The Natural Disaster Insurance Review (NDIR) handed its final report to Government on Friday.

The review was set up in March to look into issues surrounding the availability and affordability of natural disaster insurance following January’s floods.

A spokesman for Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten told insuranceNEWS.com.au the Government “won’t be saying anything publicly about the contents of the report until it has had time to consider it”.

The issues paper released in June by the NDIR panel of John Trowbridge, Jim Minto and John Berrill proposed three options for dealing with flood insurance in Australia in the future.

The options were for flood cover to be automatically included in all home insurance policies; for flood cover to be automatically included in all home insurance policies but giving homeowners the option of opting out of flood cover; or retaining the status quo, where insurers can choose whether or not to offer flood cover and homeowners can choose whether or not to buy it.

The NDIR panel also considered issues of non-insurance and underinsurance, consumer awareness and insurance dispute resolution, flood risk measurement and mitigation, and some aspects of government funding of natural disaster relief and recovery.