Given the opportunity to face up to the reality of funding our future needs, the Prime Minister and premiers collectively covered themselves in shame. Just two days before the meeting, Malcolm Turnbull had described the idea of letting the states levy their own income taxes as a "once in several generations" reform.

By Friday evening though, he had abandoned his own great reform, saying: "There is simply not a consensus, not anything like a consensus of interest on the part of COAG. So the answer is that proposal is not there. It is withdrawn." What the Prime Minister did, therefore, was run away from his own plan because the premiers said they didn't like it. What Mr Turnbull needs to learn is that leadership is not about bowling up an endless series of ideas until there is a consensus on one of them. That's akin to saying, "I have principles, but if you don't like them, I have others!" 

No, leadership is about standing up for what you believe in. Leadership is about persuading others to do what they don't want to do, because it's the right thing to do.  What our Prime Minister should have done was announce he was introducing the legislation to Parliament anyway, and that each of them could go when they decided how much tax they wanted raised in their state. That would be real leadership. Our premiers are no better. I can't remember a single premier in the past 18 years who has ever announced a major project without saying it was conditional on the federal government contributing a large part of the cost. 

The problem is that cross-river tunnels, hospitals, football stadia, light rail schemes and bridges are not actually the responsibility of the Commonwealth; they are the responsibility of the states. One of the reasons for asking the federal government to contribute is that they want to effectively rob taxpayers in other states to fund infrastructure in their own. 

This rubbish has to stop. Mr Turnbull's idea was a decent one because it would have eliminated the bloated federal bureaucracies that administer education, or hospitals, for example, and delivered the savings as a windfall to the states to fund services. It would also have put an end to the soap opera of state politicians trying to get people in other states to pay for their own political promises. By Former Senator Bill O’Chee.