Insurance claim appeal

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32847, 22 February 1972, Page 3

Insurance claim appeal

(N.Z. Press Association) , WELLINGTON, February 21. The Court of Appeal was told today that a $5OOO claim under an accident insurance policy concerned the definition of the term “while intoxicated.”

The Court is considering an appeal against a judgment by Mr Justice Wilson in the Supreme Court at Christchurch a year ago. The appellants are the executors for Lindsay Richard Rex Parsons, a shearing contractor, who was killed in March, 1967, when his station waggon hit a bridge 40 miles north of Kaikoura.

The respondent is the Far mers’ Mutual Insurance Association, which had insured Mr Parsons mder a personal accident policy for $5OOO. The insurance company denied liability under the policy on the ground of an alleged consumption of alcoholic liquoiv by Mr Parsons

[just before his death because such an event was covered by an exception clause in the policy. TO ARBITRATION His executors referred the case to arbitration and the arbitrator concluded that Mr Parsons was not intoxicated within the meaning of the insurance policy.

Mr Justice Wilson held that the arbitrator had misdirected himself and ruled that Mr Parsons was intoxicated. The Court of Appeal was told this afternoon by Mr B. McClelland, appearing for the appellants, that the case concerned the definition of the words “whilst intoxicated” in the exception clause of the accident policy.

He said Mr Justice Wilson had adopted the definition that “a man is intoxicated when he is so much under the influence of alcohol as to have lost control of his faculties to such an extent as to render him incapable of executing safely the occupation in which he was engaged at the relevant time.”

Mr McClelland submi&ed

that the definition was incorrect, and that the policy was an accident policy and not a motor-car policy—and that therefore the policy had to apply to all accidents and sickness, with exceptions, and to cover all activities.

He said to the Court of Appeal that the policy should therefore be construed with this background and not as Mr Justice Wilson had done with reference to a specific activity.

For the respondent, Mr I. C. Robertson referred to a specific question in the accident insurance proposal which asked the intended insurer if he was “of strictly sobey and temperate habits and have you always been so.”

Mr Parsons’s answer on the proposal had been “Yes.”

Mr Robertson said this answer had been given ini spite of Mr Parsons having a “drunk-in-charge” conviction. |

He said the arbitrator had! found that Mr Parsons had. been drunk within the mean-| ing of the exception clause of the motor-car insurance pol-; icy which Mr Parsons also had. I,