What do Australians think about the services they receive?

Base-line findings from the Citizen Experience Survey undertaken by the Department of PM&C indicate that despite similar satisfaction rates with public services as urban citizens, and similar levels of effort to access and receive public services, only 27 percent of regional Australians trust Australian government public services, compared with 32 percent of urban citizens. These low levels of trust, despite high levels of satisfaction, highlight that government performance (where here trust in public services is a proxy) is only one factor driving citizens’ confidence in government (Sims, 2001). Rather, government performance – and with it citizen trust in public services, trust in government and trust in democracy – is the result of complex interacting processes which reach beyond service delivery, including: policy and program design which attempts to reconcile diverging interests and balance numerous political and resource constraints, media framing of government performance, and, the behaviour of political elites (Sims, 2001; Stoker et al., 2018b).

Do Australians have preferences in terms of how services are delivered?

We only have national data on this issue; therefore, we will explore this issue in our focus group research. There is a sustained willingness amongst the Australian citizenry to use online services and a preference for online services over other delivery channels in simple transactional service areas (Evans and Halupka, 2017); however, evidence from the Department of Human Services (Senate Estimates July 2018 to February 2019) suggests that “face to face” channels remain the most effective driver of citizen satisfaction especially for more complex services. It is evident that the mix of channels is important to respond to the different needs of citizens. As Carter and Belanger (2005) observe these factors inform the trustworthiness of e-government services and influence broader service uptake; citizens need to trust both the agency and the technology (Lee and Turban, 2001).

What do regional Australians perceive to be the barriers to service delivery?

The data presented in sections three and four of the report are useful in terms of helping us to identify potential barriers to the take-up of public services. It draws on findings from the secondary literature on regional Australia. Here we use Sabatier’s (1986) seminal model of the implementation gap to identify potential cognitive, environmental and institutional barriers to the delivery of government services in regional Australia to organise evidence from the secondary literature (see Figure 2).

Cognitive barriers refer to obstacles to the capacity of the APS to understand the service needs of Australians citizens and respond to the needs and aspirations of local communities. Institutional barriers refer to organisational issues, largely linked to resources of different kinds (e.g. financial, knowledge, target group political support) which impact on the capacity of public agencies to create and deliver quality public services.

Environmental barriers refer to exogenous factors which can undermine the capacity of public organisations to create and deliver quality public services. Most environmental factors are beyond the control of service providers but need to be factored into strategic thinking particularly in areas of risk-management. These can include issues such as socio-economic and environmental conditions, and support from federal, state and local politicians and media.

The most significant sources of slippage in service delivery reported in the broader implementation literature tend to arise from six main sets of institutional factors⁵:

1. Ambiguous and inconsistent service objectives;
2. Inadequate causal theory of change and understanding services as a means to an end and not an end in themselves;
3. Failure of the implementation process to ensure compliance because of inadequate resources, and/or inappropriate policy instruments;
4. The discretion of street-level bureaucrats and the recalcitrance of the implementing officials;
5. Lack of support from affected communities and relevant government agencies;
6. Unstable and uncertain socio-economic contexts which undermine either political support and/or the causal theory.

Here, issues of environmental context and how services are designed and implemented come into sharp focus, which is explored empirically in this study.

⁵ See Dunleavy 2010; Halligan 2011; Hill and Hupe 2003; Hupe 2017; Newman 2005; Peters 2013; Redell 2008; Schofield and Sausmann 2004.

⁶ This is an interactive model in the sense that these sets of variables do not exist in a vacuum; they interact in complex and often unexpected ways.