– have each found that Australian federal and state governments fall short of basic standards of evidence and consultation-based policymaking. Their work was commissioned by the Evidence-Based Policy Research Project and funded by the Susan McKinnon Foundation.
The think tanks found that of 80 pieces of federal and state legislation, only 27 followed an acceptable decision-making process in terms of answering the basic questions of good policymaking.In 19 cases, the ratings were well below par. In the balance of cases, the quality of the bills was mediocre. On average, the 80 bills scored just 5.7 out of a possible 10.
In the private sector, any business case that did not address at least 70 per cent of its evaluation criteria would be rejected, yet two-thirds of government bills that fare worse than this on public case criteria get approved. The ability of two ideologically opposed think tanks to broadly agree on what policies were done well and which were done poorly, suggests that standardising public policymaking to accord with recognised best practice could remove much of the distrust and discord in Australian politics.