On the same day that Bob Carr was planning his liability reforms and APRA was telling a Senate committee insurers still aren’t charging enough, Victoria’s Attorney-General was getting in some free kicks. Rob Hulls said the insurers have run a “convincing PR campaign” but haven’t produced any hard evidence of a blowout in public liability claims.

Aiming a blow at insurers’ pleas for national liability law reform, he said he needs “cold, hard evidence” because he is “extremely reluctant to take away people’s rights”.

There’s little doubt Mr Hulls has been under fairly intense pressure from both insurers and plaintiff lawyers, who say insurers have staged a claims-driven crisis in public liability insurance to bring about tort law reforms.

They say there has been no blowout in public liability claims. And worse. Take the assertions of Eugene Arocca, a Melbourne-based public liability partner with law firm Maurice Blackburn Cashman:

“This crisis has been very cleverly manipulated by the insurance companies who have enjoyed non-regulation for so long that one of the major insurers in the Australian market was in trouble for nearly a year before it went under.

“What I am seeing is a selective targeting by the insurers of industries which are probably high risk and low claim but nonetheless they [insurers] have been a very good instigator of this debate.”

Mr Arocca said the industry has run a “very slick campaign” and “achieved gains [in NSW] that they wouldn’t have dreamed of”.

The Australian Plaintiff Lawyers Association is also accusing the industry of having staged a crisis. “The insurance companies have used the crisis within the industry as a Trojan horse to get tort reform through,” CEO Jane Staley said.