Public Liability Insurance when travelling and camping

In post 32025, Austravel was looking to get Public Liability Insurance for their extended trip as they has sold their house.

This made me think whether we should be getting travel insurence, even for the weekend trip.

(There could be many instances of you causing injury to someone. For example you might get drunk one night while camping with your mates and think it'd be funny to put a snail in someone's beer bottle which results with them getting seriously ill.)

But seriously...

On a recent (4 day) trip to moreton Island we had some kids with us who built a sand castle on the beach, as kids should. They were using a small shovel to do this and consequently left a hole in the beach which is vary normal, except that this beach is also a road.

Now, consider if a car hit this hole at 60km/h it could easily roll and be written off. The car insurance pays the $60 000 for the car to the owners. Then the insurance company comes after YOU to recover the costs.

Say, it goes to court and the court decides that any reasonable driver should have known that kids build sandcastles on the beach and drivers should therefore drive carefully.

The insurance company appeals to the high court where the arguement centres around whether the beach is a road, a playground or the ocean as the accident was below the high water mark. After 3 days the decision goes against you as you should have known that cars use the beach and the hole would be a danger to cars and their occupants. You have to pay for the car AND court costs of $50 000 a day over three days.

To pay the $210 000 bill you sell your house.

So, my question is:
1 Has anyone bought travel insurance for day to day travel in Aus.
2 Has anyone been in a situation where somebody else has or was likely to sue them.
3. Has anyone ever had to recover money for damages / exepenses, while travelling, from another person.

I'm guessing that this sort of thing would be very rare, (about the same as winning the lotto.)

BTW, it costs around $35 to insure for $200 000 for 12 months and I doubt your car or home insurance would cover such events unless your car or home was directly involved.

R