How responsive is E-Government? Evidence from Australia and New Zealand

Governments around the world are increasingly moving toward online service delivery in what is commonly called e-government. There are high hopes for e-government, particularly that the associated technologies provide the scope to make government services more responsive. This article reports on a 2006 study of one aspect of e-government responsiveness, namely, the basic capacity to answer a simple question posted by email. To this end, federal and state agencies in Australia, and central and local government agencies in New Zealand were emailed (n = 273). Data related to locating contact email addresses and subsequent responses was collected. The key finding was that the Australian agencies consistently did not perform as well as their New Zealand counterparts, bringing into question one component of their higher ranking in international e-government studies and also their potential to deliver on the Australian government policy that e-government means more responsive government.