At the city, state and federal levels, the government's embrace of information technology is empowering citizens while at the same time driving forward the national agenda for standards, innovation and computer literacy.
Ever since government started divvying itself up into separate departments to manage different areas of administration, citizens and business have faced the age-old problem of not knowing which government department to go to for a particular service. At least since Federation, the fragmentation of Australian governments has confused the picture even further, with customers not always knowing which level of government - local, state or federal - provides what service.
The early stages of the commonwealth's e-government initiative seemed determined to replicate such offline problems in an online world, effectively putting existing services online or automating"what is", with every different department acting independently. Now John Rimmer, chief executive officer with the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE), says all is rapidly changing.
"The government has a portal strategy in which we're working on having a whole-of-government entry point and also entry points specific to particular customer groups, such as regional customers or people concerned about youth issues or health care," Rimmer says.
Cooperation between the various levels of government in this area is being achieved via the regular standing meeting of the relevant ministers, known as the Online Council. Senior officials from all the jurisdictions also meet to discuss progress, Rimmer says. As a result, he claims, the federal government's stated commitment to bring all appropriate commonwealth services online via the Internet by the end of this year is"substantially" on target.
While Rimmer concedes it's likely that some agencies won't be 100 per cent there, he predicts the most significant services and those involving large volumes of transactions will all be available via the Internet on time. In fact, he claims a variety of transactions between the federal government and businesses and individuals are already occurring online, the most notable being those related to the new tax system. Benefits, too, are flowing, says Rimmer, who's keen to accelerate the benefits available from realisation of online service delivery.
"A lot of the work has gone into the architecture, framework, standards and policies. People are now beavering away on actually delivering [the services online] and we have a heavy investment in delivering benefits in the next few months," Rimmer says.
The Prime Minister made the commitment to online services or GovernmentOnline in his Investing for Growth statement of December 1997. Rimmer says the aims of the initiative are threefold. First, to find more efficient and effective ways of delivering federal government services. Second, to provide services that are more customer-focused and that reduce customers' transaction costs. Finally, it is envisaged that government use of electronic service delivery can play an important role both symbolically and in practice in speeding up the uptake of electronic commerce in the Australian economy generally.
Australia ranks in the top 10 countries in the world in the uptake of online services, Rimmer says. However, he admits that basic concerns remain as to the availability of adequate telecommunications services in some parts of the country.
There are other pressing barriers as well, like the people who just don't see the point of using the Internet to access government services. Rimmer believes consequently more consideration needs to be given not only to questions of access but also to whether there are compelling enough applications available online.
He says that NOIE will be promoting the availability of online services and their benefits as well as conducting customer research on GovernmentOnline matters. However, he emphasises that he is not in the business of boosting the sale of gear.
"We're really trying to argue that these are important new tools that can be used to increase productivity and innovation, but that depends on intelligent use of the tool. Skills and awareness are still a big issue, both of the general population and of employees and managers," he says.
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