Victoria's Daniel Andrews complained that the first he knew of it was what he read in a newspaper just two days before. Other leaders said they had received a phone call from the PM around that time but that Turnbull had declined to explain his proposal beyond the most broad schematic outline.

Malcolm Turnbull after last week's politically disastrous COAG meeting. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Yet there it was dominating the COAG agenda - a bold solution searching for a problem. And once again, its public discussion would be defined in the negative - its fate prey to the better explained and more impassioned pleas of opponents.

Giving the states income taxing powers literally came and went within a couple of days. In reform terms, it was a model of how not to succeed and to that extent, belongs on the trophy shelf with other world-beating public policy lemons from the Australia Card and Telstra's timed local telephone calls debacles in the 1980s, to Labor's 150-member citizen's assembly on climate change, and a series of botched tax reform and revenue possibilities closed off by the Coalition government, this year alone. Think GST, negative gearing "excesses", capital gains tax, and even personal income tax cuts.

To his credit, Turnbull did not duck the issue on Friday - acknowledging squarely that it had failed completely and would not return.