The West Australian premier, Colin Barnett, has accused all the other states and territories of “ganging up” on his government after they wrote a combined letter opposing changes to the GST carve-up.
State premiers and chief ministers began the Council of Australian Governments (Coag) meeting with the prime minister in Canberra on Friday morning.
Tony Abbott said he wanted the focus of the meeting to be measures to address domestic violence, national security and illicit drugs.
While state and territory leaders have applauded the decision to prioritise the domestic violence issue, they were agitating for a discussion about health and education funding.
Premiers of all political stripes have demanded Abbott acknowledge that the $80bn in cuts to projected long-term funding for health and education foreshadowed in last year’s budget left the states in an unsustainable financial position.
“The biggest issue here is the health and education funding,” said the New South Wales premier, Mike Baird, on his way in to the meeting.
“We got to the position where we woke up [to the federal budget] and saw that the long-term funding of health and education had been shifted back to the states. That’s not sustainable. That has to be dealt with.”
Other states and territories have echoed those calls about health and education funding.
But on the distribution of GST revenue the Western Australian government has found itself isolated. WA has criticised the system and called for a greater share after the Commonwealth Grants Commission recommended it receive only 30c in every dollar that people in the state paid in GST next financial year.
The treasurers of all states and territories except WA wrote to the federal treasurer, Joe Hockey, saying it would be “unacceptable to make significant one-off changes to address an issue for a specific state at the expense of all others”.
On his way into parliament for the Coag meeting, Barnett said he was “extremely disappointed ... that both Liberal and Labor governments around Australia should gang up on one state government”.
“I have never in my experience seen the other states and territories gang up against a single state,” the WA Liberal premier said.
“We are the state that is funding them and largely funding the commonwealth budget, because of the strength of the mining industry over recent years. I was just absolutely disappointed in those governments and individuals involved in that. That is not the way we should be doing business.”
Baird rejected Barnett’s characterisation of the other states “ganging up” on WA. Baird said states were simply arguing against a “knee-jerk” change to a long-established system that was “not perfect” but had worked reasonably well for a long time.
The letter from the seven treasurers warned against moving away from horizontal fiscal equalisation - the principle guiding GST revenue distribution. The principle is that states should receive adequate funding that allows each state to have the capacity to provide services to a similar standard.
“The adoption of the commission’s independent recommendations, in line with historical practice, is the only equitable option, and we are unable to support any alternative distribution method,” treasurers said in their joint letter to Hockey.
“If external assistance is necessary to tackle Western Australia’s budget challenges, we call upon you to pursue such solutions outside of the GST distribution system.”
That final statement left the door open to a one-off payment of the kind advocated by the federal opposition leader, Bill Shorten, so long as it did not come from the GST revenue pool.
The South Australian Labor premier, Jay Weatherill, said WA’s demands were a “pantomime”.
The Tasmanian Liberal premier, Will Hodgman, opposed “tinkering” with the system. “It should be a very short conversation today about the GST,” he said.
The Queensland Labor premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said everyone should “accept the independent umpire” on the distribution of GST revenue. She would “not cop” Queensland losing hundreds of millions of dollars in a revision to the distribution.
Palaszczuk said she was keen to use her first attendance at a Coag meeting to push for the federal government to “accelerate some of their money towards the states” for the national disability insurance scheme.
In his opening remarks to the Coag meeting, Abbott said the challenge was for everyone in the room “to be national leaders” and “wrestle with the national problems which are a challenge to all of us collectively”.
“We’ve got some big reform issues that we will be dealing with today and for quite some time to come - the big issues of our federation, the big issues of tax - but there are some particularly pressing problems that we also want to deal with today,” he said.
One of those topics - domestic violence - was the focus of a pre-Coag breakfast attended by Australian of the Year Rosie Batty and former Victoria police chief Ken Lay.
State and territory leaders voiced optimism about progress on the issue, including a national domestic violence order scheme to ensure such orders were recognised across borders.
The Victorian Labor premier, Daniel Andrews, said family violence was a “national emergency” and Abbott should be congratulated for putting the issue on the national agenda.
“Hopefully we can get some national agreement on things like intervention orders that can apply everywhere,” Andrews said.
Michaelia Cash, the minister assisting the prime minister for women, told Sky News it might be “the one issue today where we will see furious agreement” from all states and territories and the commonwealth.
She said it was unacceptable that domestic violence orders were not recognised across jurisdictions.
The Coag discussions would canvass the changes required to ensure such orders had legal standing in each state and territory, Cash said.
