Ongoing research

There are at least seven important gaps in our knowledge of the present APS service system in regional Australia that require consideration:

  1. The findings of this research are not new, many of these barriers and enablers have been identified over recent decades, although this comprehensive focus on regional citizens does provide novel insights. Given that we have known these challenges for some decades, why has more change not materialised? More research is needed to better understand disconnections in line-of sight whole of Commonwealth government and between jurisdictions and the community sector. What is constraining positive changes in service delivery?
  2. There is a lack of coherence around the common purpose, principles and operational parameters governing the present APS service delivery framework. The data reported here demonstrates that staff both anticipate and expect change and they believe a culture shift is looming through the launch of both Services Australia and the APS Review. In the main, morale is fairly good (with some outliers) but a sense of uncertainty about the future is palpable and there are diminished levels of trust between policy owners, program managers and service providers. In sum, the present governing context provides an opportune time for change.
  3. We have no data on the views of street level bureaucrats on the strengths, weaknesses and future development of the present service system and yet we know from existing literature that service innovation largely emerges from the frontline.
  4. Despite significant public investment over the past decade, we also have limited evidence on what works in terms of regionally and rurally-based governance structures for coordinating citizen-facing services.
  5. We also have limited geospatial mapping of existing service and program delivery. Developing the ability to understand what is being delivered into a community by postcode (or other relevant spatial measure) would provide a powerful planning and decision-making tool. For example, we could use this to map under and over-supply of services in relation to the SEIFA index (see Figure 10).
  6. At the core of this change process is the need for better collaborative practice and yet our understanding of what this looks like in practice is limited. A research-practice program could be established to identify and share best-practice collaboration principles.2
  7. We have limited knowledge about the costs of delivering a siloed approach versus an integrated service approach suggesting the need for the Department of Finance to undertake a productivity review of the existing service delivery system.

These are significant gaps in the evidence base that, if bridged, could enable better decision-making on regional service delivery problems and solutions.

2 See: Evans, M. (2019), Discovery Report: Building a culture for change: from “collegiality” to “collaboration”, A joint submission from AusIndustry, Strategic Policy, Economic and Analytical Services and The Science and Commercialisation Division, Department of Industry, Innovation and Science and Evans, M. (2018), Methodology for Evaluating the Quality of Collaboration, Canberra, IGPA.