Conclusion

The results of this study indicated that there is potential for the public's use of government websites to increase. The majority of respondents to the survey had made contact with the government over the previous 12 months (73%). While few people used the Internet to do this (28%), 60% of people who did not use the Internet to contact government did use the Internet for other reasons. It is important to note that the latter figure includes 1326 people who did not contact government at all. Thirty-five percent of respondents did not know they could use the Internet to contact government.

One of the main reasons for not contacting government using the Internet was that the respondent did not have suitable computer equipment (29% of responses); this was particularly common for super annuitants (47%) and other beneficiaries and women (36%). It may be that improved provision of Internet facilities at places such as public libraries may increase the public interaction with the government via the Internet. At the moment few people appear to use these facilities in general (5%).

The results of a question asking respondents what government information or services they would be interesting in accessing using the Internet that isn't currently available, indicates that the New Zealand population has not given much consideration to the issue, as there were many 'don't know' responses and many of the other responses were for information already available via the Internet. There were, however, a considerable number of 'nothing' responses.

These results suggest that the potential of the Internet for use by the New Zealand public could be increased by further publicity. In particular, high-users of government services appear to currently be infrequent Internet-users. It is also interesting to note that although many respondents had experienced security issues in their use of the internet, particularly viruses, this was not usually a deterrent to continued use.

Many of the examinations of responses by demographic factors confirmed previous expectations, for example, older people and beneficiaries are generally less likely to use the Internet, and the telephone is the preferred channel of communication. Overall, the results of the study reflect those of Isociety (2003), in that the majority of frequent technology users have a higher socio-economic status, but these are not the groups that make high use of government services.