Australia’s governments, both state and federal, are failing to undertake best practice policy-making. This failure is undermining the quality of public policy and is having a detrimental impact on faith in public institutions. Public policy in Australia is often made on the run, built on shabby foundations, motivated by short term political gain, and consequently has mediocre outcomes. Policy-makers face the challenge of limited knowledge, and must remedy this by gathering evidence on the nature of the problem, alternatives to fix the problem and undertake public consultation on the impact of policies. Good process does not guarantee good policy – but bad process has a much higher chance of producing lower quality, uninformed, and harmful policy outcomes.

The Institute of Public Affairs has undertaken this analysis of 20 public policies using the ten criteria of the Wiltshire test for good policy-making. This report outlines the findings from that research.