Reaching out

Consumers and small business

Examining and improving accessibility for disadvantaged consumers was a key focus for the TIO in the 2008/09 year and it will continue to be in the years ahead.

For our definition of accessibility we are guided by the Benchmarks for Industry Based Dispute Resolution Schemes. Based on the benchmarks, we define accessibility in terms of:

• ensuring that all Australian telecommunications customers are aware of our existence through promotion in the media and other means
• promoting our existence in such a way as to be accessible to disadvantaged consumers or consumers with special needs
• providing appropriate facilities and assistance for disadvantaged complainants or those with special needs.

During the year, we developed a plan to promote the TIO in the public arena, which integrates all our outreach activities into a yearly calendar of events. The focus of these activities has been to continue raising awareness among the following groups:

• financial counsellors
• rural and regional residents
• people with disabilities
• Indigenous communities
• young people.

The TIO also targeted small businesses by attending the National Small Business Summit with the Financial Ombudsman Service in June 2009.

Financial counsellors

In August 2008, we began a series of consultation meetings with financial counsellors throughout Australia. These meetings are designed to tie in with Council meetings, allowing Council members and TIO staff to meet financial counsellors face to face.

Our first consultation was with about 35 financial counsellors and community legal centre workers in Brisbane, followed by a similar sized meeting at the TIO’s offices in Melbourne in May 2009 and a presentation to the annual conference of the

Financial Counsellors Association of New South Wales in Coolangatta, Queensland, also in May.

TIO staff presented to the Financial and Consumer Rights Council (Victoria’s) annual conference in Ballarat in August and the Financial Counsellors Association of Western Australia’s conference in Perth in October. Consultations are planned with financial counsellors in other states in 2010.

Rural and regional residents

Our main awareness raising activity for rural and regional communities is our community service announcement, a television and radio advertisement. The announcement explains who we are and what we do. It was broadcast by television and radio stations in rural and regional communities in September 2008 and again in August 2009. The TIO also took part in a festival of the Ombudsman in Mount Gambier, South Australia, in May 2009.

People with disabilities

We launched our Second Disability Action Plan 2008-2010 (DAP) in February 2008 and since then have continued to implement and improve our processes to make our organisation more accessible to people with disabilities.
The DAP is renewed every three years and our current plan is now at its halfway mark. As a result, we have been meeting with the disability advocacy organisations who helped develop the original plan and obtaining advice about the plan’s effectiveness.

We have continued our implementation of the DAP plan by reviewing our recruitment processes and practices to ensure that we actively encourage people with disabilities to apply for positions at the TIO, and reviewing our policies on equal employment opportunity so they remain consistent with legislative obligations. We have also continued to appropriately accommodate the needs of employees with disabilities, and ensured that TIO materials are available in alternative formats, such as Braille and audio.

Over the next year, we aim to improve our website so it is more accessible to people with disabilities. In particular, the aim is to make the website meet levels 1, 2 and 3 of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which is an international strategy to make the web more accessible to people with disabilities. The DAP will also be integrated into our new internal complaint-handling process (See End-to-end process review).

With the development of the next DAP, we plan to emphasise methods of providing assistance to those with mental health issues, and those who have a disability and are part of an ethnic minority group.

Indigenous communities

During the year, we established a team of investigation staff to handle complaints from Indigenous Australians.

This is the third year we have participated in the Good Service Forums, which provide information on the services of the TIO and other dispute resolution and service agencies to Indigenous communities throughout New South Wales. The forums are a collaboration between the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW (EWON), Legal Aid NSW, NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, the NSW Office of Fair Trading, the NSW Ombudsman and the TIO.

Young people

In conjunction with the Australian and New Zealand Ombudsman’s Association (ANZOA), the TIO attended orientation week at 13 university campuses in Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and Tasmania. As well as allowing the TIO to raise awareness among this key group, it allowed several investigation staff to hear the concerns of young people face-to-face.

In August 2008, we attended the Business Educators Association of Queensland’s annual conference in Brisbane, and in November 2008, the Victorian Commercial Teachers Association annual conference in Melbourne. As well as general TIO material, we distributed our Sort It bulletin, which contains case studies on mobile phone and credit card debt. Sort It has been published jointly with the Financial Ombudsman Service since 2005. Since then, we have distributed more than 35 000 copies of Sort It to students and teachers Australia wide.

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