Working with the Australian community

Working with the Australian community is a core element of APS work. APS employees engage with the community in a variety of ways, including through the delivery of a broad range of services, consultation on policy development or programme implementation, and active engagement with the community to address issues of concern.

There has been a growing focus on improving service delivery in the APS in recent years. This focus has taken a number of different forms. These include improving the capability of service delivery employees; better approaches to monitoring and responding to the feedback of service users; increased use of online service delivery; and looking carefully at the best mechanism for service delivery, whether delivered directly by the relevant agency, in collaboration with other agencies, or by a third-party provider such as the private sector or a not-for-profit organisation.

There are increasing pressures on the APS to become more sophisticated in its approach to working with the community. These pressures derive from a range of sources, such as the need to respond to rapid improvements in ICT; the demands of a more educated and technology-savvy public that governments keep abreast of best practice in developing and delivering programmes; and the need to work more directly with the community to address a growing number of complex policy problems, for example, in public health areas such as tackling obesity or in addressing welfare dependency.

In response to these changes in the APS environment, new approaches in relation to a number of aspects of working with the community are emerging. Government policies are placing an increasing emphasis on differentiating and targeting services to achieve outcomes more effectively and foster self-reliance. There is growing interest in using conditionality and mutual obligation to promote behavioural change in complex policy areas. There is also an increasing recognition of the importance of identifying interactions between different services and programmes, and looking at the total experience of an individual in accessing different services and obligations.

Forms of interaction with the community vary, depending on the issues involved, from relatively straightforward transactions (where citizens want efficient and timely service, preferably without having to visit an office) to much more intensive interactions around complex policy issues. There are a number of ways in which interactions between the Government and the community can be viewed. The OECD, for example, has developed a three-level model of citizen engagement in government policy-making:

information—a one-way relationship, where governments produce and disseminate information to citizens
consultation—a two-way relationship where citizens provide feedback to government
active participation—a relationship based on partnership with government, where citizens engage in defining policy content and process.¹

This model puts a strong emphasis on the nature of the Government’s interaction with the community.

Another approach is to look at the nature of the public’s role. Abramson et al, for example, have developed another tripartite model of citizen engagement that takes into account both the policy-making and service delivery functions of government.² The model characterises public interactions with government as comprising:

consumers of government information
customers of government services
citizens participating in government decision-making and policy-making.

Working closely with the general public and other external stakeholders is particularly important where there are complex, interrelated issues around a particular policy objective, for example, in improving health or environmental outcomes.

This chapter looks at a range of issues relevant to working with the community. It begins by looking at how effectively the APS is delivering services to the public, and some of the new directions that service delivery is taking. It then goes on to examine the relationship between the APS and a range of external stakeholders, particularly in the area of the provision of government services to the public by non-government organisations. Finally, the chapter discusses more active approaches to engaging with the community, including dealing with complex policy problems and changing citizen behaviour.

1 OECD 2001, Citizens as Partners: Information, Consultation and Public Participation in Policy-Making, <http://www.oecd.org>

2 M. Abramson, et al 2006, Six Trends Transforming Government, IBM Center for the Business of Government, Washington, D.C., p. 20, <http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/SixTrends.pdf>