We were vaguely amused this week when, among the voluminous coverage of Victoria's draft regulations for its SafeScript real-time prescription monitoring system, we discovered that federal Health Minister Greg Hunt was threatening to write a sternly worded letter to all the other states and territories to ask them to get a move on with the federal RTPM system that he has championed to the tune of $16 million.

Amused because this is exactly what one of his predecessors, Peter Dutton, did way back in 2014 and no one paid him any attention then either. Four years on from those sternly worded letters, here we are, with Victoria giving up on the feds and building its own system and the ACT government only just announcing last week that it will legislate to give prescribers and pharmacists real-time access to its existing monitoring system by March 2019.