But none of this can happen unless governments remember how to govern again.
Abbott said the federal government believed "the states should take more responsibility for their public hospitals and for their public schools and we make no apologies for wanting the states to be grown up, adult governments that take responsibility for the programs that are theirs, for the institutions that they run".
The public health community has an important role to play in demonstrating the magnitude of tobacco's threat to public health and calling on governments to strip away the trademark protections, rights to sue and opportunities to lobby that big tobacco uses to bully public representatives.
There are promises on tax avoidance and evasion, something promised by successive governments which is often easier to announce than to achieve.
Change the actors – and the stakes – and it's a tired plotline familiar to many governments across the world.
According to Eurodad, the coalition of civil society groups that campaigns on debt, there have been 600 sovereign debt restructurings since the 1950s – with many governments, including Argentina for example, experiencing one wrenching write-off after another.
In a highly critical report on Monday, marking the first anniversary of the official outbreak in west Africa, the charity said the governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone obstructed the early response and contributed to the loss of life.
The Ebola crisis has brutally exposed the "age-old failures" of the humanitarian aid system with the World Health Organisation and governments repeating the mistakes of past public health emergencies, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said.
And some governments – notably the US and Japan – have trouble participating in multi-year commitments that represent a fiscal contingency.
Under Reagan and Thatcher we had embarked on this era of deregulation and privatisation, much of which the subsequent Clinton administration and New Labour governments accepted.
Ekins said if governments approved new fossil fuel production, they should be asked what resources elsewhere would not be exploited.
