We've built the 2026-2031 regulatory proposal through three engagement phases:

  • Broad and wide 

    Looking into what matters most to customers

  • Deep and narrow

    Fine-tuning initiatives and considering trade-offs

  • Test and validate 

    Assessing alignment of draft proposals with customers

Who we engaged with

  • Special interest groups

    • Advocacy groups
    • Local councils/shires
    • Business advocates
    • Residential and small-medium business advocates

  • ​Internal team

    • Board members
    • Shareholders
    • Executive Management
    • Workstream leaders
    • Regulatory reset team
    • Internal staff

  • External stakeholders

    • DEECA
    • AER
    • Customer Advisory Panel
    • Other Victorian networks
    • Energy retailers

Our engagement approach

​For each phase, we undertook the following triangulation process:

  • ​Community and stakeholder engagement 

    Purpose: planned engagement activities to collate insights aligned to themes and phases.
    Outcome: customer insights to feed into business decision making.

  • Close-the-loop 

    Purpose: what we heard is shared back with customers and stakeholders, who are invited to review and share additional feedback.
    Outcome:     an iterative feedback loop/open dialogue between us and our customers/stakeholders.

  • Insights synthesis 

    Purpose: synthesis of all customer and stakeholder insights to date is documented in one ‘source of truth’.
    Outcome: customer responsive strategic decision making; constantly evolved and improved approach to regulatory engagement.

  • Insights socialisation

    Purpose: challenge and review business decisions.
    Outcome: refinement to inform the next engagement phase

Our engagement commitments

  • Ensuring customer voices have been heard

    We partnered with Forethought, an independent market research and community engagement firm, to ensure the design of our engagement activities were conducted in accordance with best-practice techniques.

    Forethought provided independent facilitation of engagement sessions to ensure the opinions of customers and stakeholders were captured without prejudice or assumptions.

    All of Forethought’s reports are listed on this web page.

  • ​Engagement activities

    We have connected with over 8,000 Victorian customers and stakeholders, including more 140 different organisations through our engagement activities.

    This has included large-scale forums, community workshops, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and surveys. Our aim has been to keep customer priorities and concerns at the forefront of our planning.

    As we moved into deep and narrow consultation, we focused on customer outcomes and trade-offs, which have become central to the draft proposal.

  • Customer Advisory Panel

    The CAP is made up of 11 diverse and unbiased members, including an independent Chair and Deputy Chair, who possess specialist capabilities in consumer advocacy, regulatory strategy, energy policy, social research and public policy.

    The CAP is advised on all customer research, participate in working groups, observe our community engagements, and ensured the diverse and changing needs of our customers are properly understood, balanced and reflected in our plans.

    Learn more about the CAP 

  • Communication and promotion

    To ensure broad participation, we designed this dedicated engagement website and social media, radio and our corporate website. These platforms allowed us to share outcomes and keep the community and stakeholders informed throughout the process.

    To date, we have connected with more than 94,000 people via social media channels and 2,175 people through our websites. Our goal was to enable customers to follow our journey from start to finish and have the opportunity to engage on their terms.