Over 100 leaders from the water, energy and community sectors joined Energy and Water Ombudsman Catherine Wolthuizen and Essential Services Commission chairperson Kate Symons for the online family violence leaders forum on Tuesday 29 August.
This important event was a collaboration between the commission and the Energy and Water Ombudsman of Victoria (EWOV) and provided an opportunity for attendees to hear insights and share learnings about how the water and energy sectors can work individually and together to reduce the incidence of family violence and financial abuse.
In addition to hearing from Kate and Catherine, attendees heard a video message from the Minister for Water, Harriet Shing, and presentations from Lara Olsen, Managing Director South East Water, and Catherine Fitzpatrick, Founder and Director of Flequity Ventures.
The Minister for Water, Harriet Shing, reflected on the efforts of the water sector to support vulnerable customers over recent years, acknowledging how they have adapted, innovated, and evolved the ways they support customers. Protecting families from violence is a priority of the government, and the minister expressed her continued interest and commitment to ensuring that the government continues to improve support for customers now and into the future.
Kate Symons
Kate Symons highlighted the commission’s leadership role in promoting safe and flexible family violence protections across our regulated sectors, and affirmed the commission’s commitment to hearing directly from people who have experienced family violence. She reiterated that the commission takes potential breaches of family violence provisions seriously and won’t hesitate to hold businesses to account. Drawing on lessons learned from the recent enforcement action with South East Water and the review of the family violence provisions in the Water Industry Standards, Kate reminded attendees that the codes and businesses legal obligations extend beyond those customers who have disclosed family violence. She highlighted the commission’s forward program of work and our commitment to continue to support businesses to meet their obligations by working in partnership and collaboration, and ensuring research and lessons learnt are available to all.
Catherine Wolthuizen
Catherine shared case studies that demonstrated key areas for improvement in energy and water markets, including reducing barriers to assistance, training, removing inappropriate or harmful request for evidence, and privacy and account security related issues. The case studies highlighted the importance of safe design, including policy settings and controls to support safe outcomes for family violence victim-survivors, particularly when consumers may not feel comfortable or able to disclose an experience, or if disclosure would potentially expose them to harm. Catherine outlined the ways in which EWOV has enhanced its capability relating to family violence and how they will be using their enhanced capability to share insights with businesses where they see opportunities for improvement. Family violence is an ongoing priority area of work for EWOV.
Lara Olsen
Lara spoke about the early learnings and changes South East Water has undertaken in its family violence policies and processes since entering into an enforceable undertaking in June 2023. This included South East Water’s approach to reviewing and improving policy and processes; reviewing and improving training; reporting on, and compliance with, their action plan; and quality assurance and compliance monitoring. South East Water is continuing to work towards supporting customers in a way that goes beyond their compliance obligations and are happy to continue sharing learnings and changes as they implement the enforceable undertaking and improve their processes.
Catherine Fitzpatrick
Catherine shared insights from her research into the weaponization of products in the banking sector, as well as work by the Esafety Commission that has developed a safety by design framework for the technology sector. She challenged attendees to think of ways they can disrupt or prevent abuse by deliberately and by design reimagining products to improve physical and financial safety. She encouraged attendees to consider the tactics they were already aware of, and to think about how they might disrupt these, and suggested an opportunity for a tailored essential services safety by design framework to be developed collectively, to make products more flexible, safer and harder to be used as a tactic of coercive control.
