Help-seeking stigma is a major barrier to the utilisation of mental health services. This is especially so for young rural Australians who, despite being particularly susceptible to the onset of mental illness, have the lowest tendency to seek professional help compared to the broader Australian population. While some interventions strive to enhance help-seeking, few studies have examined the efficacy of web-based interventions for improving attitudes towards mental health help-seeking behaviour. This thesis aims to examine the efficacy of these interventions within a young rural population, as rural young people have not been the focus of previous intervention research in this area. Five studies were undertaken to address the aims, commencing with Study One, a systematic review that evaluated the impact web-based anti-stigma intervention strategies have on modifying mental health help-seeking stigma intentions and behaviours in young people (14–25 years). These interventions were found to have strong practical implications that highlighted the need for further exploration guided by theory and improved methodology. Study Two expands this existing evidence base to add to the current body of research through the piloting of alternative early intervention strategies: Internet-Based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (ICBT) and Cognitive Bias Modification for Help-Seeking (CBM-HS) for decreasing mental health stigma and increasing young rural Australians’ intentions to access services. Contrary to predictions, findings were limited regarding outcomes of stigma and intentions. Yet, data trends indicated greater reductions in self-stigma levels for the CBM-HS condition compared to the ICBT and control, suggesting improved implementation may yield stronger effects. Studies Three and Four used qualitative feedback to aid in understanding young Australians’ current mental health perceptions and in assessing the acceptability of intervention strategies for adapting future mental health interventions to be both inclusive and effective in their dissemination. Predicated on these findings, Study Five conducted a superiority analysis on CBM-HS and ICBT, with a control condition across three time points (spanning 6 weeks) for the modification of help-seeking stigma in young, rural Australians to increase intentions to access mental health services within Australia. As predicted, the results provided support for CBM-HS interventions as effective in decreasing mental health help-seeking self-stigma across the three time points compared to the ICBT condition and control. CBM-HS also showed positive trends in decreasing negative normative beliefs, attitudes, and perceived barriers to help-seeking. A significant increase in mean mental health literacy (MHL) scores and intentions to seek help from informal sources (partner, parents, friends, and phone) were found between time points with no discernible differences across conditions. These outcomes offer some practical implications for the effective delivery of online anti-stigma interventions targeting young rural Australians, including improved engagement through the age-stratified tailoring of materials and incorporation of visual and auditory stimulation. To overcome structural inequalities and combat the embedded stigma in young rural peoples’ mental health help-seeking, technology-based alternatives that utilise mechanisms of change (i.e., CBM-HS) are needed to guide preventative mental health interventions. This can potentially bridge the gap between intentions and actual help-seeking behaviours and allow for enhanced timely treatment uptake and the promotion of improved clinical outcomes for young rural Australians.

A voluminous empirical literature has focused on organizational characteristics and their relationship to organizational performance in the public sector, including municipal efficiency. However, as yet no effort has been made to examine the impact of administrative intensity on the effectiveness of local authorities, as measured by local resident satisfaction surveys. To address this gap in the literature, this article investigates the effect of administrative intensity on local resident satisfaction in the local government system of the Australian state of Victoria over the period 2014/2015 to 2018/2019. Using regression analysis, we find that there is a significant association between administrative intensity and the effectiveness of municipalities. However, the impact of administrative intensity on municipal effectiveness differs between urban local authorities and rural local authorities. This has significant public policy implications given that a uniform policy prescription may not achieve its intended aims due to the differential effects of the determinants of municipal effectiveness.

While a voluminous empirical literature has investigated cost efficiency in local government, until recently no effort has been invested in decomposing municipal performance into its persistent efficiency and transient efficiency components. In this paper, we estimate persistent and transient cost efficiency that might be attributed to managerial and environmental factors in the Victorian state local government system in Australia using stochastic frontier analysis over the period from 2014/2015 to 2018/2019. In addition, we seek to contribute to the empirical literature on local government performance by estimating differences in cost efficiency between urban and rural councils and the relationship between the transient cost efficiency and the overall cost performance of Victorian local councils. We find that the overall cost efficiency (OCE) of local councils is highly correlated with transient (short term) cost efficiency and that urban councils are more cost-efficient than their rural counterparts. Various public policy implications are then considered.

A body of empirical literature exists which sets out how the accommodation industry performs across a range of locations. However, research on tourism regions in terms of its accommodation industry remains underdeveloped, especially in the Covid-19 pandemic when tourism faced unprecedented adversity and need to find a way to move forward. In an attempt to address this and take the Australian accommodation industry as a case study, this paper sought to investigate the efficiency of Australian tourism regions in the accommodation industry for the period of 2014/15–2017/18. The findings clearly showed that Australian tourism regions had seen significant growth in terms of their efficiency in the accommodation industry over the surveyed period. The Australian commercial large cities, namely Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and the Gold Coast, represent perhaps the best example, having obtained a higher efficiency than all other tourism regions. Exogenous factors, such as the occupancy rate, the average daily rate, the number of international visitors and the number of domestic visitors overnight were identified as influencing the technical efficiency score of tourism regions, with policy formulation and implementation identified as being key to improving the efficiency of the accommodation industry at the regional level for a post-Covid-19 exogenous factors period.