As government services move online, it is increasingly tempting to assume that everyone can now use them. Most people own a smartphone, internet access has never been cheaper, and each year more transactions are completed digitally, so it can seem only a matter of time before non-digital channels are no longer needed. Yet the 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index found that around one in five Australians, 20.6%, are digitally excluded or highly excluded. That is not a small group at the margins, and for people aged 75 and over, those in the lowest-income households, and First Nations people, the rate is far higher. If services are designed on the assumption that everyone has a computer, they will fail many of the people who depend on them most.
The digital divide is not one problem, but several, and owning a device is only the first of them. Research on the digital divide, notably Jan van Dijk’s work, has long recognised that access is a matter of motivation, skills, and usage as well as of devices and connections. In practice, at least four distinct barriers stand between a person and a digital government service: access, skills, motivation, and prior experience. Each has different causes, affects different people, and calls for a different response. Treating them as a single problem, solved once everyone has a device, guarantees that most of them are missed.
Access is the most visible barrier, but it is not simply a question of owning a device. A person needs a reliable connection, a device capable of running the service, and the means to keep both working. For someone living in remote Australia, a reliable connection may not be available at any price, and the Index shows that digital inclusion generally falls as remoteness increases. For a family on a low income, a shared phone with limited data is not the same as being able to complete a lengthy form, upload documents, and wait on hold if something goes wrong. Access is a question of circumstances, not just ownership, and it is shaped by geography and income in ways that no single service can change.
Skills are a separate barrier, and they are not distributed in the way we might expect. Many people acquire their digital skills through their work, which means that those whose work does not involve computers can reach adulthood with very little practice, regardless of their income or education. Consider a well-paid safety supervisor who spends the working day underground in a coal mine, and is then asked to set up a digital identity using two-factor authentication and a biometric check in order to access a government service. Nothing about that person’s capability or earnings suggests they would struggle, yet the task demands skills they have had no reason to develop. Digital exclusion is not only a problem of disadvantage, and assuming it is will hide many of the people it affects.
Motivation is often treated as reluctance, but it can be an entirely rational choice. For some people, the best outcomes come from walking into a service centre and having a staff member help them through a complex request, ask the right questions, and catch mistakes before they cause problems. A digital channel may be faster for a simple transaction, but for someone with a complicated situation, it can mean more errors, more delays, and less help when things go wrong. When people prefer assisted channels, they are often responding sensibly to their own experience, and pushing them online removes the support that made the service work for them.
Prior experience is the barrier most often overlooked, and it can be the hardest to overcome. Imagine a single mother at the supermarket, unable to pay for her weekly shopping because scammers have emptied her bank account. With nothing left to feed her children, she turns to Centrelink for support, and is directed to an online form that asks her to enter her bank account details. For her, the request is not an inconvenience but a reminder of exactly what went wrong. A person who has been harmed online may reasonably refuse to trust a digital channel again, and no improvement to the design of a form will change that.
None of these barriers is likely to disappear soon, and most lie outside the control of any government agency. Remote connectivity depends on infrastructure, household income depends on the economy and the welfare system, digital skills depend on education and the workplace, and the damage caused by scams falls well beyond the reach of a service delivery agency. The assumption that the digital divide will soon close on its own is therefore not supported by the evidence, and services designed around it will continue to fail the people it leaves behind.
What this means in practice is that government services should be digital by default, but never digital only. Digital channels should be the easiest choice for the many people who can use them, while assisted channels such as in-person service centres and intermediary support remain available, properly resourced, and easy to find for those who cannot. Just as importantly, agencies should measure who is not being reached, rather than counting the growth in digital transactions as if it told the whole story. A rise in online completions says nothing about the people who tried and gave up, or never tried at all. Knowing who those people are, and why they are struggling, is the only way to tell whether a service is working for everyone it is meant to serve.
This matters because the people most likely to be shut out of digital-only services are the people who most need them: older Australians, people on low incomes, people in remote communities, and people already harmed by fraud. When they cannot complete a digital process, they do not simply go elsewhere, because for many government services there is nowhere else to go. Payments are missed, entitlements go unclaimed, and the costs shift to families, charities, and other parts of the community. Closing the non-digital door may look like efficiency on a departmental budget, but it transfers the burden to those least able to carry it, and undermines the principle that government services are there for everyone, and above all for those who need them most.