The Internet can be an excellent source for finding freely available reports, papers, policy documents, statistics and conference proceedings. These documents are often referred to as 'grey literature'
However, it is important to evaluate all your sources, and in particular those that you find online. View this checklist for evaluating your sources.
A quick tip for locating Australian statistics, government & academic reports and working papers when using Google is to add either inurl:gov.au or inurl:edu.au after your search term.
An example is: rural primary health inurl:gov.au
Alternatively, use Google Advanced Search which provides more search boxes and categories (e.g. date range) to further search by.