Chlöe Swarbrick suffers visible agonies as insurer conference exposes how poorly NZ is preparing for climate change

Friday, 5 June 2026

ANALYSIS: The facial expressions of Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick ranged from disbelief to despair as she listened to ACT and New Zealand First MPs explain that while they weren’t exactly climate change deniers, they weren’t sold on the severity of the problem.

Frustration with politicians was the overriding theme of the Insurance Council of New Zealand conference in Auckland on Thursday at which Swarbrick represented one of the five main political parties that spoke.

Insurers were dismayed at how long it was taking the country to stop building homes in flood zones, how little was being spent on things like flood defences, and how there just didn’t seem to be a national plan for making the country more resilient to extreme weather events.

New Zealand, all agreed, was stuck in reactive mode.

It would swing into action heroically when a disaster hit, like the 2023 Cyclone Gabrielle and Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods, but the political parties were seemingly incapable of mustering the cross-party will to move from a reactive to a proactive stance.

Read more:

• Finance Minister rejects insurers’ call for $700m disaster‑resilience levy

• Treading Water: What banks are saying about our stormy future

• Natural Hazard Insurance levy on homeowners has to rise, but how high does it have to go?

Politicians were dismayed with each other. Labour leader Chris Hipkins was dismayed with Finance Minister Nicola Willis and her government for gutting the country’s climate adaptation planning.

Willis was dismayed by opposition politicians who couldn’t see the wisdom of cutting government spending so it had the resources to cope with the next big natural disaster to hit New Zealand.

But it was Swarbrick’s expressions as ACT’s Parmjeet Parmar struggled to put her climate beliefs into words, and New Zealand First’s David Wilson explained how climate change might be a little over-egged, that seemed to capture the tragicomedy of a divided political class playing out before delegates’ eyes.

How could New Zealand adapt for climate change if political parties could not even agree on basic principles, Swarbrick lamented.

Reaction mode was costing the country dearly, speakers tried to explain.

Rehette Stoltz, mayor of Te Kaunihera o Te Tairāwhiti Gisborne District Council, explained every dollar Gisborne invested in resilience saved it $4 in disaster recovery costs.

She had lost count of the number of states of emergency she had had to declare in Gisborne.

Swarbrick had been keeping count. Across the country, the number this year alone was 21.

Economist Shamubeel Eaqub said New Zealand’s disaster maths didn’t stand up to scrutiny. We knew natural disasters lay in the future, but refused to invest to reduce the costs of their impact.

We could spend now to save money tomorrow, but we weren’t doing it.

Adam Health, chief executive of rural insurer FMG, said since 2010, New Zealand governments had spent $64 billion on disaster recovery.

“We're spending $5.5bn every year on natural disasters,” he said, then asked whether that would go to $10bn, and beyond, as climate change resulted in more frequent extreme weather events.

Eaqub said New Zealand had known the issues for more than a decade, but its failure to act had resulted in many homes being built in “stupid” disaster-prone places, and there didn’t even appear to be political consensus that it was the Government’s job to ban it from happening.

All insurers were asking was for hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent now to save billions in the future, and keep the international re-insurers they rely on happy to carry on providing cover for our disaster-prone nation.

Willis rejected a call from insurers for a new levy on insurance to raise $600 million to $700m each year to spend on things like flood defences, which would cut the future cost of weather disasters.

Hipkins also dismissed the idea.

But other countries were doing much better, said Alix Pearce, general manager for climate, social policy and international engagement at the Insurance Council of Australia.

The UK had committed £4.3bn over the next three years in flood defences, she said. The Dutch commit $1bn every year to flood defences.

Swarbrick lamented that government spending on flood defences had been cut by 41% since the National-led Government took power.

She said of every $100 of government spending on natural disasters, just $3 was spent on flood defences and disaster mitigation projects.

All speakers worried about insurance retreat, which is the term for insurers refusing to insure homes in high-risk locations. Once insurers pull out, property values fall dramatically as banks won’t lend to people to buy them.

That, Eaqub worried, would “create ghettos around New Zealand where only poor people will live”.

“I don't think that's fair, and it should not happen in a country of five million,” he said.

Everyone worried that insurance premiums would continue to rise, which would lead to falling levels of insurance as cash-strapped households gave up buying it. That could lead to fewer businesses being able to afford cover, and that would hit the economy hard as they would be able to take fewer risks in the pursuit of profit.

“When insurance stops, then those wheels of commerce stop,” said Heath.

Jon Duffy, chief executive of Consumer NZ, said: “Home insurance payments have gone up, and they're [up] 1000%, since the year 2000.”

“We're seeing people drop home insurance, and nobody in this room, I'm sure, wants that train to continue,” he said.

The Green Party and Labour felt strongly that risks should be spread. ACT and Auckland mayor Wayne Brown did not.

Brown didn’t see why he should be paying higher premiums to subsidise people living in flood-prone valleys. He urged insurers to deepen their risk-based pricing on individual homes so people who owned lower-risk homes and business properties didn’t get hit with continued large increases. He felt Auckland cliff-dwellers ought to really pay a lot more.

“Cliff-dwellers need hitting harder,” he said.

Eaqub suggested taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies for poorer homeowners could be on the cards.

Swarbrick said if insurance became unaffordable for sections of society, social stability would be threatened, calling it “a huge ticking time bomb”.

She pondered over extending the coverage of the Natural Hazards Insurance (the new name for EQC cover) to cover extreme weather events.

The one thing is seemed everyone agreed on was there needed to be national disaster and flood maps so New Zealanders had a shared understanding of risk at a property by property level.

The Government has promised one, which could leave some homeowners facing an uphill struggle to sell their disaster-threatened homes, but funding for the project was not yet certain, the conference heard.

And, if people do find their home unsaleable because it appears on the map as at a high risk of flooding, politicians were split over whether there should be taxpayer money to help them relocate elsewhere.