IAG says thanks for your loyalty

A little-noticed suppression order filed in the Federal Court on April 21, 2026 has revealed what Australia's largest general insurer would prefer the public never learned: that Insurance Australia Group uses "demand modelling" and "renewal optimisation" to calculate how much it can raise premiums on its customers before they'll leave. 

Those terms – descriptors for the industry's dirtiest practices – appeared in the court schedule listing confidential materials IAG wanted hidden. But in naming what to suppress, the court revealed IAG's smoking gun. 

The global insurance industry has invented more ways to screw customers than can be found in the Kama Sutra handbook. Stand in your flooded living room, brown water lapping at the skirting boards, and an adjuster in his gumboots will define the deluge as an "inundation event", excluded as per page 147 of the product disclosure statement. 

IAG is a master of this art of technical obfuscation.

From March 2014 to September 2019, it ran a silent algorithm on NRMA renewals that inflated base premiums before applying loyalty discounts. Six hundred thousand customers were ensnared. The discount was printed big and bold on customers' renewal notices. The inflated base it came off? Nowhere to be seen.