Spending on public health in Australia makes up only a small proportion of health services expenditure. Unlike clinical medicine, public health is often delivered to groups of people without their individual consent. The primary interest of public health is in influencing and controlling the determinants of health (including personal, behavioural, social, economic and environmental factors). Though cloaked in a veil of civic duty and humanitananism, the growth of organised public health in the Victorian era could be seen as a response to 'market failure'. There are a number of common approaches to planning public health services that may be thought to offer a framework for priority-setting, including historically based decision rules, best practice guidelines, needs assessment, and goals and targets. The uptake of economic evaluation methods in public health, while not as widespread as it could be, is a mark of the progress of economics.