In 2023–24 Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV) supported Victorians facing cost of living, housing and rental pressures, while maintaining its activities directed at ensuring a fair, safe and competitive marketplace.
Our new 2023–26 strategic plan, launched in October, guided us in directing our resources to best help Victorians doing it tough, while ensuring that our regulatory oversight stayed robust and impactful. We reinforced many of our existing support services for consumers, renters and businesses, while delivering initiatives such as the underquoting and renting taskforces and stakeholder engagement activities.
We supported Victorians to exercise their consumer rights, providing advice and information through multiple channels. We ran several education and communications campaigns in 2023–24, including on underquoting, renting and domestic building, to increase people’s understanding and confidence in their rights and responsibilities and how to contact us for further help. In 2023–24 CAV’s contact centre answered 220,741 calls and responded to 80,040 online or written enquiries, and our CAV website received over 7 million visits.
CAV’s community programs played an important role in helping Victorians who are dealing with financial hardship. CAV provided $16.7 million in funding to the Financial Counselling Program in 2023–24, enabling community service partners to support more than 19,000 clients get their finances back on track with free and independent financial counselling services delivered across the state.
People experiencing family violence were supported through specialised financial counselling services, provided to 4,164 Victorians. Flood financial counselling services for Victorians impacted by the October 2022 floods were also extended.
We responded to Victoria’s rental market pressures with a slew of new initiatives and reinforced services. In March 2024 the Government announced a new renting taskforce within CAV, to detect and deter non-compliance with rental laws designed to protect renters’ rights. The renting taskforce uses a risk-based, intelligence-led compliance program to crack down on rental law offences but also engages with the community to promote compliance through public education and communications about rental rights and regulatory actions.
We provided information and advice on renting via our website and through phone and online enquiries. In 2023–24, CAV answered 66,231 calls in relation to rental enquiries, while the renting section on the CAV website received over 4.9 million visits. Demand for rent investigations also continued to increase and we responded to 7,469 rent investigation requests this year, up 37 per cent on last year, itself a 122 per cent increase on the year before. While growth in this service slowed, the continued increase reflects the ongoing challenges many Victorian renters faced with rent increases.
CAV also provided renters with help through our Tenancy Assistance and Advocacy Program and Retirement Housing Assistance and Advocacy Program, under which community organisations supported over 9,000 renters and residents in 2023–24.
Under its Housing Statement released in September 2023, the Victorian Government announced a new Rental Stress Support Package to help address the high demand for rental assistance that organisations who work to prevent homelessness and help renters stay in their homes are seeing. CAV supported the rollout of this package and in May 2024, the Government announced it had allocated $7.8 million across three years from 2023–24 to 2025–26 to nine not-for-profit community service organisations to increase the delivery of renter services.
CAV also released new regulatory priorities and throughout the year, CAV engaged in risk-based, intelligence-led compliance activities to ensure fair and safe trading. In addition to the establishment of the renting taskforce, we took a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to underquoting through our underquoting taskforce. The underquoting taskforce issued 89 infringements and 128 official warnings, totalling $1,001,720 in fines, in 2023–24. This has helped to ensure a fairer property market for buyers and for estate agents doing the right thing.
We also continued our focus on stamping out failures by estate agents or conveyancers to lodge annual audits of trust accounts, helping to guarantee that trust funds are not misused or stolen. We took disciplinary action against professionals who failed to submit their audit reports. Our continued focus on ensuring rooming houses comply with their mandatory safety and amenity standards led to an increase in inspections in 2023–24 and a range of actions to secure compliance and rectification of any breaches.
Our regulatory priorities include keeping Victorians, especially children, safe from consumer products presenting risks of harm. CAV inspectors played a critical role in keeping the community safe, inspecting 425 stores, issuing 8 infringements, 131 official warnings and receiving 65 voluntary undertakings to remove dangerous products from sale.
More generally, our increase in targeted compliance activities led to over 900 court and administrative actions. We commenced 14 new court and tribunal proceedings in 2023–24 in response to serious alleged offending or non-compliance.
CAV is committed to using digital technologies to enhance our services and optimise our data and resources. In late 2023, CAV completed a significant website upgrade. This made it easier for Victorians to find consumer and renting information online, and we saw a meaningful increase in traffic to the CAV website in 2023–24, with 7.21 million visits in 2023–24 (up 27 per cent from 2022–23). This represents thousands of Victorians seeking and finding advice on renting questions, consumer issues and many other topics. We also continued to implement changes to our licensing and registration online systems to make it easier and faster for businesses, professionals and community groups to manage their regulatory obligations with us.
Good stakeholder engagement helps us to understand what is happening in the marketplace and deliver better services and regulatory responses to the Victorian community. We launched our new Stakeholder Engagement Framework in June to make clear our commitment and approach to engagement and established two standing forums to hear from key stakeholders on important issues.
As part of our commitment to engaging with the Aboriginal community and improving access to culturally safe and inclusive services, we introduced a new Aboriginal Community Engagement Lead role in October 2023. Our Lead will help us align our services to the needs of First Nations communities.
I would like to thank the Minister for Consumer Affairs, Gabrielle Williams MP and our former Minister, the Hon Danny Pearson MP, for their support over the year covered by this report. I acknowledge our partners in the Department of Government Services and across the Victorian government who provide crucial support and collaboration for our work.
I would also like to thank our colleagues in funded community service partners working hard every day to provide advice, support and advocacy to Victorians facing challenges with their finances, housing or other consumer issues. Lastly, I thank our staff for their dedication to helping and protecting Victorians, and for their perseverance and hard work in this effort.
In 2024–25 we look forward to continuing our focus on consumer and community engagement, enhanced digital and intelligence capabilities and inclusive and accessible services to deliver on our strategic plan and regulatory priorities and achieve positive outcomes for the Victorian community.
Nicole Rich
Executive Director, Regulatory Services &
Director, Consumer Affairs Victoria