I will be brief, as the essential points are very simple: 

Australia will derive great benefit and will also perform a service for the rest of the research world, if, as proposed:

(1) Australia mandates that all publicly funded research articles must be made Open Access by self-archiving them in the funded researcher's Institutional Repository in order to maximise the uptake, usage, applications, and impact or Australian research ouput, thereby Australian research productivity and progress as well as the return on the Australian tax-payer's inverstment in research:

National Funder model: 
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/weaker-OApolicy.htm
Individual Institution model: 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html

    Harnad, Stevan (2005) Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on
    its Research Investment. In Steele, Prof Colin, Eds. Proceedings
    National Scholarly Communications Forum 2005, Sydney,
    Australia.  
    http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000204/ 
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/41-guid.html    

    Harnad, S. (2006) Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: 
    What? Where? When? Why? How?. 
    Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.    
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13098/

and

(2) Australia uses the rich and unprecedented Australian Open Access research database that will result form this mandated self-archiving to monitor, measure, assess and analyse Australian research productivity and progress, in exercises such as the RQF, using the powerful new battery of research performance metrics that the OA database will generate:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/137-guid.html

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html