Federal election 2016: An interactive map featuring profiles of the cabinet and shadow cabinet

In this election year, there will be much focus on the performance of the prime minister and opposition leader respectively, as Australian election campaigns have tended to become increasingly presidential. This deflects attention from the important role that members of the cabinet and shadow cabinet play in the running of the country.

So we decided to take a critical look at how these key members of the government and the opposition have performed politically and on important policy issues. To do that we asked our experts from universities around Australia to appraise their performances.

In some cases, ministers or shadows hold more than one portfolio. To simplify the policy analysis, we have chosen a key policy area for which they are responsible and asked our experts to analyse those.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra; Adam Webster, Lecturer, Adelaide Law School; Alex Reilly, Deputy Dean and Director of the Public Law and Policy Research Unit, Adelaide Law School; Bryan Mercurio, Professor and Vice Chancellor’s Outstanding Fellow of the Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Corey Bradshaw, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change; Daniel Baldino, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Notre Dame Australia; David Peetz, Professor of Employment Relations, Griffith University; Deborah Ralston, Professor of Finance and Director, Monash University; Diana Perche, Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy; Flavio Menezes, Professor of Economics, The University of Queensland; Glenn C. Savage, Senior Lecturer in Education Policy and ARC DECRA Fellow (2016-19), Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne; Jim Gillespie, Deputy Director, Menzies Centre for Health Policy & Associate Professor in Health Policy, University of Sydney; Matthew Beck, Senior Lecturer in Infrastructure Management, University of Sydney; Nicholas Biddle, Fellow, Australian National University; Philip Branch, Associate Professor in Telecommunications Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology; Roger Dargaville, Deputy Director, Energy Research Institute, University of Melbourne; Susan Harris Rimmer, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, and Will J Grant, Researcher / Lecturer, Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.