Reports & Submissions

The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System recommended that the Victorian Government develop a new suicide prevention and response strategy. The strategy will take a whole-of-government and community-wide approach to better prevent and respond to suicide. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Division in the Department of Health issued a discussion paper as a starting point for collaboration and co-design of the new Victorian suicide prevention and response strategy.

Financial problems combine and interact with other contributory factors across all areas as a driver of suicide risk. Financial counsellors well understand from their practice that financial difficulties, debt, and hardship are important contributors to suicidality amongst the many groups of people they work with.

Drawing on financial counselling client experiences, our members’ professional observations and FCVic’s work with communities, our response to the discussion paper outlines key insights financial counselling can contribute to the development of a suicide prevention and response strategy, and includes several recommendations.

The Victorian Government has commissioned an independent review into the culture of Victoria’s prison system which aims to ensure the prison system promotes rehabilitation, reduces recidivism, and caters to the needs of all prisoners to ensure the system improves community safety.

FCVic, in preparing its submission to the review, consulted extensively with our Prisons Network, a community of practice for financial counsellors servicing correctional facilities across Victoria, and drew from their casework experience.

The submission focuses on specific areas of concern in relation to safety in custody for vulnerable cohorts, and makes two recommendations:

• That all Victorian correctional facilities, including remand centres, provide all prisoners with access to financial counselling as an integral service from the commencement of their incarceration.
• That financial literacy and life skills programs run by financial counsellors are implemented at all Victorian prisons with options for remote delivery to accommodate public health directions.

After two years of implementation, the Essential Services Commission is reviewing the framework designed to support energy consumers facing payment difficulty.

FCVic’s submission responds to a selection of the key review questions the Commission is seeking feedback on, based on the experiences and insights of financial counsellors.

FCVic welcomed the opportunity to make a submission to the Senate Inquiry into the purpose, intent and adequacy of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) in close consultation with our Centrelink Working Group.

Financial counsellors in Victoria work with and represent large numbers of clients who interact with the Federal systems of support, in particular the DSP and JobSeeker, and have considerable insight into the problems people encounter in accessing those systems and making them work fairly and supportively. This submission, drawing on client experiences and our members’ professional observations, raises a number of concerns about the DSP failing to provide support to many vulnerable community members and people living with a disability.

The Case for Change document proposed a series of significant changes to the Diploma, and the Board engaged in a detailed discussion of these proposals, resolving to make a submission to the consultation process on them.

In its submission, the FCVic Board agreed with the recommendation for a review of the existing financial counselling units. However, the Board was not able to fully support the proposed addition of two newly developed units (including a proposed unit on Small Business) and the removal of two units from the core of the qualification without more detailed information.

Developed in consultation with the Gambling Issues Working Group, FCVic’s submission to the Royal Commission into the Casino Operator and Licence outlines Crown Casino’s failures to take meaningful steps to reduce and minimise gambling harm have continued to cause significant harms to the Victorian community.

As the peak body for financial counsellors in Victoria, FCVic has had considerable and long-term feedback from our members raising concerns about clients experiencing harm from Crown Casino – either directly as a gambler, or as a family member or other person affected by gambling.

The major failings financial counsellors identify in Crown’s obligations to (and care for) its customers at risk of gambling harm include:

• Failure to effectively support patrons to establish and maintain self-exclusion arrangements
• Crown providing benefits, services or products to solicit increased customer gambling
• Crown ignoring evidence of customers experiencing gambling harm and inducing further losses

FCVic joined FCA and the other state financial counselling bodies in making a joint submission to the the Senate Economics Committee inquiry into the National Consumer Credit Protection Amendment (Supporting Economic Recovery) Bill 2020.

In the submission, the financial counselling sector opposes the Federal Government’s Bill which proposes to remove responsible lending obligations for banks and other lenders. The submission cites examples of irresponsible lending from financial counselling casework to highlight the danger of removing these key consumer protections.

FCVic’s submission on the draft regulations drew on the expertise of the Bankruptcy Working Group, which involves FCVic members with particular interest in bankruptcy issues encountered in their practice.

The Bankruptcy Working Group discussed and considered the exposure draft and were able to identify positive inclusions in the draft regulations, as well as provide comments in support of the joint consumer groups submission on the exposure draft, authored by Financial Legal Rights Centre, Consumer Action Law Centre and Financial Counselling Australia.

In September 2020, Financial Counselling Victoria (FCVic) conducted a survey of Victorian financial counsellors to better understand how the sector has changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The resulting report, New Costs to Count, provides a snapshot of the financial counsellors’ experiences, which shows the complexity of the changes wrought by the pandemic in its first nine months.

The report also considers – in the context of the issues identified in our earlier report (Counting the Costs published January 2020) – how COVID-19 has impacted on the existing levels of work-related stress, and what opportunities there are to introduce more sustainable work practices to minimize the risk of work overload and burnout.

We’ve made recommendations in the New Costs to Count report to enable funding bodies, agency employers and financial counsellors to address the issues identified and create a safer working environment for practitioners.