Motorcycling Australia Alliance Update
The Motorcycling Australia (MA) Alliance has been fully operational under the MA Alliance Agreement since August 2018 when 6 State Controlling Bodies (SCB) (excluding Motorcycling Victoria) and MA signed the agreement.
The Alliance Leadership Team, consisting of a representative of each Alliance participant and two from MA, have been meeting fortnightly by teleconference since November 2018 to ensure a number of critical alliance projects are progressed as quickly as possible. These projects include the following:
- Strategic review if what the MA federation should look like in the future.
- Designing a completely new financial model for the MA federation.
- Getting all our affiliated clubs operating on RiderNet before the end of 2019 – membership, events, on-line entries and ensuring all services to riders and participants are exclusively delivered online through RiderNet.
What should the MA federation look like in the future?
In this bulletin, we deal with the first of these projects, largely by putting to you the range of options.
What is the optimum insurance structure for the future?
Those of you who have participated in MA for a long time will recall that in 2001 the public liability insurer, HIH, went into liquidation, making it almost impossible for sporting clubs to obtain suitable public liability and other insurance. At the time, MA and the SCBs took the historic decision to establish a captive insurer, MA Insurance Limited (MAIL). That visionary and courageous decision has served this organisation very well since 2002. But will the current insurance structure serve us as well into the future? Some of the critical strategic questions we need to address are the following:
- How should MAIL recover the costs of $1.8 million per year for public liability insurance that covers every club, every committee member, every official, every volunteer and every rider or participant from legal liability? Part of that cost must be recovered through, variously, affiliation fees, event permit costs and fees to participate in events. And what should the mix be?
- Should personal accident insurance that costs the organisation $1.1 million per year (ie the insurance that covers riders for the cost of injury) continue to be compulsory? Or is there a case for making that insurance optional?
- Should MAIL offer income protection insurance and on what terms? Should that be mandatory or optional?
- Should MAIL insurance products be offered to non-members as a way of attracting those outsiders onto the MA community as members.
What should membership look like?
Currently, clubs are the primary members of the SCBs, SCBs are the primary members of MA and all club members are MA members by virtue of those primary memberships. A MA licence of any sort also confers membership on the licensee. But should we create an opportunity for any individual to acquire direct membership of an SCB and/or of MA for a modest membership fee in exchange for individual membership benefits (eg industry discounts, discounted major event tickets etc.).
Should MA remain a dominantly racing organisation?
Or should we also expand our operations into recreational riding in which the family can participate together. As an organisation, we have a very great advantage in that we, mostly though our clubs, have many and varied venues for motorcycling, albeit at the moment focussed on competition. How can we facilitate wider commercial opportunities for our clubs to accommodate purely recreational activities under rules and insurance that are very different from what applies to competition? How can we create more and varied opportunities for our riders, and the non-member public to ride at many more venues?
What are the mutually beneficial opportunities for MA and SCBs to better cooperate with the motorcycle industry?
Whilst we are all familiar with the way in which we currently interact with industry through sponsorship, industry-supported teams etc, what other ways can MA provide benefits to the industry in exchange for more revenue into clubs, SCBs and MA?
All ideas are welcome
There are a lot of questions here and these are only the main questions with which the MA Alliance is wrestling. In the course of the ALT’s considerations of these important strategic issues, we invite any member anywhere to submit to the Alliance via MA any ideas you have about MA’s future in writing. We assure you that the ALT will fully consider any sensible ideas, even radical ideas you wish to put.
Please email through your ideas to [email protected]
