'Evidence-based' policy-making discourse is popular among a diverse range of policy communities. Following the United Kingdom, there is growing interest in evidence-based policy-making in Australia. The evidence-based policy movement raises important questions for those interested in public affairs and the politics of policy-making in Australia. However, the meaning and practice of 'evidence-based policy' are contested. The article attempts to critically appraise the emergence of evidence -based policy in Australia, addressing the question of whether evidence-based policy will live up to its promise as an as an idea whose time has come.

In order to address this question, the article seeks to explore and define the concept of evidence-based policy. It highlights the extent to which the meaning and practice of 'evidence-based policy' are contested. This critique indicates the very wide range of what can - properly - count as evidence, based on a premise about the irreducible richness and complexity of social reality. Evidence can exist in a wide variety of forms; possible sources include photographs, literary texts, official files, autobiographical material like diaries and letters, the files of a newspaper and ethnographic and particular observer accounts.

The article looks at the debate over the relative weight of these various inputs into policy-making. A hierarchy of knowledge is created which necessarily shapes what forms of knowledge are considered closest to the 'truth' in decision-making processes and policy argument. This categorises evidence as either 'hard- objective' or 'soft- subjective'. 'Hard' Evidence includes primary quantitative data collected by researchers from experiments, secondary quantitative social and epidemiological data collected by government agencies, clinical trails and interview or questionnaire-based social surveys. 'Soft' Evidence includes qualitative data such as ethnographic accounts and autobiographical materials. This critique questions the assumption of evidence-based policy as scientific, scholarly and rational approach which is a neutral and objective policy tool which goes beyond political ideology. Consequentially the idea of a linear relationship between research and policy outcomes, which ignores context, is questioned.

It also raises other crucially important questions in respect to evidence-based policy; Does current enthusiasm for evidence-based policy imply that policy-making in the past has not been based on empirical evidence? What weight can - and should - policy-makers give to 'research evidence' in the (necessarily political) process of policy-making? What kinds of evidence do promoters of evidence-based policy advocate? Are their conceptions of 'evidence' narrowly based on conventional scientific methods that privilege certain forms of methods and knowledge over others?

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