Here I am 12 months down the track from Dreamworld killing 4 of its visitors and reflecting on the last 12 months.

Yes, I’m back on the Gold Coast, in a virtual rinse and repeat of last years holiday. Mr 2 3/4 is now Mr 3 3/4 and we’re here at much the same time to do much the same things.

We’re even staying in the same place, Ashmore Palms, nice, quiet, cabin based family holiday park. More in the style of a classy camping park than a Gold Coast high rise apartment. Suits us just fine.

So what’s changed, not much it seems. The same roadworks on the way in that were happening last year are still happening.

The theme parks seem just as busy, busier actually as the atmosphere last year was muted at all the parks following the accident at Dreamworld.

So what’s my point?

The fact not much has changed is my point. When you look back on the last 12 month it is often the case with people. It can be like that for years and all of a sudden there’s an upheaval.

Just because nothing has changed in your world doesn’t mean the world hasn’t changed. And this is the bit people often don’t grasp with their risk management. A little too much set and forget.

So what has changed that we need to consider?

The big one is the change of government, this is likely going to put pressure on areas of the economy that have been quite stable in recent history.

This will have impacts on:

• Labour
• Business
• Housing
• Health
• Immigration.

The reality is we do want better conditions and opportunities for our citizens, it drives a large part of our culture and sense of dignity. The focus on employment for New Zealander’s is a good thing, but it will have unintended consequences, as all Government meddling in the market does.

With the focus on employment, we then have a direct follow-on impact on businesses and business owners. Now before you moan about these people being the fat cats and should be leant on, most aren’t.

Most are just getting by, paying the bills and bringing up families. They are often the ones that employ a significant portion of the working population and where we see the increase and reduction in employment the most.

What businesses are looking for are good skilled workers who have the ability to help grow their businesses, in return, there’s a regular wage or salary for that worker.

The small business owner in New Zealand is the backbone of our economy, yes I’m including farming in this too, as they have taken the initiative and their capital and put it to work in a business. They should be commended for taking the risk, not bashed about making it work.

What seems to happen though if someone says something about an aspect of our society and the media turns it into a beat-up story.

Talk about beneficiaries it becomes beneficiary bashing, talk about companies and all of a sudden their profits are considered to be robbing the economy and then there’s the poor middle class, where everyone is a victim rather than being upwardly mobile and getting on with it.

I see all of this all the time, we work with people across all areas of society. What I can say is people are not victims, they aren’t news for their station in life, they are getting on doing what they see is the best for them and their families.

Yes, some things could be better, at the same time things could be significantly worse too.

What we need to be careful of is not opening up the labour aspects while penalising business in the process. The businesses are the ones creating the jobs, they need to be confident that they have both the work and the money to employ someone. Take that away or impact it significantly and you’ll see job losses, not job gains.

Housing, my this is an interesting one. Frankly, there have only been two sectors that have benefited from the meteoric rise in house prices, investors and boomers with no kids.

Why do I say this?

Investors have the spare cash to speculate, thus they are in the position to inflame the market and to take the profits as it gets crazy.

The boomers with no kids, they don’t have to take the value of their home and leverage it to get their kids into the housing market, they can take it and spend it as they see fit.

A good part of the ‘wealth’ created from our property boom is going to end up being ploughed back into a property at some point in the future as the kids inherit it. Some of this will be handled well, a lot of it won’t be.

We have seen a massive shift of wealth to the older more established members of society, it will in time swing back the other way, but it will take time.

In the meantime, we will have an increased level of people renting. With the noise from the new Government about immigration and offshore home ownership I expect that we’ll see continued demand for rental accommodation but not at the same rate we have seen in the past, but will take time to ease.

Talking jobs, with the migration of people from rural and small towns to bigger cities, chasing work and opportunity the bigger city markets won’t be the first to ease.

We can expect increased automation in businesses too, this will impact on the needed skills for jobs in the future. We’ve seen the retrenchment of reception telephonists in lieu of interactive voice systems, expect more of this sort of thing.

Frankly, the easiest way to ease the pressure on big cities and support our smaller communities is to distribute the work to remote workers. Making life both more affordable, reducing transport and housing requirements while maintaining small businesses in more remote places.

What my week in the Gold Coast has shown, this needs good communications networks. I’m sitting here with 1.3mbps of wifi connectivity with a typical fringe suburb user getting 3.5mbps of direct connectivity. Aussie is miles behind. Given I’m used to greater than 20mbps even on mobile, this is purgatory by comparison :)

Health and Immigration

What we are going to see is a continued challenge for our health system. The public system is still unable to keep up with the demand for surgery with the private medical system performing more operations for the 25% of people with medical insurance cover than the public system does for the whole rest of the population.

We're seeing more expensive treatments coming onto the market, that aren't funded by Pharmac, meaning you have to pay for these yourself if you don't have the right medical insurance coverage.

These are primarily for cancer treatments at the moment, the danger is the government budget will skew this in unexpected ways, in some ways we're already seeing it now.

For example, we had a 52-year-old client with a hip problem, the specialist's answer was a hip was needed now. The public system's answer was a cortisone injection now, another in 5 years and then a new hip at 62 with an expected revision at 72-75.

This smacks of budget control on the DHB's part when the private medial answer was here's your new hip and we've oversized it with good components to get you through this active part of your life with a simple operation to revise it when you're 75-80.

The latter medical approach is far preferable than living with pain, not to mention more inclusive family time.

Immigration is also going to put pressure on this eventually too. As we have more people from around the world entering our health system, we'll see more interesting medical conditions we haven't seen here before.

One client of ours has a condition from the middle east, controlled with a simple cheap medication, that presented as an enigma with both insurers and the medical fraternity. One of those situations where the patient knows more than the medical specialists. Made for an interesting discussion when we had him underwritten.

So what's my point?

We have had a relatively stable political environment for the last 9 years, the next 12-18 months we can expect this to have a number of changes. It's also a good time to consider other changes likely into the future.

Focus on Health Insurance and Income Protection are going to be two key core areas of protection you need to ensure you have coverage for.

Health insurance to access the treatment you need, without the barrier of cost

Income protection to cover your income while you recover from treatment or a disability, and added redundancy cover for forced job loss.

What do I mean by redundancy?

If you are in a position where you need to retrain to re-enter the workforce, you'll need additional financial support if you were laid off.

White collar process workers are going to be one of those categories where automation is going to impact jobs quite quickly. If you're not already thinking about re-skilling then this is something that needs consideration now.

My final point on Immigration

We currently rely on immigration to bring in new skills, if we are going to turn off the tap on new people coming in, we need to be able to develop those new skills internally, and quickly.

Yes, we need builders and trades, but STEM needs to expand to STEAM as the fostering of creative with the arts combined with STEM is where new innovation comes from. Knowledge of what we already know doesn't drive creativity.

If you haven't reviewed your risk for a while, now is a good time to have a look at where you're at, where you're going and what needs to be done to protect you in the most cost-effective way.

This article discusses universal basic income and talks about the future impact of technology in a reasonably realistic way.