Insurance companies have targeted the Welsh, but you could be next

Posted on 03 Sep 2026

By Denis Moriarty, founder and group managing director, Our Community

Denis Moriarty has an issue with insurance companies varying premiums because of what they perceive to be risk profiles, finding yet another way to categorise and divide us. They crossed a line, he says, when they targeted the Welsh...

A major Australian insurer has just been outed for variable customer-matched pricing. Suncorp wants to match its car and home insurance premiums to the precise risk profile of each person seeking insurance. In order to do this, Suncorp needs to know quite a lot about you. It asks you about your age and your sex and your driving history, and adjusts for that. But it would like to know more. If it put more questions on the form you might get twitchy, so it uses your suburb as a proxy for other data. If you live in a high crime area, your contents insurance goes up.

Where exactly in Melbourne is this suburb? Pic: Shutterstock

Still, there’s more to it than that, and Suncorp has apparently been pushing the limits, charging more to customers who live in areas home to a higher proportion of Muslims, or a higher proportion of people with Greek or Welsh ancestry. People in areas that preferred rice to pasta paid more, and people in areas that didn’t eat much yoghurt paid a price for their fermented-dairy-shunning ways.

Here, I have to say, we’re getting into some fairly dicey territory. The Welsh? Is this a leg-pull? Where are these Welshtowns, where the tourist strolls down the cobbled main street to the haunting music of Methodist chapel choirs past statues of Owen Glendower, Dylan Thomas, Billy Hughes and Kylie Minogue before dropping into the café for a rarebit and some laverbread? There are a handful of rural electorates where the proportion of residents claiming Welsh connections rises above one per cent, but that’s a pretty weak basis for marking them and their neighbours down.

Anti-Welsh prejudice is really not a thing. They come under the general heading of Anglo-Celtic and get all the presumptions of innocence going. Which is certainly not the case for Muslims, against whom prejudice is rife and insurance red-lining can’t help. It’s possible that Suncorp could be had for illegal discrimination.

“Are we entering a new era where our every weakness is exposed to every company we deal with?”

Denis Moriarty

Still, looking at the wider picture, one question that forces itself on us is whether differential pricing – a unique price for each individual – works. Because it’s just becoming possible for AI-based systems to scrape together every characteristic that makes up your life, and every transaction you’ve ever made, and use that data to calculate what you’ll pay for any service, and what you’ll cost. Are we entering a new era where our every weakness is exposed to every company we deal with, where each identical supermarket trolley adds up to a different amount at the checkout depending on whether or not you own a Mercedes?

With AI, though, we’re always faced with a choice of risks: underestimating its impact, and overhyping its capacities. When AI’s proponents worry about the possibility of mechanical superintelligences taking over from humanity they’re not really panicking, they’re actually boasting. A computer program that can assemble time-travelling terminators to pursue Sarah Connor through endless sequels and spin-offs is surely worth another trillion of savvy investors’ money. I suspect that something of the same nature is happening with the Welsh.

Yes, there are striking differences between the profiles of different Melbourne suburbs. There are 10-year gaps in life expectancy between Camberwell and Hoppers Crossing, for example. These differences, though, are almost completely accounted for by average income. Poorer suburbs have worse statistics in almost every respect. Inequity is the driver, and Welshness is nowhere. Suncorp is simply enforcing what’s known as the Matthew principle. To paraphrase the Bible, Matthew 13:12: Those who have will be given more; those who have little will lose even what they have.

Poor people get it coming and going; they have less to begin with, and they’re charged more by Suncorp.

There are no reliable indicators of crime rates or driving offences among the Australian Welsh. They’re not a large enough proportion for anybody except genealogists to bother with. No cross-referenced statistics, of any sort, exist. Anybody who claims to be fine-tuning insurance rates on the basis of Welshness either is guessing or is dressing up guesswork as technological sophistication to impress investors. The Welsh are innocent but irrelevant.

Don’t get me started on the Cornish, though.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.