Happy New Year and welcome to 2025! I am really energised about what 2025 has in store for financial counselling in Victoria, and I am delighted to share some of this with you in our first Devil’s Advocate for the year. We’re hitting the ground running with some significant projects that will make a real difference to our sector and the people we serve.
As I shared last year, we have been fortunate to receive support from Consumer Affairs Victoria as part of their financial counselling funding round. We are working on a Workforce Development Project to provide long-term thinking on how to create a thriving workforce into the future. We will be consulting with members closely over the next six months to ensure that this work captures your perspectives and experience. This is also a good opportunity to once again congratulate all agencies that were successful in seeking additional funding through this round—we are reaching out to all and offering our support if it is useful.
We are also seeking to ensure that we continue to be engaged with and engaging for members, so we will be conducting our annual engagement survey soon. We have been working hard since the beginning of January to prepare this and ensure that we don’t overdo our surveys. We know that they take time away from client work, and we want to ensure that we strike the right balance of consultation here, particularly given our Workforce Development Project consultation.
Another big project on our advocacy radar is the Rank the Energy Retailer collaboration with Energy Consumers Australia. This project is powering ahead with our partners across the country as a national rerun of our previous 2016 report. We’re grateful to be working with other state associations and Financial Counselling Australia to ensure that this is impactful.
This has been a very busy month in preparing for our Housing Summit on Thursday, 27 March, which will be a deep dive into housing affordability, access, hardship issues, and what we as a profession can and are doing in response. This is a challenging space to program for because we want to ensure that it is not simply a series of high-level macroeconomic wish lists but is tangible and practical for financial counsellors and industry hardship teams. We’re delighted that so many have already signed up to join us on the day to be part of this important conversation at The Glasshouse and that we already have such a strong group of speakers for the day.
Following our State Budget Submission last year and the recent Victorian Government reshuffle, we are continuing to have productive conversations with MPs and agencies across the state about the needs of financial counselling and hardship in Victoria. It’s really important to maintain an ongoing dialogue across the sector and with government to ensure that the insights from financial counsellors effectively make their way into the decision-making process.
On a personal note, I wanted to share that my family is counting down to early March when we will be welcoming our fourth little one! I will be taking some leave at the time to be with my partner and new baby, which is why I’ve carefully timed a trip to Warrnambool two weeks before the due date and our Summit two weeks after. There will be no surprises (I hope).
There’s such positive energy in our sector right now. I really believe 2025 is going to be a landmark year for financial counselling in Victoria, and I couldn’t ask for a better team to tackle it with.
Looking forward to everything financial counsellors will achieve together in 2025!