeah. And you just let a little bit of seawater to go into the canal system. And so the gold coast, it would be the canal coast. The lovely Venice. It used to be a beach there. It doesn't matter.

Look inland, Charles, to the beautiful lagoons. And maybe that's how you solve the Great Barrier Reef bleaching as well. Because if you'd overlay, like you put in a big LED screen on the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. You'd be able to, like,

and you could make it really non-bleached. The glass bottom boats would still go over the reef. And it would look real because it's through the water. OLED, fantastic. It would be vibrant. It would be so vibrant. You'd have an amazing 3D graphics. Yes.

So the coral could come up and say hello. And I'm sure you could have animatronic. Like, you could get animatronic fish to go through it. To be 3D. So, Charles, in this scenario, the great dividing range actually is the great dividing dyke. You'd have to say goodbye to Sydney eventually one day. The whole thing would... But you just move up to the Blue Mountains.

It's the Lithgow Beach. Pondai Beach would actually appear back. That's a wonderful rather than just in the lagoon. That's a brilliant idea. The Western Sydney beaches would finally go underpass. Yeah, yeah. So we move up the Blue Mountains. That's all right.

Yeah. I don't like the Blue Mountains. And we just all relocate there. So, I mean, uninsurable, not anymore. And I think the economists always look at this as like, oh, no, it's terrible. But there's going to be, like, the economists are also saying, oh, there's going to be a terrible jobs shortage because AI is going to replace all the jobs. Yes.

I'm sorry. AI is not going to replace other jobs. place things like cleaning up after a flood? No. Or building us all the houses we need up on, up in the massive five million person metropolis. At the same time, AI's replaced, you know, our massive consumption of energy is supercharging climate change.

We've also got the solution to that problem, which is a whole lot of jobs created in the climate change emergency recovery sector. Yeah. It's perfect. That's brilliant. And just think of what you could do with, I mean, look at what do you buy and all the Emirates have done. They make masters.

Giant tall buildings, many of them quite wacky, up in the Blue Mountains. Now, Charles, there's one small issue with this, with this embrace of the table lands. There's a lot of bushfires. You get a lot of bushfires up there. So we'd need to fell all the trees in the Blue Mountains National Park. Oh, we'd get rid of the trees, yeah.

Yeah, because... Well, yeah, where else would we live? I mean, a tree is a bushfire we haven't met yet, isn't it, really? Yeah, no, exactly. So, I mean, maybe all the trees can go to Adelaide and Queensland, land, rewild them. It wouldn't be a lot of work in South Australia. Just put all the trees in those states for climate reasons.

If you want to. I mean, do you need tree? Like, is there any reason? Surely every tree is just slowing down progress. Yeah. And, you know, like, if we're having a climate change geared economy, like where our entire economy is geared around recovering from emergencies created by climate change, the one thing you don't want to get in the way,

of is the acceleration of climate change. That's true. You want. You're leaning in. That's true. Climate change actually becomes a driver of economic opportunity. Yes, exactly. That's right, Charles.

Maybe Net Zero is ridiculous. Yes. So, Charles, what I'm... I'm starting to be convinced. Has you been... Is climate council. They're a bunch of woke... More like Kuku Kaku Council in the Academy.

Charles, have you been to the scenic world in the Blue Mountains? Oh, I love scenic world there. For those who do. You've got the scenic railway. You've got the scenic railway. I can't remember the last thing. It's like a gondola. lift it's the cable car yeah there's a cable car whatever they call that um but it's got a nice names i can't remember the name but we went there recently so charles but that is that is three

public transport systems in the blue mouth already and they're just used for novelty like i went on the scenic skyway when it crossed the valley and back again it went to nowhere but it's not a valley it'll be a harbour yes that's true yeah but what if charles that was that was going from one skyscraper district to another yes you see if you think of it was skyscrapers all the way through there, the scenic railway becomes an amazing transport system. And the residents of Blue Mountains are notoriously pro-development, aren't they? Well, they'd have to be.

Yeah, they will be. Yeah. But Charles, they'll have harbourfront properties. Yeah. They'll become rich. All those lovely houses with views with the valleys. Lose their principles. It's a view of a harbor. I love it. Yeah, look, I think this is all upside, really. Except for Queensland. We haven't talked about the wetball problem, but we can

do that another day. We did a whole episode about the wetball problem. Because that's also going to hit Queensland the hardest. Yeah. Because I think Queensland will also just be uninhabitable from the heat. Yeah, that's the other thing. So this is what, didn't we conclude that we need to go to Tasmania, actually. And perhaps Canberra, which is so cold.

Yeah. No, no, but Canberra can be hot in the summer. Oh, don't you go to Melbourne. It's finally the triumph of Melbourne. No, I don't like this. It's pretty chilly down there. No, Tazzy. We'll do, let's make Tassie the near Sydney.

And we can continue to have beef with Melbourne, but we'd be bigger, rather than smaller. Yes. And they'd have to build that AFL State. him finally down there. Right, well, that's a lot of things solved. I like the idea that we just lean in to being, like, gearing our economy towards... It does feel more in line with human nature.

Yes. Because all the, I mean, all the calls to do something for many decades now. It answers every question. Yeah. The result did in no action, really is. So let's just roll with it. And it's another reason to oppose nuclear. Because nuclear is carbon neutral.

Oh, yes. Yeah, you go. No, no, no. We don't want nuclear. The carbon's an accelerant. Yeah. It's really, if you think of it as sort of opportunity juice. We're part of the Oconocles Network.

Not sponsored by the Climate Council today. No.