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March 25, 2008
CoAG meets in Adelaide tomorrow and it appears that the Rudd Government is using this as a way of governing the country and pushing the modernizing agenda --to make CoAG a reform workhorse. The suggestion to widen the CoAG agenda to include financial regulation of margin lending, mortgage brokering and non-bank lending indicates that. It's about time that kind of national financial regulation happened.
Is CoAG picking up on the older National Reform Agenda on which little progress had been made under the Howard Regime? Is the older strategy of incentive payments pioneered under National Competition Policy going to be used?
Health will also be on the agenda. The signs indicate that the commonwealth's emphasis will be for more accountability from the states on health, insisting they accept tough performance reporting requirements to demonstrate efficiency in spending commonwealth money. No doubt the NSW Lemma Government will continue to resist with spurious arguments.
The signs are there that here will be a push of a national registration and accreditation scheme. The AMA has come out in opposition as is expected. They have a history of opposing major reform that undercuts their power as the gatekeepers of the health system. That power must be defended at all costs. It is a totemic political issue.
Some of the proposed reforms are long overdue such as paying the states to clear the nation's hospital wards of 2000 elderly people who are occupying valuable bed-space but who should be in nursing homes and nationally harmonized occupational health and safety legislation.
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You say "demonstrate efficiency in spending commonwealth money".
Any thoughts on how this efficiency should be measured? There's the problem that mere throughput might be rewarded rather than measuring impact on the well-being of the population as a whole.
I'd love to read suggestions for appropriate (and inappropriate) metrics.