The Australian Government Information Management Office Archive

Better Services, Better Government

Setting the scene

The Prime Minister, the Hon John Howard MP, in his %u201CCentenary of the Australian Public Service Oration%u201D (Institute of Public Administration of Australia, June 2001) stated:

We live in an increasingly complex and interdependent environment and there is no doubt that, in recent years, issues have more consistently reached across traditional portfolio boundaries. This trend will continue.

Senior Public Servants and their staff will need to find ways to minimise any limitations associated with what could be described as the 'Silo effect'. A methodology for rapid and effective integration of work units from traditionally unrelated departments will need to be further refined to achieve broader government objectives.

The Better Services, Better Government strategy takes up these challenges.

Traditional ways of providing services to the public are being challenged.

E-government creates new interfaces between government and the community, and is transforming public administration and driving new options for public sector reform. E-government also creates opportunities to align policies and programs better, reduce duplication, improve policy development processes and revolutionise program delivery.

In the Investing for Growth policy statement released in 1997, the Prime Minister announced a policy framework for growth and dynamism in the Australian economy. As part of the statement, he set an ambitious target for federal departments and agencies (referred to throughout as 'agencies') to have all appropriate services online (via the Internet) by December 2001.

The Government Online Strategy, released in April 2000, helped guide and assist federal agencies working towards meeting this target. Federal agencies responded to the challenge of placing all appropriate services online. In February 2002, the Prime Minister announced at the World Congress on Information Technology in Adelaide that this target had been met.

According to a number of independent reports, the Australian Government's use of the Internet to provide services and programs online is already amongst the world's best.

International e-government benchmarking reports

Accenture, in its 2002 report e-Government Leadership - Realizing the Vision, ranks Australia fourth of 23 countries assessed against a range of criteria measuring e-government maturity. The previous year Australia was ranked fifth. According to a report published in June 2002 by the United Nations, Benchmarking e-Government: A Global Perspective, Australia ranks second to the United States of America in terms of e-government development.

The World Market Research Centre and Brown University, in their Global e-Government Survey of September 2001, rank Australia third of 196 countries.

Federal agencies are at the end of the first stage of government electronic service delivery spelt out in the Government Online Strategy, which mainly involved the migration of existing information services to the online environment. The next stage is e-government.

What is meant by the term e-government? It involves government agencies delivering better programs and services online, more efficiently, through the use of new information and communications technologies. E-government also harnesses the use of these technologies to improve government administration as well as enabling more effective engagement with the community.

Better Services, Better Government maps out the next phase of the federal government's drive to move from simply placing government information and services online to a more comprehensive and integrated e-government strategy.

Through the innovative use of available and emerging technologies, e-government will deliver more seamless, responsive, efficient and outcome-focused government.