Our performance in 2023–24 reflected our commitment to ensuring a fair consumer marketplace, while supporting Victorians in a time of rising cost of living pressures.
We provided crucial information and advice to Victorians through both our online and telephone services. This year saw an increase in online services provided, with a corresponding decrease in telephone services, reflecting our goal of using digital technologies to provide greater service to the community. As many Victorians struggled with rental pressures, we continued to dedicate extra resources to undertaking rent investigations, to help Victorians avoid paying excessive rental fees.
We also focused on ensuring that businesses and rental providers were supported to understand and meet their legal obligations and that Victorians were not further impacted by unfair business practices.
We delivered thousands of licensing and registration services to Victorian businesses and community organisations. Upgrades made to our systems allowed organisations to meet their regulatory obligations more easily and quickly, with minimal red tape.
Over the year, we also undertook hundreds of compliance and enforcement activities in multiple industries, including real estate and renting, motor car trading, and debt collection. These resulted in both voluntary and enforced outcomes such as infringements and public warnings, and where necessary, court or tribunal actions. The establishment of the underquoting and renting taskforces provided significant resources to undertake these activities.
We supported Victorians facing hardship by funding community organisations to deliver critical financial counselling, renting and consumer assistance and support. Specialist financial counselling for victims of family violence and for people impacted by disasters such as floods and storms remains a priority, with increased demand for support driven by housing and cost-of-living-pressures.
We are proud to have played an important role in providing Victorians with supports and protections during a challenging year.
Our performance is measured against target outputs specified in Budget Paper 3 2023–24. Outputs refer to the goods and services provided to government by departments, agencies and statutory bodies, and through funding provided to others, such as community agencies.
For more information on our performance against targets for output measures, see the table on page 13 of the Annual Report 2023-24 (PDF, 628KB).