Earthmoving and Heavy Machinery Insurance Australia

The biggest gap we see, and most owners have never been told it.

CTP is not part of your plant policy. You buy it when you pay registration in your state, and it covers you if you hurt someone. No registration, no CTP.

On the wordings we place, the road risk section answers only for a machine registered with a road authority, or on a temporary permit and only while it is on a public road. Damage cover attaches to your insured property. Liability attaches to your registered insured property. One word apart.

So an unregistered machine that hurts someone, or damages their property, has one place to turn: your business public and products liability cover. Without it, you pay. Not every wording is that blunt, and at least one turns instead on whether being unregistered contributed to the claim.

The case nobody argues about: unregistered, no permit, travelling a public road between jobs. Road risk needs a registered machine and fails. The illegal use exclusion catches it. Tool of trade cannot reach it, because every wording we read stops that write-back once the machine is travelling to or from site. Nothing responds.

An owner rings a direct insurer and puts the excavator on a commercial motor policy. Unregistered, it gets no road risk. He assumes it works like car insurance. It does not.

And it is not non-disclosure. The insurer reads the registration status on the day of the accident and pays for the machine only. Honesty changes nothing.

Then the double whammy. These wordings exclude loss or damage AND liability where the machine was not authorised by law for the use it was put to, so using it illegally can cost the damage cover as well.

Registration changes it. CTP attaches and road risk becomes available, though it does not turn itself on: the machine has to be registered, and we note it as comprehensive insurance on a registered item.

And putting an unregistered machine on a road is against the law. Check yours before you read anything else here.

Property in your care, custody and control is excluded, then bought back at a sub-limit that is both the most you get for one incident and the most you get for the whole year.

The excess is commonly 10 per cent of the claim or $1,000, whichever is greater. On an $80,000 claim that is $8,000 of your own money. Illustrative only.

And on many wordings the write-back will not stretch to the very thing you were engaged to work on. Crack the driveway you were trenching across and you are arguing about it. Hit the house wall fifty metres away and you are not.

Generic liability wordings often show a higher care and control sub-limit than specialist plant ones. That is not generosity. Specialist insurers meter it tightly because their clients have someone else's property under the machine every day.

The liability section does not cover work that is:

• demolition
• blasting, or use of explosives
• inside a rail corridor, or on rail platforms
• excavation deeper than ten metres
• wholly underground

Take a demolition or rail job and nothing about the machine changes. Your cover does.

Ring your broker before you quote that work, not after you win it.

An employee hurt on your site is a workers compensation claim, not a public liability one. And a subcontractor's policy protects them, not you. Collect the certificate and check the dates.

• The split of what you do, by percentage of turnover, and how much you subcontract.
• The deepest excavation you take on.
• The liability limit, and the sub-limits underneath it.
• The fleet: how many machines, what, how old.
• Five years of claims history, and any break in cover.

We will not put a price on this page. A real number needs your fleet, your work and your contracts.