Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Panel beaters: public liability requirements in South Australia

Cover for legal liability to third parties for personal injury or property damage arising from business activities.

Data as at

Verified for South Australia

  • Licence liability condition: Not applicable to repair work, and the distinction is worth being precise about because a neighbouring occupation does carry a hard condition. Section 12 of the Second-hand Vehicle Dealers Act 1995 requires a person to be insured in accordance with the regulations at all times when carrying on business as a dealer, and provides that a dealer's licence is suspended for any period for which the dealer is not so insured. That binds used car dealers. It does not bind a mechanic, panel beater, auto electrician or mobile mechanic performing repair work. SA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer and Business Services SA · 2026-08-13
  • Licence evidence required: Not applicable to repair work on the evidence found. A second-hand vehicle dealer, by contrast, faces automatic suspension of the licence for any period the required insurance is not in force. SA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer and Business Services SA · 2026-08-13
  • Licensing body: Panel beating and smash repair is not a separately licensed occupation in South Australia. What is licensed is selling vehicles, not fixing them: the Second-hand Vehicle Dealers Act 1995 binds a dealer, meaning a person who carries on the business of buying or selling second-hand vehicles. The available automotive credentials are training qualifications rather than state licences. This rests on targeted searches rather than an exhaustive negative search of every trade licensing Act. SA · effective 2026-08-24 Consumer and Business Services SA · 2026-08-13

What contracts commonly ask for

Principals and head contractors set their own insurance requirements, and those are frequently higher than a licence condition. The requirement that binds is the higher of the two, and both have to be read from the actual document.

What this cover costs

This site publishes no cost benchmark for this cover. A benchmark needs a real sample of documents, and none is published until the sample is large enough to compute a median honestly. A benchmark from a handful of policies is a guess with a decimal point.

Sources