At first glance, it might appear there are some nice wins for the industry in the federal budget, with cuts to regulatory red tape and money set aside to address home insurance affordability.

But dig a little deeper and it starts to look like a major missed opportunity, with almost no meaningful action on the issues the industry believes matter most.

On affordability, $3.4 million over four years will help drive down property insurance costs, by improving clarity around how home and contents premiums are calculated and legislating standard definitions for natural hazard terms.

Progress in those areas will be welcomed by consumer advocates, but it’s not a lot of money by any measure – and $1 million of it goes towards maintaining a north Queensland comparison website that’s visited by relatively few people and offers little of use to those who do stumble across it.

Many in the industry believe two major planks are needed to genuinely tackle the affordability issue – an urgent uplift to spending on resilience, to start reducing the risk over the longer term, and a short-term partnership measure such as a flood pool or subsidies, to provide more immediate relief.

On the first point, the industry has been crystal clear. The Insurance Council of Australia has repeatedly called for a game-changing flood defence fund, costing $30.15 billion over 10 years, with the burden shared between the federal, Queensland, NSW and Victorian governments.

And it wants a Disaster Ready Fund revamp, to extend disaster resilience funding to a 10-year rolling program that prioritises hard infrastructure projects in collaboration with insurers.

CEO Andrew Hall, speaking at Insurance News’ annual conference in March, said the case for action is “overwhelming” and “we have to stop talking and start doing”.

“We are pleading with the government to start investing in its mitigation before the costs become prohibitive,” he said.

But despite these pleas, neither recommendation was addressed by the budget.

While ICA believes investment in risk reduction is the “only sustainable solution”, it also accepts it’s not going to happen overnight, and some form of public-private partnership is needed to give more immediate help to those being priced out of cover.

Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino accompanied insurers on a trip to Europe last year, to examine pools in other jurisdictions. He said he was considering the “full menu” of options, but we’ve heard nothing since, and the budget offered no clarity or progress.

Developing economic and geopolitical environments might have pushed insurance affordability down the list of priorities – but as inaction continues, so the problem grows.

And these days it’s not just consumer groups and climate campaigners that are sounding the alarm.

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s climate vulnerability assessment predicts an extra 40,000 households will fall out of insurance every year for the next 25 years – resulting in one-quarter of free-standing properties having insufficient cover by 2050.

As ICA has been trying to point out, this is a big problem that requires a big solution, but for some reason the government has not seen fit to act.

So far, the industry’s reaction to this snub has been measured. ICA repeated its view on the “urgent need for an ambitious uplift in funding for extreme weather risk mitigation”, but it declined to offer any criticism of the government’s approach.

The Actuaries Institute says it “continues to call for a co-ordinated national strategy to encourage a significant step up in public and private investment in resilience measures”.

And Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance CEO Katrina Shanks noted the budget’s “limitations”.

“Core resilience settings remain largely unchanged,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

“The cyclone reinsurance pool is untouched, the Disaster Ready Fund remains capped at $200 million annually, and funding adjustments elsewhere are marginal. At a time when catastrophe exposure is intensifying, the absence of expanded mitigation investment signals a continued reliance on post-event recovery rather than pre-event resilience.”

As various studies have pointed out, that approach isn’t smart. Not only does it result in a higher overall spend, but it leaves lives and properties horribly exposed.

After another disappointing budget, the industry is left wondering what it will take for the government to stop talking and start acting.