Essential services are regarded as such because they are critical for survival. Energy and water are fundamental human needs and therefore necessitate a highly regulated critical infrastructure – with controls around price and quality to ensure they are safe, accessible and affordable. But the system can fail to protect victim-survivors of domestic and financial abuse. 

In a world where digital access, data systems and consumer-facing platforms increasingly shape how energy and water are delivered and managed, the risks no longer stop at the substation or the treatment plant. They now extend to customers, whose lives can be deeply affected by system design, account structures, privacy protocols and communications processes.

Nine years ago, the Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria tasked the Essential Services Commission with creating regulatory protections for utility customers affected by family violence.

This paper outlines how an essential services safety by design framework can be applied to proactively identify and mitigate the safety risks related to domestic and financial abuse. It considers potential design changes to enhance protections and ensure safer access to these essential services, including whether debts incurred by victim-survivors as a result of perpetrators’ actions should be wiped.

The paper challenges energy and water providers to extend their workplace safety culture to consider the risks for customers experiencing domestic and financial abuse, move beyond compliance to prevention, and to provide a clear roadmap for change in essential services. It also recommends a national investigation into Australian businesses’ disclosure of victim-survivor contact details to perpetrators to uncover the scale and impact of these systemic and potentially fatal errors across sectors.