GMW’s price submission gets green light

Tuesday 18 June, 2024

Goulburn-Murray Water’s (GMW) fees and services for the next four-year regulatory period have been finalised, ensuring the water corporation’s customers will enjoy stable prices in the coming years.

The Essential Services Commission (ESC) – which serves as the independent regulator for Victoria’s water, energy, and transport sectors – found that GMW’s price submission was a “high quality” proposal that demonstrated “prudency and efficiency”.

 The new price submission will come into effect on 1 July 2024 with many gravity irrigation customers set to experience a steady or lower typical bill before inflation, and some medium and large gravity irrigation customers experiencing slight increases. Overall, GMW’s average prices will increase less than 1 per cent across the four years before inflation.

GMW Business and Finance general manager Michael Gomez said he was pleased to be offering customers another four years of stable prices.

“At the start of our previous regulatory period (2020-24), we announced an average price reduction of 10 per cent for our customer bills,” he said.

“Since then, we have put a lot of work into minimising our expenditure and therefore keeping prices stable, which enabled us to provide further reductions before CPI in 2022 and 2023.

“Our 2024-28 Price Submission continues this trend of efficient operations and steady prices.

“As a non-profit corporation, our pricing is structured to recover the costs of the services we provide to customers. The consistency of our prices since the 10 per cent decrease in 2020 therefore shows we are operating in a sustainable manner.”

Customers will be sent a full 2024/25 list of prices in the coming days and will receive their 2024/25 fixed charges bills from the end of July.

GMW will improve how it communicates with diversion customers about the nature of their charges in its Price Submission, which has been supported by the ESC’s determination.

People can view the ESC’s final determination on the commission’s website: https://go.vic.gov.au/3JB4Z6E

People can also learn more about GMW’s 2024-28 Price Submission on the GMW website: https://yoursay.gmwater.com.au/pricing-submission-2024

Those with any further questions can contact GMW Customer Experience Team on 1800 013 357.