If you walk into a shoe shop, pick up a shoe with a scratch on it, and you wouldn't buy it. The problem with insurance is that this is harder to do – not usually life insurance, but more likely the murkier world of disability insurance. You can't always see the scratch until it's too late.

"It's a profession," and "it's complicated" is heard a lot. That's a sort of defensive mechanism against those who say advisers are paid too much. They aren't – they are paid the price that clears the market, and in economic terms, that's efficient.

There is a bugbear lurking in the bushes just up the path a little for the life insurance industry and people don't really want to talk about it. It's Taxation. Yes – capital "T". Because while the rest of us will be getting our 'block of cheese' tax cut in September, life companies will shortly face a big tax hike.

Time for advisers to hold their head up high – even if the most venal, over the past few years, shunted clients from one insurer to another for higher commissions… the clients' cover has been good and provided they don't plan on suicide, complete at all times.

While most of us need to be optimistic just to get out of bed in the morning, the skilled insurance salesman is working out how to 'back the hearse up to the sitting-room window' – metaphorically speaking. It's an important component of success – nice eh?

Business insurance training is as perennial as the grass, but the big question is always – why doesn't it seem to work? Certainly to judge by a recent Sovereign course I attended, there is no obvious reason. The course was excellently presented.

The main theme on display at a recent Asteron launch was claims. It was a 'back to the future' type of presentation.

AIA’s General Manager for New Zealand, Bernard McCrea declared as “Illogical” claims that policyholders may be put at risk of tax penalties by their stand on the tax treatment of Agreed Value disability income insurance.