I’m becoming tired of hearing about various public areas, services and attractions being closed or scaled-down due to the operators/owners being unable to afford spiraling public liability insurance premiums.
The concept of public liability insurance is a sound one: someone becomes injured or otherwise disadvantaged due to liability or neglect on your property, they sue you, the insurance company pays up and they go away.
This prevents you from losing your entire business due to one small incident. At least, that is what it is supposed to do.
Yet, with the incidence of public liability claims on the rise, insurers are reacting to huge court-awarded settlements by raising premiums to what they say are ‘user pays’ (i.e.: unaffordable) levels, forcing businesses to either risk operating uninsured, or pass on costs to consumers.
Whilst the government and the insurers play a never-ending game of ‘toss the hot potato’ with the blame issue, it seems to have escaped everyone what the actual cause of all these premium rises really is.
The combination of the exorbitant ‘public liability’ cash amounts awarded by courts, plus the triviality (and occasional insanity) of the ‘injuries’ passed for ‘compensation’ under public liability law is crippling this ‘system’ into a social and economic mess.
In 2001, an elderly Australian woman was awarded damages in the sum of one hundred thousand dollars for burns from McDonalds coffee. When I read the headline, I imagined some horror scene where a clumsy employee had dropped a pot of boiling java on the old dears’ head.
But not so. She went through the drive-though. And she dropped her own cup of McDonalds coffee into her own lap, with her own hand, in her own car !. And she still sued them !. And she won !.
How is that possible ?. Do we need to be told to specifically NOT drop our hot coffee into our laps ?. Well, some of us apparently do.
If you or I go somewhere, and we don’t see a sign strictly forbidding an activity, may we then automatically assume that we may do what we like ?. No !. Of course we may not !. Just because no sign says “Do Not Pee On The Carpet” doesn’t mean we will, now, does it ?. Or, does it ?.
There is a huge sign on a Southern NSW beach that says ‘No Diving – Variable Depth’. Some tourist did it anyway and broke his back. He’s back home now with 4 million Australian dollars because a court ruled that the sign ‘wasn’t clear enough’.
Another tourist, compensated for injuries received from a crocodile mauling in a Queensland National Park, said that he SAW the crocodiles before he swam, but (and I quote) “As there was no sign saying that they were dangerous, I just went ahead and swam”.
(Uh-huh. He needs a sign to tell him that crocodiles are dangerous ?. Should I make him another one that says “PANTS first, THEN your shoes” ?).
By placing the onus on business owners and landholders to keep people safe, we are encouraging the age of the petty personal injury lawsuit and discouraging individuals to use common sense to maintain their own bodily safety.
Where does personal responsibility belong in all of this ?.
Trip over a tree root ?. That couldn’t be YOUR own silly fault for not looking where you were going, could it ? ...‘course not !. (And you can sue the landowner for that sprained toe, too. Not to mention the emotional distress inflicted upon you by the neighbours getting any eyeful of your under-chunders).
If I elected to go out and consume a large quantity of alcohol and then take a nap on the highway, I would not feel self-righteous enough to sue the barman that served me because a car ran over my ass (yes, someone really did that).
I would take my (flattened) ass to a hospital, yes, but I would know whose fault it was that I was there, and THAT makes all the difference.