The previous Australian government, in its ongoing quest to out-mediocre the rest of the world, had instituted a "research Quality Framework", liberally taken from a failed exercise in Britain. Now, the new government has declared it dead. It will not be missed.
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Why do you think the RQF is bad, John? Under the current system, we are rewarded equally for each peer-reviewed publication; so a paper in the Nature or Science is worth the same as a paper in Rivista di Biologia. That's crazy. Something like the RQF, which rewarded quality and not just quantity, seems much better. It provides incentive to get work right, and not just publishable.
BTW, the rumor is that something RQF-like will come in in any case.
Three reasons:
1. It was arbitrary in the way it assigned ranks to journals. While a lot of it was based on responses from the disciplines, so far as I could see the universities themselves did a lot of filtering.
2. It relies on the badly flawed h-index.
3. It is massively work intensive.
I'm not against some kind of qualitative ranking of work, and at the least a book ought to count as more than 3 papers' worth of work, but this particular system was flawed as hell.
I'm not aware of it assigning rankings to journals *at all*. As I understood it, assessors were - in theory - ranking work based on its intrinsic merit. Of course, it is very likely that they would use journals as a proxy for quality, but so far as I am aware that was left up to the assessors. But I could be wrong (that would make three times).
In philosophy, there is a pretty good consensus on journals - at least at the top - so if I am right we would get few perverse results.