Injured as a passenger in a car accident

You are almost certainly covered

Every registered vehicle in Australia carries compulsory third party insurance, and injuring passengers is precisely what it is for. Whatever happened between the drivers, you did not cause it — so the fault arguments that make a driver’s claim difficult mostly do not touch yours.

That holds whether you were in the front or the back, in a friend’s car, a taxi, a rideshare, a bus, or a work vehicle. It holds if the driver of your car was the one who caused it. It holds if you are related to them, live with them, or are on the same policy.

The reason most passengers never claim

It is not that they were refused. It is that the driver was someone they care about, and making a claim felt like turning on them. This is the single biggest reason entitlements in this area go unused, and it rests on a misunderstanding worth clearing up plainly.

• You are claiming against an insurance policy, not against a person.
• The driver does not pay your compensation and is not asked to repay the insurer.
• In most cases their premium does not change, because CTP is priced on the vehicle and the state rather than on individual claims.
• Not claiming protects the driver from nothing. It only costs you.

Telling the driver you intend to claim is the decent thing to do, and it is better they hear it from you than from their insurer. Most people find the conversation is far smaller than they feared.

What to do now

1. See a doctor and tell them it was a car accident. Everything that follows rests on that record existing.
2. Lodge a CTP claim in the state where the accident happened. Several states have a short window — commonly 28 days — to keep full entitlements, with a longer outer limit after that.
3. Write down the registration of every vehicle involved. You do not need to work out which one you are claiming against.
4. Keep receipts and keep a note of days off work, appointments, and help you needed at home.
5. Speak to a lawyer before you accept anything at all.

If the driver was unregistered, or took off

You can still claim. Every state and territory operates a nominal defendant or equivalent scheme that stands in for an unregistered, uninsured or unidentified vehicle, and injured passengers are exactly who it exists to protect.

• Report it to police — for an unidentified vehicle this is usually a condition of the claim rather than just sensible.
• Write down everything you remember about the other vehicle immediately. Colour, make, a partial plate, the direction it went.
• Lodge quickly: these claims generally have shorter and stricter deadlines than ordinary CTP claims.
• Get a lawyer. There are more procedural traps here than anywhere else, and getting one wrong ends a claim rather than delaying it.

Things that reduce a claim but do not end it

People talk themselves out of these far more often than an insurer refuses them. If you were not wearing a seatbelt, or you got into a car with a driver you knew had been drinking, your claim can be reduced by a percentage for contributory negligence. It is not usually a bar.

Tell your lawyer about it at the first appointment rather than letting it surface later. A reduced claim is worth a great deal more than no claim at all.