Our Role

The Essential Services Commission is Victoria’s independent economic regulator. The objectives of the Commission under the RCA are:

  • to ensure users have fair and reasonable access to declared rail transport services
  • to ensure that users requiring access to declared rail transport services to provide passenger services have priority over users requiring such access to provide services other than passenger services.

These objectives are additional to the more general objectives of the Commission under the Essential Services Commission Act 2001. The Commission’s primary objective is to protect the long term interests of Victorian consumers with regard to the price, quality and reliability of essential services.