Many issues considered by the Special Premiers' Conferences and the Council of Australian Governments did not result in new forms of joint action among governments. The most notable failure was fiscal reform, where the Commonwealth refused to accept the demands of the states to provide them with a more secure, guaranteed source of revenuesharing than was available under the current system. Indeed, this refusal, which meant that the states continued to rely heavily on Commonwealth grants for their basic recurrent expenditures, perpetuated a significant source of entanglement and laid the basis for the Commonwealth to insist on collaborative arrangements in other areas of policy, when some states might have preferred different forms of relationship. As discussed in Chapter 2, the model of federalism underlying the states' demand for more fiscal autonomy was arm'slength, or competitive, not collaborative.

The fiscal reform issue aside, other issues that appeared on the agenda of SPC and COAG did not result in agreement, but only served to remind observers that the federal system, while cooperative in some aspects, remained adversarial in others. Attempts to remove inconsistencies in industrial relations legislation, for example, were doomed so long as it was to the advantage of different governments with markedly different models of such legislation to retain the capacity to pass their own laws. Here, federal politics made it advantageous to heighten difference rather than remove it. Another case was the Mabo issue concerning Aboriginal land rights, which appeared on the agenda of the June 1993 COAG meeting and resulted in heated argument, but no more.