The Australian Government's Performance Framework

There has long been a keen interest from countries around the world in Australia's experience in creating an evaluation system to support evidence-based decision making and performance-based budgeting. Australia's evaluation system lasted from 1987 to 1997, and during that time it was used to systematically evaluate all government programs every three to five years; these evaluation findings were used heavily by officials, ministers and the cabinet in the annual budget process. The uses of these findings included the policy advice prepared by departments including the preparation of ministers' new policy proposals and departments' savings options submitted to the cabinet for its consideration. More importantly, these findings were highly influential on the cabinet's ultimate policy decisions. Finally, evaluation findings were also used widely within line departments in support of their ongoing management. This paper updates two previous World Bank papers that reviewed the Australian experience with monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and other performance-related initiatives. These papers (Mackay 1998, 2004) focused on the first two time periods addressed in this paper.