The Motor Traders Association of NSW is waiting expectantly for the NSW government to introduce legislation to ban repairable write-offs.
MTA advises that the legislation will be introduced during the present session of the NSW Parliament.
The banning of repairable write-offs will greatly enhance public safety by not having these “death traps” or “debt traps” put back on NSW and Australian roads.
There are also growing calls from the industry for a showdown with insurers over the two-quote/tender system because of the increasing number of unsafe repairs being uncovered through rectifications that end up as the new breed of insurer write-offs.
MTA is assisting the industry with exposing these risks to public safety by bringing these unsafe repairs to the attention of the authorities and the public. An educational/promotional type program is being developed with key stakeholders for this very purpose.
MTA is holding area meetings in Sydney and the south coast areas in coming weeks – the first is the western Sydney area meeting followed by the south Sydney area meeting and then the south coast meeting.
Several major industry meetings have already taken place, with hundreds of concerned repairers and a cross-section of many other key industry stakeholders having attended.
The meetings were organised to galvanize the industry’s issues with unsafe repairs under the two-quote/tendering system.
MTA said the situation with unsafe repairs and poor quality of repair is the worst for 40 years, even though vehicle design has sky-rocketed with safety features, composite metals and advanced repair technologies.
Meanwhile, MTA NSW CEO James McCall was recently interviewed on the Finance News Network, where he lashed out at AAMI and said panelbeaters were still in extreme difficulty.
"We've settled the difficulties that we had with NRMA, IAG, and in fact we have a very good relationship with them now, and, they're behaving quite decently and I think the further we go down the track the more that relationship will improve," he told the network.
"But we've got now on the other side of the fence the red giant that's killing our people, AAMI.
"When we went into a conflict situation with NRMA three years ago, people stopped using NRMA for insurance purposes. They had a massive drop in business. According to their own balance sheet it cost them $200 million in premiums in that year.
"Now who was the beneficiary of this? Not our people, because it cost our people dearly. AAMI was the greatest beneficiary of the action that we took.
"Now AAMI are really very aggressive, they’re really screwing our people to the ground, in a stupid sort of a way.
"I mean, they go into a two-quote system, and I'm not anti-competition, that's fine, but the way it's administered means that they will get a cheap quote, and the cheap quote often produces very, very poor quality repairs, and sometimes repairs that are dangerous."
The full interview can be seen on the MTA NSW website or at Finance News Network.