Ms Berejiklian, the winner of the 2019 McKinnon Prize in Political Leadership, took a swipe at smaller states and territories, specifically the ACT, suggesting that under existing arrangements the tail could wag the dog.

"You've got a state the size of NSW (current population 8,128,984) and a jurisdiction the size of the ACT (current population 427,419) essentially having an equal seat at the table and you can't go by the law of averages on every decision you make," she said.

Ms Berejiklian said this had not been a problem at the time of federation: "when the federation formed, the states were very much the same size economically, socially [and] all that stuff".

The NSW Premier has been grossly misinformed if she believes this was the case. There was just as much disparity between the sizes of various jurisdictions in 1901, if not more, as there is today.

According to W. D. Borrie's The European Peopling of Australia: A Demographic History 68 per cent of all citizens lived in just two states, NSW and Victoria. They had 36 per cent and 32 per cent of the national population respectively. NSW had 1,354,800 residents and Victoria had 1,201,100. Tasmania, then the smallest jurisdiction included in the federation, had 172,500. As of last December 57.9 per cent of all Australians lived in NSW and Victoria, down by almost 10 per cent on 120 years ago. The smaller jurisdictions have grown in relative significance.

There is no precedent to suggest, as Ms Berejiklian seemed to do, power within the Commonwealth be weighted according to the population of member states. When the federation agreement was originally signed it was on the understanding it was a pact between equals. Nothing less would have been acceptable.

That said, Ms Berejiklian is correct in admitting recent events have exposed cracks in the way the Commonwealth and the states work together, and that much could be done to clarify "grey areas" that can lead to dangerous errors. The "Ruby Princess" is an obvious example. The confusion over whether state or federal agencies should decide if potentially infected passengers were allowed off the ship has been well documented. It was not her government's finest hour. The consequences for hundreds of people across the country, and even overseas, were catastrophic.

The NSW Premier was also correct in flagging health as an area where "more black and white going forward" would be "good for our nation and good for federation". "We [the state government] don't have GPs or Medicare but we control the hospital system and manage other bits of it," she said.

The last attempt to bring all of the nation's public hospitals under the control of the Commonwealth in a bid to improve their performance was mooted by Kevin Rudd during his "Kevin 07" campaign. It eventually foundered in the face of intense opposition from the leaders of the Liberal states.

While there is no doubt Ms Berejiklian is a worthy winner of the McKinnon Prize, and that she was right to call out examples where individual states and territories had - in her words - "overstepped the mark" in failing to acknowledge they were part of one country, she runs the risk of being reminded people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

The 100 Canberrans who spent the better part of a week stranded in Victoria in August after NSW's sudden border closure will not soon forget how they suddenly felt they had become strangers in a strange land.