Our strategy

On 22 May 2025, we published our strategy to support a safer energy market for customers affected by family violence alongside an open letter to the energy sector.

Our strategy reflects the AER’s commitment to working with the energy sector to prevent essential services and energy debt from being weaponised against customers experiencing family violence. 

We expect this strategy to evolve over time as we continue to learn more about how we can best ensure the energy market is safe for customers affected by family violence. 

Read our strategy


 

Our priorities

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Our strategy sets out three key priorities for the AER in supporting a safer energy market for customers affected by family violence:

  • Building organisational awareness and capability within the AER
  • Supporting a regulatory framework that enables safety by design
  • Encouraging regulated entities to prioritise safety in their businesses


 

These priorities reflect what we have learned through our work in this space so far, including as a member of the advisory group for the Essential Services Commission of Victoria’s safety by design partnership. The strategy builds on our progress to date, including:

We expect our strategy to evolve over time as we continue to learn more about how we can best ensure the energy market is safe for customers affected by family violence.

The need for a safer energy market

In August 2024, the Essential Services Commission of Victoria established a safety by design partnership with Thriving Communities Australia, Flequity Ventures, Safe + Equal and the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety. 

The goal of the partnership was to develop better practice guides to help businesses identify risks and harms in their systems and processes and prevent the potential for products and services to be weaponised against customers experiencing family violence.

Designed to Disrupt: Safety by design for essential services by Catherine Fitzpatrick of Flequity Ventures was published on 19 May 2025. The paper found that family violence perpetrators exploit essential services to cause harm using tactics such as accumulating debt, avoiding payment, sabotaging services and controlling access to bills. 

Some of these tactics are inadvertently enabled by energy products and services, and many customers affected by family violence live with the fear of life-threatening risks due to human and system errors – many of which could be avoided by changing how products, services and processes are designed.

The paper identified opportunities for the energy sector to improve safety for customers affected by family violence at a systemic level and set out recommendations for businesses to evolve workplace safety culture into a culture focused on customer safety by design.

Open letter to the energy sector

In May 2025, in response to the Designed to Disrupt discussion paper’s findings, we published an open letter to the energy sector calling on industry to make its services safer for customers affected by family violence. 

The letter highlights the opportunities the paper has identified for ambition, collaboration and sharing of good practice as part of a whole-of-sector response.

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