Reports & Submissions

The FCVic Board has adopted its 3-year Strategic Plan for 2022-2025.

Developed through a consultative process with FCVic members, the Strategic Plan articulates the priority areas of focus for our organisation, and our sector, as we move towards our vision:

A fairer and more equitable society with improved community wellbeing and better lives for vulnerable people.

Following the direction of our expiring Strategic Plan of the past three years, the new plan continues the aim of building our sector capacity to respond to new and increased community needs, while protecting our workforce from burnout and work-related stress.

FCVic’s current and recent projects have enabled us to connect more closely with other sectors and organisations to demonstrate the benefits of financial counselling for the communities they support. The Strategic Plan reflects our commitment to strengthening those relationships through collaborative initiatives that allow us to achieve our social justice objectives.

As always, FCVic remains driven and led by its members – professionals with strong ethics and high-quality practice standards. As our profession reaches a new stage in its maturation, the Strategic Plan strives for financial counsellors to be recognised and respected, with opportunities for growth and leadership.

The past three years have been heavy with challenges, which the financial counselling sector has been adaptive to respond to. Our new Strategic Plan maintains a positive outlook for the future and what we can achieve.

We invite you to read the FCVic Strategic Plan 2022-2025.

Between March and June 2022, 90 people who were clients of financial counsellors shared their stories about trying to live on the JobSeeker Payment.

They also provided information about their weekly income and expenditure showing that it is simply impossible for many people to make ends meet on the current rate.

The costs resulting from this impossibility are borne directly by the most vulnerable in our community, facing destitution, declining health, homelessness and hunger, and also carried by overstretched emergency relief services, and by our service systems including justice, health and mental health.

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