We remember and honour the brave men and women who have served and continue to serve in countries around the World.

The past, the present and the future.

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Seasonal surges mean higher demand, hotter days, and bigger stockpiles. That brings risk for small and medium businesses across Australia.

As summer arrives, the rush is on to keep cool rooms running, line up reliable hands, and avoid supply chain hiccups.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest report gives a clear warning: the grid should hold, but only if every planned upgrade gets done on time. Any delay increases the risk of blackouts just as trading peaks.

Three out of four SMEs say peak season keeps them up at night. The biggest worries? Stock loss, cash flow pains, and staff issues. A little forward planning makes all the difference, putting you a step ahead while others scramble.

Stock spoilage: profits on ice
Everything that needs the cold, from sliced cakes to medicines, faces spoilage if your equipment breaks or the power goes. It is more than just lost product.

You take a hit on margin, with customers left disappointed and trade missed. Insurers are seeing more claims, with businesses taking on more perishables and high-value goods to meet seasonal demand.

Retail operators expect even greater exposure to spoilage and interruption this year.

A single outage can mean thousands in spoilage. Good insurance is vital, but it needs to be matched by working temperature controls, up-to-date maintenance logs, and regular checks.

Extra hands, extra risks
When business booms, you might boost your team with agency, casual, or labour-hire staff. Temporary workers are more likely to miss procedures or make mistakes, especially when busy.

Speak to your insurance broker or advisor to ensure that you have adequate insurance cover for claims made by labour-hire and agency staff used in your business. Check both your liability policy and your induction processes.

Cash flow and continuity
Weather, power failures, delivery delays, or people off sick can each put business on ice. Missing one day of peak trade can hit cash flow, supplier payments, and customer trust for weeks.

Recent research finds many companies still treat resilience and continuity separately. This can open holes in your planning and coverage.

Your broker or advisor can help guide you on business interruption insurance that matches real risks: lost trade, not just damaged property. Down time should not be a disaster.

Four steps to stay ahead
Review storage and backup: Check every fridge, cool room and your backup power. Confirm your policy covers spoilage and product loss

Know your staff mix: Identify all temporary, agency or casual workers, then make sure your liability cover applies to every name

Test your continuity plan: Play through real scenarios, from outages to key people going missing, and fix any gaps

Update policy settings: Make sure your covers are set for peak season, not just the quiet months

Australian SMEs now face tougher conditions than ever. Three in four suffer late payments; borrowing costs are at a five-year high, while insolvency rates jumped 28 percent in the past year. Four out of five small firms are still doing accounts manually, not digitally. Automating records reduces headaches and helps you spot risks faster. Digital risk is now a front-line issue. Sixty-seven percent of cyber incidents impact small business, and busy times can make these threats even harder to manage.

Speak with Aust Brokers Terrace – their specialists are able to disccus and advise on your insurance needs for your business.

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Australia is heading into a high-risk summer, with hotter days, warmer nights, and more rain than usual expected across much of the country. Over the past year, we’ve already seen more than 80 severe weather events. Emergency agencies say flood, storm, and bushfire risks could jump by as much as one third in some regions. Warmer oceans are supercharging storm systems, and fast-drying ground across NSW, Queensland, and Victoria is setting the stage for quicker, harder-to-predict fire behaviour.

How severe this summer is looking
The Bureau of Meteorology expects both day and night temperatures to be unusually elevated. More than four in five regions face higher-than-average overnight heat. Rainfall has been inconsistent; some areas are soaked, while others are drying fast, which tends to create stop–start bursts of risk. Parts of the nation’s east should expect above average-rainfall; the west, below average.

Bigger fuel loads in Victoria, Queensland and along the east coast mean grass and scrub fires can take hold quickly. Storms have already driven about 126,000 insurance claims this year, costing close to $1.5 billion. Losses from the first half of 2025 have already topped $1.8 billion and continue to rise. Secondary perils are the everyday extreme events that hit more often; things like sudden flash floods, intense summer heatwaves, hailstorms and fast-forming storm cells. They don’t always make headlines like cyclones or bushfires, but together they now cause far more damage across Australia. These events strike with little warning, affect built-up areas, and put pressure on drainage, power, and older buildings.

In some hotspots, the risk is so frequent and severe that insurers price it higher or limit what they can cover, simply because the losses keep rising faster than the system can absorb.

Insurance costs keep climbing
Insurers are making big changes as climate risks rise. Pricing is becoming more fine-grained, and high-risk areas or industries are feeling the squeeze. Construction firms are seeing higher excesses; retail and hospitality are facing stricter conditions; and professional services firms are being asked for clearer evidence of continuity planning.

About three in five major weather events now lead to business disruption long after the physical clean-up is over. Experts also say Australia is facing a $4.5 billion insurance crisis, with one in six businesses unable to secure cover that genuinely matches their risk and cashflow.

Affordability and underinsurance pressures
The latest Insurance Council of Australia data shows more than half of Australia’s local government areas now face either high or very high exposure to extreme weather. For SMEs this often means more conditions in policies, larger excesses, and sometimes unexpected gaps.

Industry data suggests about seven in ten businesses are underinsured, with an average shortfall of roughly 30 percent across property, equipment, and other assets. Up to four in five businesses never fully recover after a major event when insurance cover proves inadequate.

What SMEs can do right now
Heat, heavy rain, and sudden storms affect every industry. Practical steps like these help reduce risk and strengthen your resilience:

Protect people first: Review heat protocols, storm-safe procedures and communication plans
Check critical equipment: HVAC, roofing, drainage, backup power and batteries
Review site exposure: Outdoor areas, signage, storage, vegetation and firebreaks
Confirm supplier continuity: Transport, logistics, backup providers and cloud systems
Check coverage accuracy: Make sure sums insured reflect current rebuild costs
Review business interruption triggers: Know what is covered and what is excluded
Document risk controls: Insurers expect clear proof of maintenance and planning
Early action really matters. Nearly half of Australia’s small and medium businesses are underinsured by at least 20 per cent, and rising building and replacement costs mean gaps widen quickly if values aren’t reviewed regularly.

Austbrokers Terrace can assist businesses in reviewing their insurance policies. Speak with one of our specialists today.

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For Australian SMEs, the biggest threats aren’t always the ones making headlines. Inflation and cyber attacks grab attention, but it’s the unseen risks that can do the most damage.

Major legal firms, including Allens, warn that geopolitical shocks, AI governance failures and reputational vulnerabilities are accelerating alongside traditional economic pressures.

Cyber and AI Beyond the Basics

Digital transformation has emerged as the primary business challenge for Australian companies in 2025. More than half (53%) of leaders identifying it as their top priority, says KPMG.

The Australian Signals Directorate’s 2023–24 Annual Cyber Threat Report reveals cybercrime reports increased 23 percent to over 94,000 incidents. That’s about one attack every six minutes.

Many SMEs assume their basic safeguards are enough, overlooking how AI tools and third-party vendors expand their attack surface. Weak AI governance can cause data leaks or harmful automated decisions — and those missteps can quickly trigger notifiable breaches under the Privacy Act.

Supply Chain and Integration Gaps

Supply chain vulnerabilities have intensified, with extreme weather events causing cascading disruptions. The February 2025 Queensland flooding severed the Bruce Highway for three weeks. The disaster cost businesses an estimated $45 million daily in delayed shipments. All up, lost exports across all impact sectors slashed $2 billion off the value of production.

Growth often means adding more partners, platforms and integrations.

Be wary of shadow IT, such as unverified APIs or weak contract clauses that can leave hidden weak links. A single vendor outage can disrupt operations or introduce risks you didn’t anticipate.

Reputation, ESG, and Regulatory Blindspots

Litigation related to environmental, social and governance issues is the fastest-growing category of business disputes. In 2024, there were 47 new cases with high-profile settlements showing real financial consequences.

Reputational damage now spreads faster via social channels. Over half of Australians say they would abandon a brand after one negative incident.

Meanwhile, new climate-related disclosure rules came into effect in January 2025. Large entities must publish detailed sustainability reports. There is a phased implementation for other organisations. Treasury defines ‘large entities’.

While the new rules apply to large entities, the flow-on effects are already reaching SMEs. To stay in the game, smaller businesses will need to track and report basic climate data, so they can meet customer and contract requirements tied to sustainability reporting.

Think energy use, emissions, and supply chain impacts. Those SMEs that don’t may find themselves locked out of lucrative supply chains as compliance expectations tighten. The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) gives a rundown of the sustainability reporting requirements for SMEs. Check out the SME Climate Hub, too. Also, consider comprehensive carbon management platforms such as ClimateCover, Trace Carbon Management, or Seedling Earth.

How to Start Mapping Blindspots

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Try these steps to surface hidden gaps:

Stress: run internal stress tests, such as vendor outages, AI errors, or compliance audits.
Audit: list all software, integrations, and tools in use (official and shadow).
Record: maintain an obligations register. This records all material (legal and contractual obligations of the business) and assigns key controls and accountability to adequately manage those obligations. New or amended regulatory obligations are simply added to the register with key controls updated accordingly.
Review: check contracts for weak liability, breach, and data clauses.
Train: update policies and make sure teams know which tools to use and how to report issues.
Scenario: run tabletop exercises that include cyber, reputational, or supply chain incidents.
These actions reveal weak links and let you strengthen them before something goes wrong.

Austbrokers Terrace have specialists for all your insurance needs.

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Happy Chinese New Year

Gōng xǐ fā cái 

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The last few years have shown us that COVID 19 was not a one off. Since 2020, businesses have had to navigate a rolling series of shocks, including a global pandemic, war, energy price spikes, supply chain disruption, extreme weather and a steady rise in cyber attacks.

Your risk profile does not sit in isolation. It is part of a bigger system shaped by climate, geopolitics, technology and regulation. It makes sense to strengthen your approach to risk management and to check that your insurance is keeping pace.

Black Swan or Grey Rhino?
Black swans are outlier events that are tricky to anticipate, let alone plan for. In reality, many of the risks keeping business owners awake now look more like grey rhinos, the term US policy analyst Michele Wucker uses for highly probable, high impact threats that we tend to ignore until they are charging straight at us. What gets in the way are cognitive biases that keep us in denial. Find out more from Wucker’s TED talk.

Business leaders and scholars look to grey rhinos as a reframing of risk to help recover faster from disruption, build resilience, and pinpoint leading indicators. It’s about decreasing the uncertainty of risks that could confront your business.

Risks Have Not Gone Away
COVID 19 has faded from the headlines, but the underlying drivers of pandemic risk have strengthened. Studies of four centuries of disease data suggest there is around a one in three to two in five chance of experiencing a pandemic as intense as COVID 19 in a lifetime.

Climate change is another amplifier. Research shows that more than half of known human infectious diseases can be worsened by climate related hazards such as heatwaves, flooding and drought. Scientists are also warning about a new “age of the panzootic”, where diseases like highly pathogenic bird flu move rapidly between animal species and may spill over into humans.

For business owners, the message is not to panic. It is to treat future health emergencies as one of several predictable grey rhinos that could disrupt your workforce, supply chain and customer base.

More Globally Disruptive Events Likely
Apart from the pandemic, more frequent and severe global disruptions are possible. Such events include:

Military conflicts, and war
Supply chain disruptions
Restrictions to business and consumers (think public health orders, limits to movement etc)
Energy crisis
Cyber attack
International trade war
Natural disasters
Company accident

Time, Early Signals and Your People
There’s another important dimension to that visualisation – time. The lead time between knowing a disruptive event will happen and when it first impacts your business is called detection lead time. It’s the warning period.

Think of trends, such as cyber security. The worldwide move to tighten data obligations will affect Australian businesses, even small-to-medium-sized ones. The Productivity Commission and the Federal Government have foreshadowed this need to boost privacy. While cyber attacks are an unknown threat to each business, tightening laws is a given.

Be sure to look internally as well. Consider, the ‘risk fingerprint’ of each of your staff members. That’s the mix of their personality traits, experiences and social context that feeds into their identity and how they behave. Wucker writes about this in her other book, You Are What You Risk.

Think of the personal qualities of being risk averse, sensitive or even risk blind and how that influences their perceptions of threats and opportunities. Could you be making assumptions about their beliefs about and reactions to risks?

For example, discourage groupthink by sharing safety information across your workplace. That builds a culture encouraging staff to comment and contribute from different perspectives.

Updating Your Risk Management and Insurance
So what does all this mean for your practical risk and insurance decisions this year?

You might consider:

1.Refreshing your risk register using a grey rhino lens, identifying a small set of high impact, plausible disruptions such as another infectious disease outbreak, a major cyber incident, a lengthy supply chain interruption or a climate related disaster.
2.Reviewing your business continuity plan to check it still reflects hybrid working, cloud dependence and key supplier changes.
3.Checking whether your current policies respond to non physical damage events, for example cyber incidents, denial of access or supply chain disruption, rather than only fire and storm.
4.Looking at specialist cover where it suits your circumstances, such as broader cyber and privacy protection, management liability for regulatory exposures, and tailored extensions for infectious disease or event disruption where available.

Speak with Austbrokers Terrace specialists about your business insurance.

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Wishing you and your families a happy, safe and prosperous New Year. The team at Austbrokers Terrace look forward to welcoming you in 2026.

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With best wishes to you and your families at this festive time from the team at Austbrokers Terrace.

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As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon 1914

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More than four in 10 Australian SMEs now rely on AI for daily operations, from virtual assistants and smart inventory systems to content creation and data insights. Even major banks and insurers use it to triage claims and automate risk scoring. Whether you run a café, consultancy, or construction firm, AI is likely already part of your toolkit, often acting as an agent, not just a support tool.

But AI’s rise also brings hidden risks. Cybercriminals are using the same technology to launch smarter scams. In Australia, 82.6% of recent phishing attempts involved AI, with phishing emails jumping 17.3% in six months. Generative tech is fuelling attacks that bypass traditional defences.

Most Australian Businesses Are Not Fully Prepared for AI
Despite rapid uptake, most Australian businesses feel unprepared for AI’s challenges.

Only one in four say they’re “very prepared” to implement AI—putting Australia among the least confident nations globally. It’s not just a tech gap, but a risk gap that could leave your business exposed.

The Risks Extend Beyond Technology
AI failures aren’t just system glitches—they can trigger serious legal and financial consequences.

Potential issues include:

Product liability:

If AI causes harm or loss

Cybersecurity breaches:

If vulnerabilities are exploited

Employment practices liability:

If AI leads to biased decisions

Directors and Officers (D&O) liability:

If leaders fail to oversee AI use properly

These risks are real for SMEs using AI in customer service, logistics, marketing, or analytics. Legal experts warn that scrutiny is growing over how businesses manage AI. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) advises assessing privacy and data risks, especially where personal information is involved. It offers clear guidance, including on off-the-shelf AI tools.

How to Stay Ahead of the Risks
Think of AI like new machinery, so when it’s added, your risk protocols need updating too.

Here are five practical steps your SME can take:

1 Audit systems
Map where AI is used in your business

2 Assess risks
Look beyond tech failures to legal, ethical, and reputational threats

3 Set governance rules
Create clear policies for choosing and managing AI tools

4 Upskill staff
Ensure your team knows how AI is used and how to flag issues

5 Document decisions
Keep records of AI-driven actions, especially involving people

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) also recommends conducting regular vulnerability assessments and incident response planning to manage AI risks.

What Your Insurance Needs to Reflect
Emerging tech brings new risks. But insurance doesn’t always keep up.

Standard policies may not cover AI-related incidents. For example, faulty AI advice that causes financial loss might fall outside public liability. A data breach linked to an AI vulnerability could also leave you exposed. It may be best to supplement your existing insurance arrangements with specialist cyber insurance cover.

Insurers can review your policies to spot gaps and ensure your cyber, management liability, and professional indemnity cover aligns with your AI use. They also have the capacity to keep you updated on changing legal and industry standards. The Insurance Council of Australia advises businesses to regularly update their insurance as their use of AI evolves, ensuring coverage keeps pace with emerging risks.

AI is reshaping how SMEs operate. Make sure your insurance evolves with it. Let’s ensure your protection is as future-ready as your business.

Cyber insurance is certainly essential for any business in today’s environment. Speak with Austbrokers Terrace to learn more.

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