McKinnon has commissioned the ‘How the Sausage is Made’ series to examine policymaking practices in Australia. This series of reports will provide insights into patterns of the good and poor dimensions of policy development, to identify key barriers to delivering quality policy. This supports McKinnon's wider agenda on identifying and advocating for system improvements to policymaking in Australia. This series will provide a set of findings and recommendations on how to improve policymaking processes and governance at a systematic level. 

Report One: Assessing Australian Policymaking Practices in the Energy Sector 

The first report of this series focuses on policymaking the energy sector, developed for SMF by the Blueprint Institute and McKell Institute (Feb 2025).

The McKinnon Policymaking Assessment Framework 

The McKinnon Policymaking Assessment Framework is a tool measure the quality of policymaking processes across policies and sectors, intended to be used as both: 

• a forward-looking guide for policy practitioners to guide policymaking processes 

• a tool for post-hoc assessment of the quality of policymaking processes. 

The Framework is based on our research into “what good looks like” in contemporary policymaking in Australia. The Framework is intended to accommodate the real complexity of policymaking processes and reflect the realities and context within which policymaking is undertaken. The policymaking process criteria can be tailored for different policy problems and policy types and applied across sectors and levels of government. Our Framework was used in policy assessments in the ‘How the Sausage is Made’ series. 

McKinnon developed the Framework based on research and advice provided University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Public Policy and Governance (IPPG), who were commissioned to develop a set of indicators of good practice in policymaking. McKinnon then worked with the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) to refine these indictors into an assessment framework suitable for rating public policy processes based on information commonly available in the public domain in Australia. McKinnon's Framework reflects the best available insights and evidence from experts, thought leaders, practitioners and research and provides a flexible and broadly applicable method to assess policymaking. 

The Framework is intended to be an evolving product, that responds to the needs of users and the latest evidence on best practice in policymaking. Get in touch with us to let us know how this Framework can be improved or better tailored to the different types of policy and environments in which policy is made. 

Previous reports on policymaking 

Our agenda builds on the previous work of the Evidence Based Policy Research Project (EBPRP), an independent not-for-profit organisation that advocated for evidence-based public policymaking. Between 2018 and 2022, EBPRP produced 100 case studies on the quality of public policymaking in Australia at both federal and state levels. 

Research on policy quality 2022 (Per Capita) >

Research on policy quality 2022 (Blueprint Institute) >