All things COAG...

The health debate found its way to the COAG meeting. COAG stood for the Commonwealth of Australian Governments, and gave the states a chance to have a say in federal policy. As Rudd did not plan to take over funding of the health system in its entirety, the states were front and centre as far as reaching an agreement on funding arrangements was concerned.

A drama of sorts was taking place on the Monday of the 19th April in Canberra. Or was it a soap opera? Either way, it had always seemed a deal would be reached, despite the language of the media and the Premiers in the lead up to the meeting itself.

Yet what remained uncertain was whether the deal would be for the better for the patient recently admitted to the emergency ward of a public hospital in the south-west of Sydney, suffering from a heart defect. Would they be seen within the four hours that Rudd had set down as the limitation on emergency consults? And would this target really be met ninety-five percent of the time, as he had suggested? Or was the Health Summit really just a way Rudd could divert attention from the failures the insulation program, the BER program, the SIHIP program, and others like them, represented?

The result of the Health Summit seemed to be to show once and for all the subservience of Labor State Governments. With substance sadly lacking, The Prime Minister had once again shown himself, within the space of forty-eight hours, to be ‘The King of Spin.' WA Premier Colin Barnett would now be shown to be either ‘out on a limb’ as a result of his unwillingness to sign up to the agreement reached with all other premiers, or the sole source of reason. And what now for Tony Abbott? To oppose or support was the decision before him.

Just another layer of bureaucracy was the way he saw the reform package. And, as NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell sensibly said on the Wednesday following the meeting’s wind-up, it wasn’t so much how much money was being offered, but how effectively it was to be spent, that mattered most.

Colin Barnett’s refusal to sign up to conceding thirty percent of his state’s GST revenue seemed at the time to have more to do with common sense than the political colour of his state government. One thing was for sure, though.

A caller to talkback radio that day had said he did not know whether Barnett was right or wrong to hold out for retention of GST funding, but he knew for sure that guy, meaning Barnett, “had balls.” The WA Premier would surely have been pleased with the caller’s review of his minority position.