Counting performance or performance that counts? Benchmarking government services in Australia

Benchmarking government services is a cooperative development between the Commonwealth, State and Territory governments to compare the performance of publicly funded social infrastructure services. A performance monitoring framework has been developed for the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) by the Productivity Commission (PC) to benchmark the performance education, health, housing and community services. The objectives are accountability for public funds and improving the performance of public services providers. The focus is on public services rather than the management of public agencies. The strategy is benchmarking comparative performance and public reporting. The significance of this project is the scale of performance indicators and scope of public services. The first section of the paper explains the historical and political context in which the benchmarking project for COAG developed. The Commonwealth Government dominates funding for delivering 'social infrastructure' or 'human services', but responsibility for service delivery is fragmented in highly complex systems. Federalism, social policy, public management reform and the philosophy of the PC explain the approach to performance monitoring in COAG benchmarking project. The second section considers the nature of these services and the implications for performance monitoring. The third section examines development of the performance reporting frameworks for benchmarking government services and the status of reporting in 2000. The final section of the paper examines the strengths and limitations of the approach to reporting performance. Transparency and a suite of effectiveness and efficiency indicators for measuring the performance of government services are the strengths of performance monitoring for COAG. Two issues arising from the methodology are considered. The fi rst is applying a production process model to professional services. Performance indicators and associated measures do not take into account the nature of productivity and quality for services. This is a problem for public and private service providers. The second issue is the complex and contested nature of performance for public services. Standards and indicators derived from a business or market model of services management do not take into account the nature of public services.