The Consumer Affairs Victoria Strategic Plan for 2023-26, and regulatory priorities for 2023-24 have been published this week.
The Strategic Plan is a comprehensive roadmap aimed at strengthening consumer rights, fostering a fair marketplace, and empowering Victorians in their everyday transactions.
The regulatory priorities focus on serious marketplace issues facing Victorian consumers and renters at this time. Several of the regulatory priorities also highlight the important role consumer laws have in protecting Victorians from the impacts of rising cost of living pressures, including:
- addressing rooming house and rental provider compliance with minimum standards
- responding quickly where goods are not supplied by emerging online drop-shipping sellers, and
- stamping out prohibited debt collection practices.
The Strategic Plan reaffirms our vision and the outcomes we are seeking to achieve, and identifies where we will focus our efforts over the next three years.
Our three overarching strategic directions are:
- Supporting Victorians: we will provide inclusive and accessible services and recognise the extra support people experiencing vulnerability may need.
- Harnessing digital technologies: we will continue to adopt digital technologies to enhance our services and make the most of our data and resources for the benefit of the community.
- Better engagement: Improved engagement with the community, stakeholders and our partners will be a priority to better understand and meet the diverse needs of communities.
To put these strategies into action, we will focus on nine key areas, including prioritising services for individuals experiencing vulnerability in the marketplace and communities impacted by emergencies, ensuring timely compliance and enforcement responses, making our systems and services easier and faster to use, delivering genuinely helpful, responsive, and culturally safe services, and fostering a safe, diverse, and inclusive work culture.
The release of the Strategic Plan is accompanied by the announcement of our regulatory priorities for 2023-24. These priorities undergo annual review to focus resources on areas of most risk of harm, while allowing us to respond to emerging issues that arise during the year.
Our regulatory priorities for this year include a focus on unlawful estate agent conduct including underquoting, domestic building challenges and motor car traders who sell bad cars and fail to provide a remedy.
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