“PROTECTED” LIFE INSURANCE.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXV, Issue 159, 21 June 1935, Page 4

“PROTECTED” LIFE INSURANCE.

Once more, as reported from Wellington yesterday, wc nave our archaic legislation regarding life insurance before the Court of Appeal in an action calling for judicial interpretation of its illdrawn clauses dealing with protection against creditors. It is years now since attention was first drawn in this column to the urgent need for a parliamentary review of the Life Insurance Act, not only in this but in other respects also, and since then we have found several occasions for like comment. It is now over half-a-century since the original Act embodying these clauses found its place in the Statute Book, and from the outset their vague and unsatisfactory terms have been the subject of much adverse criticism and also of much very expensive litigation. Yet they stand to-day in the same garbled shape as they took fifty years ago. Not only this, but the ‘‘protected” insurance is limited to the same amount, £2,000, as was then prescribed as sufficient, whereas we all know that the purchasing power of the New Zealand pound is only about half of what it was then. It is not for want of their attention being drawn to the defects of this old statute that our legislators have not long ago taken steps to amend it, for our Supreme Court judges have not been slow to pass scathing strictures upon it, much as the Chief Justice did yesterday. What interested policy-holders cannot understand is that the insurance offices doing business in the Dominion should be so indifferent to the admitted rights of their clients that they take no action in the matter. There can bo no possible doubt that were such financially influential institutions to make some concerted movement. for reform in the legislation it would at once receive consideration. 'Their failure 1,0 do this can lie interpreted only as meaning that they arc concerned only with extending tlicir operations and gathering in. more premiums, but have but little regard for seeing that policy-holders or tlicir dependents are fully assured of getting benefit from the premiums they pay. The policy-holders are surely entitled to look to them as the guardians of the benefits they profess to provide. It would also obviously be to their own interest to have the ‘‘protected” amount increased to the present-day equivalent of the £2,009 of fifty years ago. - -•»