The man in charge of checking whether the state and territories are improving health and education standards says they are not giving him the information required to properly assess their progress.
Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Reform Council chairman Paul McClintock said the organisation wasn't getting enough current performance data to write comprehensive reports on whether targets were being met.
"You can't really run this accountability system that the council is responsible for if you don't have current data," Mr McClintock told reporters.
"Not just across health, across all of these issues, we really do need this to be given a greater priority."
Mr McClintock said examples of important missing or out-of-date data included rural and regional health statistics and cancer incident rates, the most recent of which are from 2007.
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There was also a backlog of eight reform council reports from last year that still hadn't had a COAG response.
"This means our recommendations remain unresolved while we produce the reports from this year, so you don't have the benefits of seeing what they've addressed," Mr McClintock said.
"This leads to a level of uncertainty in our work and prevents the council from reporting (to the) public on the real progress on how COAG has responded to what we've put to them."
Reports on progress towards a seamless national economy have been responded to promptly but issues such as health, housing, disability and education are not getting the same attention.
Mr McClintock questioned whether COAG - which next meets in July - was well structured to carry out its present workload, given it was considerably larger and more complex than when the group was first formed in 1992.
He said being able to measure the work of commonwealth-state relations was a task that required years of forward-planning but that hadn't been done.
"They are only five-year agreements so they've all got to be renegotiated (and) we are getting close to the point where people are going to think about that," Mr McClintock said.
"If you don't have a strong accountability system running well before that process, then when they are renegotiated they'll be done in a vacuum where the various different players won't really know whether this system is working effectively."
The reform council chairman said he thought the states and territories were slowly meeting most of their performance goals and he didn't think they were too ambitious.
Mr McClintock said changes in government in several states, and a change in prime minister just under a year ago, provided "an opportunity for refreshing the mandate and having a new look".
