A number of factors underpin the success of the NRA, which brings together a number of related objectives. These objectives primarily include economic prosperity, social cohesion and healthy federalism.

First, the NRA has economic prosperity as a key objective, through improving productivity and participation and by being able to meet the new economic challenges of an ageing population, international competitive challenges and an increasing premium on skills in the economy.

Another objective is social cohesion, thereby enabling the best outcomes for the individual and by improving social cohesion more generally. The NRA has argued for the benefits and necessity, of promoting social inclusion and mobility, through a lens of economic reform. The joint goals of participation and productivity link closely to the proposed human capital agenda in terms of the need to improve literacy and numeracy at school; more successful youth transitions; raising adult skills; and improving workforce participation by preventing illness and disease.

Finally, NRA has building a healthy federalism as an objective. Public policy makers in Victoria have argued that, through establishing a framework that creates the right incentives for all governments to work together towards common outcomes, the NRA can improve the health of the Australian federal system. The NRA has challenged governments to change the way they work together, to focus on agreed outcomes rather than contestable ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ and to focus on a truly fair sharing of the costs and benefits.

COAG has agreed on the solid conceptual framework for the National Reform Agenda. That is, having agreed the vision, objectives and reform priorities, governments agreed to focus on outcomes and measuring progress against those outcomes. This is a significant shift from the ‘old’ ways of COAG, where there was an undue emphasis on specific inputs and actions. The ‘old’ way of doing things had fostered an unproductive game of ‘points scoring’ and ‘blame shifting’ and resulted in a financial framework between governments (for example, specific purpose payments), that could be too focused on administration and red tape and too little on outcomes. By agreeing on what governments want to achieve and how they will measure progress towards that achievement, the debate moved away from ‘who does what and for how much’ towards ‘what we need to do and for what benefit’.