If you are reading this, the crash has already happened. So this is not a page about hazard triangles and first aid. It is about the legal steps that decide whether you are compensated for your injuries in Queensland, and the ones people most often get wrong without realising it.
Queensland runs a compulsory third party (CTP) scheme under the Motor Accident Insurance Act 1994 (Qld). Every registered vehicle carries CTP insurance as part of its registration fee, and that policy is what pays compensation to a person injured by someone else’s driving. It is separate from your comprehensive car insurance, and it is what a motor vehicle accident claim is made against.
Several of the steps below carry hard deadlines. Two of them can end a claim outright if you miss them. If you want to talk to someone about your own accident before you read any further, contact ROCHE Legal today.
Step 1: Make Sure Police Have Been Notified
This is a legal precondition, not a formality. Anyone intending to claim for personal injuries such as whiplash must ensure appropriate notice of the accident has been given to police under section 34 of the Motor Accident Insurance Act 1994 (Qld).
There are only two ways to satisfy it. Either the required particulars were given to a police officer under section 93(4) of the Transport Operations (Road Use Management) Act 1995 (Qld), which is what normally happens when police attend, or you give police a separate written notice in the approved form. That notice has to name you, give your date of birth and contact details, set out the date, time and place of the accident and how it happened, and identify the vehicles, drivers, injured people and witnesses as far as you know them.
Police often do not attend a crash where nobody appears badly hurt. If that describes yours, this step is still outstanding, and it is the first thing a CTP insurer will look at when it is deciding whether to argue non-compliance.
Step 2: Identify the Vehicle and Its CTP Insurer
A CTP claim is made against the insurer of the at-fault vehicle’s registration, so the registration number is the single most valuable thing to come away with. It is what allows the correct insurer to be identified, usually Allianz, Suncorp, QBE or RACQ, and a claim lodged against the wrong insurer wastes time you may not have.
If you did not get it, do not assume the claim is over, but do act quickly. Where a vehicle cannot be identified the Nominal Defendant takes the insurer’s place, and the deadline drops from nine months to three. If you fail to record the at-fault vehicle’s registration plate, there are things you can still do, and they are set out in the hit and run section below.
Step 3: See a Doctor and Get Every Injury on the Record
Your medical records are the spine of the claim. Compensation follows documented injury, so an injury that never made it into a clinical note is an injury you will struggle to prove two years later.
Two things matter at that first appointment. Tell the doctor the injury came from a motor vehicle accident, so the causal link is recorded from the start. Then tell them about all of it, not just the worst part. A common and expensive mistake is mentioning only the shoulder because it is agony, while the dull ache in the back goes unrecorded. When the back turns out to be the lasting problem, the insurer argues it came from somewhere else entirely.
Neck and back symptoms often take a day or two to appear. That delay does not defeat a claim, because the Queensland notice period can run from the first appearance of symptoms rather than the date of the crash, but it does make an early appointment worth keeping.
Step 4: Preserve the Evidence Before It Disappears
Evidence in a road accident has a short shelf life. Service station and council CCTV is commonly overwritten within days or weeks, dash cameras loop and record over themselves, vehicles get repaired or written off and sold, and witnesses who did not leave a phone number are gone for good.
What is worth securing now includes photographs of the damage to every vehicle and of your injuries, footage from your own dash camera saved somewhere it cannot be overwritten, the names and mobile numbers of anyone who saw it, and anything unusual about the road itself such as faded line marking, a missing stop sign or an obscured view. An independent witness is often what settles a disputed liability argument, and they are almost impossible to find once everyone has driven off.
Nobody remembers the full list under pressure, which is why we built one you can work through on your phone. Open our post-accident evidence checklist and tick items off as you go. It saves your progress, so you can start it now and finish it later.
The location deserves more attention than most people give it. Some Queensland intersections and stretches of road produce crashes year after year, and a documented history of collisions at the same spot can support an argument about how yours happened. You can look up the ten-year crash record for your suburb on our Queensland Road Danger Map.
Step 5: Lodge Your Notice of Accident Claim Before the Deadline
This is the step the whole claim turns on. Section 37 of the Act sets the deadlines for giving your Notice of Accident Claim to the CTP insurer, and they are shorter than most people expect.
- Nine months. Where the vehicle is identified, notice must be given within nine months of the accident, or nine months from the first appearance of symptoms if the injury was not immediately apparent.
- One month after you consult a lawyer. Whichever date falls first governs, so if you see a lawyer about a possible claim at month two, the notice is due one month later, not at month nine. This one catches people out constantly.
- Three months for an unidentified vehicle. If the vehicle that hit you cannot be identified, notice goes to the Nominal Defendant within three months of the accident.
Missing a deadline is not automatically the end. The obligation to give notice continues, and you have to provide a reasonable excuse for the delay. There is one hard exception, and it is absolute. Where the vehicle cannot be identified and the Nominal Defendant is not given notice within nine months of the accident, the claim is barred, and no court can rescue it.
Separately from the notice deadlines, a court proceeding must generally be started within three years of the accident. Section 57 allows a limited extension where the notice of claim was given before the limitation period expired.
Step 6: Be Careful What You Tell the Insurer
An insurer will often make contact early, sound helpful, and ask you to talk through what happened while it is fresh. Anything you say then is recorded and can be used to argue that you were partly or wholly to blame, and people routinely concede fault they did not have by being polite about it at the roadside or on the phone.
Be equally careful with an early offer. A figure that sounds generous in the first few months is usually being offered before anyone knows how your injuries will settle down, and once the claim is resolved it cannot be reopened because the recovery went worse than expected.
It is also important to remember that just because an insurance company declares you the at-fault driver, this is not necessarily a fact and can often be wrong. The lawyers at ROCHE Legal have a history of successfully contesting false assertions of liability made by insurance companies.
Step 7: Get Your Treatment Paid For While the Claim Runs
This is the part most Queenslanders do not know, and it costs them money. You do not have to fund your own physiotherapy, specialist appointments or psychological treatment out of pocket for years while the claim grinds on.
Once you lodge a Notice of Accident Claim, section 39 of the Act gives the CTP insurer 14 days to respond in writing, and that response must state whether the insurer is prepared, without admitting liability, to meet the reasonable and appropriate cost of your rehabilitation. Section 51 then confirms an insurer can make rehabilitation services available before it has admitted or denied liability, and that doing so is not treated as an admission. Once liability is admitted, or the insurer has agreed to fund rehabilitation without admitting it, the insurer must ensure reasonable and appropriate rehabilitation services are made available at your request, and the insurer bears the cost.
In practical terms, funded treatment can start early in the claim rather than at the end of it. If you are not satisfied that what the insurer is offering is reasonable and appropriate, the Act lets you ask the Motor Accident Insurance Commission to appoint a mediator, or ask the court to decide.
If your injuries are serious enough to qualify for the National Injury Insurance Scheme (NIIS), your treatment, care and support are covered under that scheme regardless of who caused the crash. NIIS is the no-fault arm of the Queensland system and applies to eligible serious personal injuries from motor vehicle accidents on or after 1 July 2016.
Step 8: Keep the Property Damage Claim Separate from the Injury Claim
These two claims get confused constantly, and the confusion costs people their injury claim. The panel beating, the excess and the hire car are a property damage matter between motor insurers, dealt with under your comprehensive or third party property policy. Your injuries are a CTP claim against the at-fault vehicle’s registration. Different insurers, different rules, different time limits.
Two consequences follow. Settling the property damage claim does not settle your injury claim, so a payout for the car is not the end of the matter. And a property insurer’s view about who was at fault does not decide the injury claim either, even when it has already paid out on that basis.
CTP insurance is not to be confused with third party property insurance despite the similar name. CTP covers personal injury and comes with your registration. It does not pay a cent towards your vehicle.
Step 9: Keep a Record of Everything the Accident Costs You
Damages are not just an amount for the injury itself. They include what the injury has actually cost you, and that part of the claim is only as good as your records. Keep receipts for medication, scans, treatment, travel to appointments and anything else you have paid for, and keep a note of every day or shift you have missed and the income lost with it.
Unpaid help from family is worth recording too, and this is where a contemporaneous note earns its keep. Under section 59 of the Civil Liability Act 2003 (Qld), damages for gratuitous services are only awarded where the services are necessary, the need for them arises solely out of the injury, and they are provided for at least six hours per week and for at least six months. Damages are also not available for help of a kind that was already being provided before the accident. Those thresholds are proved with a diary of who did what and for how long, not with a recollection two years later.
Step 10: Get Legal Advice Before the Clock Runs Down
There is an oddity in the Queensland rules worth understanding. Consulting a lawyer shortens your own notice deadline to one month, which reads like an argument for putting it off. It is not. The lawyer prepares and lodges the notice for you, ordinarily well inside that month, and the alternative is drifting toward a nine month deadline while the evidence you needed quietly disappears.
Early advice also decides things that are hard to undo. Whether the correct insurer has been identified, whether the police notification requirement has actually been met, whether an early offer is anywhere near reasonable, and whether the treatment you need can be funded now rather than in three years.
Situations That Change What You Should Do
The crash looked minor
A low-speed shunt in a car park still needs Steps 1 and 2. Get the registration number and make sure appropriate notice reaches police. Vehicle damage is a poor guide to injury, and modern bumpers are built to absorb an impact without showing it. If you wake up the next morning with a stiff neck and you have no police record, no registration number and no photographs, you have a genuine injury and no practical way to prove where it came from.
The other driver left the scene or cannot be identified
You can still claim. Where the vehicle or its insurer cannot be identified, the Nominal Defendant stands in the place of the CTP insurer, and its liability is the same as if it had issued the CTP policy for that vehicle. There are two catches. The first is the three month notice deadline in Step 5, with the absolute nine month bar behind it. The second is that a court will only presume a vehicle cannot be identified where it is shown that proper inquiry and search have been made and have failed. That means reporting it to police immediately, writing down everything you did see about the vehicle, and chasing dash cameras, CCTV and witnesses while the footage still exists.
Our hit and run injury lawyers in Brisbane deal with Nominal Defendant claims regularly, including where the only description available is a colour and a direction of travel.
You were riding a motorbike
Riders are far more likely to be seriously hurt in the same collision, and far more likely to be blamed for it. Insurers routinely raise contributory negligence over lane filtering, speed, protective gear and visibility, which can reduce the damages recovered even where the other driver plainly caused the crash. Your riding gear is evidence in that argument, so photograph it and keep it rather than throwing it out, and keep the helmet in particular.
Read more about motorcycle accident claims in Queensland, including the lane filtering rules and how contributory negligence arguments are answered.
The driver hit you on purpose, or the vehicle was unregistered
Neither of these ends a CTP claim, although most people assume they do. CTP responds to injury caused by a wrongful act in respect of a motor vehicle, and a deliberate act is still a wrongful act. Lapsed registration is not fatal either, because the CTP policy continues for a grace period after registration expires, and beyond that the Nominal Defendant covers an uninsured vehicle.
We acted for a client who was deliberately run over twice with her own car, in a case that led to attempted murder charges, and who assumed she had no claim because the incident was intentional and the registration had lapsed. She was wrong on both counts. Read the full CTP claim case review for how the Act applied.
Speak to a Queensland Car Accident Lawyer
ROCHE Legal has helped many Queenslanders through personal injury claims in Brisbane and across the state, and we want to hear your story. We act on a No-Win No-Risk basis, which means you don’t have to pay anything if your case is lost.
If you want a rough sense of the numbers first, try our Queensland compensation calculator. If you would rather just ask someone, contact us on 1300 335 334, visit one of our three offices, or contact us online to find out how we can support your case. Time limits apply to every one of the steps above, so to protect your rights, it is best to not delay.