Insurance brokers “have no idea” how the Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation (ARPC) works, a major conference in Canberra was told last week.

Speaking at the ARPC-OECD Global Terrorism Risk Insurance Conference, National Insurance Brokers Association (NIBA) CEO Dallas Booth said it is important to involve intermediaries in the discussion.

“The partnership is not just between the pools and the reinsurers who are in the market,” he said.

“The partnership has to be between the pools, the terrorism reinsurers, the main insurance market and, I think, the brokers as well.

“Because the thing that struck me after [the siege at Sydney’s Martin Place in December 2014 in which three people died] was virtually all insurance brokers in Australia had no idea how the ARPC works.

“I spoke to quite a number of insurance company people, and they had no idea how the ARPC works, either.

“So the fact there’s no demand, I suspect, is [due to] a large element of ignorance.

“We at NIBA take every opportunity we can to put the ARPC in front of brokers – we did so at our national conference very recently.”

Mr Booth says he welcomes calls to expand the discussion into areas including community resilience, community security and economic security.

“The way we are going to address those questions more broadly is to have a really good understanding of what the ARPC currently does in the Australia context, what the pools do in the overseas context… what they actually do, where the gaps are and how those gaps might be addressed either through ongoing growth of the pools themselves or through greater contribution from the private sector at the retained level or the reinsured level.”