The COVID-19 pandemic that tore through states across the world in 2019 and 2020 was a stark reminder to governments of the inextricable interdependencies and co-dependencies that characterise today’s global society. National officials were confronted with a health, societal and economic catastrophe on a scale unseen since the Spanish Flu of 1918. Compounding the crisis, in the frantic search for effective policies to contain the worst social, health and economic effects of the pandemic, the World Health Organisation was widely held to have failed to establish authoritative global strategy to manage the outbreak, leaving governments bereft of expert, external leadership on an issue of profound global governance at a time where the need for policy learning was at its most urgent.

Amidst the bedlam, chief finance ministers of a small group of five states quietly worked together to learn from one another’s management of the pandemic’s effects on their economies. In an interview with The Australian on June 8th 2020, the Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced the meeting of finance ministers of Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA: