RIP COAG: The national cabinet gets its chance

Australia’s shared success against COVID-19 can be summed up in the fact that only two patients are on now ventilators when the worst-case scenario assumed 7,000.

That fact, relayed on Friday by chief medical officer Brendan Murphy, followed another startling figure the other day: that if Australia had experienced the death rate seen in the United States, we would have 14,000 dead.

The are many factors in this victory but one of them is the way national cabinet has worked so well to harness the forces of federal, state and territory governments.

Scott Morrison wants to build on that by making national cabinet the new mechanism for reform, sweeping away the old structure known as the Council of Australian Governments.

This is a decision on structure only. As with his cautious proposal on workplace change this week, the Prime Minister promises a process, not a policy.

The move is promising, however, because national cabinet has proven its value when COAG was past its prime.

Nobody will mourn COAG and its sclerotic layers of councils and committees. There has been a shortage of accountability with the federation for years, not to mention a lack of ambition.

One of the turning points came six years ago when Tony Abbott abolished the COAG Reform Council, which had the job of testing whether anything concrete ever materialised from the meetings between premiers and prime ministers.

Nobody liked the reform council’s answers because it discovered too much of the grand talk was never put into action.

National cabinet cannot be any worse than COAG and it is worth the attempt to find a better way to strike meaningful agreements on health, education, infrastructure, indigenous welfare, disability services and more.

If Morrison wanted to be more ambitious, however, he would ask an independent agency to check every year on whether the new structure turns its rhetoric into reality.