The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) is moving in a “completely new proactive direction”, according to President Michael Hawker. Speaking at the annual ICA Canberra conference last week, he said the aim now is to build a more positive influence on the country’s political, business and social environment.

“When we looked at the Insurance Council a year ago we said it had been very reactive and we wanted to make it proactive,” he said. “It had to change to ensure we would be part of the public policy debate.”

In the past few months new CEO Kerrie Kelly has removed most of the senior managers employed by former CEO Alan Mason and closed the two remaining ICA regional offices in Melbourne and Perth – moves which have caused concern among some ICA member companies.

Mr Hawker says the policy process at the Sydney head office and in the states will now be left more to dynamic working committees, which will replace the more traditional standing committees which have served ICA for many years.

“What we’re looking for is working committees made up of industry specialists drawn from member companies, and they’ll come and go,” Mr Hawker said. “We want to utilise the talents of our members to move along to being able to work on the issues of the day.”

He says the areas of public policy that will become the new focus for ICA will “reflect what the insurance industry does in ways that make sense to the community and to the Government”.

Those areas are health and ageing, economic security, national security, community safety and support, disaster response and emergency planning, environment and climate change, and the regulatory burden.

 “We need to get traction for our own views by moving from underlying industry principles to things that make sense to the community and the Government,” Mr Hawker said. “This is where public policy has effectively moved, and we need to try to move into areas where what we have to say makes sense to the Government in the area of public policy.”

He says the industry had a “low profile on the bureaucratic radar screen” for many years before the HIH collapse in 2001. “We didn’t get involved in the economic debate.”

He pointed out that the Wallis Report of 1997, which led to the Financial Services Reform Act, only mentioned general insurance on a few pages.

“Now we’ve moved into the mainstream. We are going to go through a number of policy debates, and we need to move the insurance industry into the same sort of policy area as the banks.”

Mr Hawker says the public debate over the role of the banks during the 1980s led to “a greater community understanding of the value of banking to the overall economic security of the country”.