While last week’s images of backyards, walls and swimming pools collapsing into the sea off the NSW suburb of Collaroy were extraordinary, the media storm that followed the recent east coast low, storm surge and king tides was all too familiar.

Yet again insurers were vilified, this time for their failure to cover a peril that affects only a small proportion of property owners along Australia’s coastal fringe.

A review of mainstream media reports reveals that the tendency to turn this type of catastrophe into a good-versus-evil affair – with the insurance industry typecast as the villain – is alive and well.

The response was highly disproportionate: only a handful of properties among more than 19,000 claims across four states totalling $74.3 million suffered losses from actions of the sea.

Worse than that, it was bias masquerading as reporting – opinion disguised as news.

Residents quoted in stories were not pointing fingers at insurers; they were expressing their dismay over what had happened to their homes, and uncertainty about their futures.

The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the secretary of the Coastal Residents Association “lashed out at councils and the State Government for preventing protective works such as sandbagging and the building of sea walls, upping the risk of property destruction in wild weather”.

He did not criticise insurers for failing to provide cover, yet the headline read: “Beachfront homeowners deprived of adequate insurance cover”.

It is true that very few home insurance policies cover actions of the sea, storm surge or king tides.

LMI Group MD Allan Manning says reluctance to provide cover for this peril is due to it having a return period of less than one in 50 years. “It’s not if, it’s when,” he told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

Some cover is available, with insurance analyst Jan van der Schalk estimating annual premiums would be about 30% of the property’s value.

While it would be easy to confine the risk to the too-hard basket, the effects of climate change mean the problem is growing.

About 250,000 Australian homes are at risk from a one-metre rise in sea levels, which is expected by the end of this century. And evidence has emerged that the El Nino-Southern Oscillation climate cycle is intensifying, resulting in more extreme El Nino and La Nina events – and stronger storms – along the east coast of Australia.

With more properties expected to be affected by increasingly frequent events, demand for cover will increase, as will the controversy surrounding its price and availability, fuelled by emotive images such as those in Collaroy.

The media and political storms that have followed recent flooding events and the strata cover crisis should serve as a warning to the insurance industry to get on the front foot.

While it has been successful in campaigns for levees in flood-prone central Queensland towns and for cyclone-resistant buildings on the northern coast, the industry has been less successful in encouraging awareness of the insurance-related impacts of climate change.

Community and media expectations of insurance as the means by which everything is fixed up just the way it was are going to have to change. Where risks are high, as they are in so many seaside properties for example, the risks must be reduced.

Ultimately, the solution is likely to lie with mitigation – and a co-operative approach that involves insurers, local and state governments and homeowners.

The industry has a role to play in fostering greater community understanding of the issue, and one of the key avenues to achieving that is the media.

It is a conversation the industry should start having now, or ignore at its peril.