The past 16 months as Australia has tried to navigate its way through the COVID-19 pandemic have largely been marked by bickering and blame-shifting between the states and the Commonwealth - moreso in the Labor-held states but also here in NSW.

But those rivalries have only highlighted a similar vein of mistrust and disunity that has probably been going on since federation.

There are regular spats over the distribution of GST revenue, just as there is constant debate over who should administer health and education and who would do it better.

Most of those fights are cynical exercises in political point-scoring and nearly always it is the general public that loses out.

The perfect example is the debacle associated with the new medical resonance imaging (MRI) machine for the Bathurst Hospital.

State MP Paul Toole, understandably, made a big thing of announcing the machine which will be installed at a cost of around $4 million. It was hailed as an example of the state government investing in Bathurst's future and the people of this region.

But, as was revealed this week, It is likely very few of those people will actually be able to afford to utilise its services.

It is up to the federal government to issue a licence for the MRI which would allow clients to claim for its use through the Medicare system. The federal government hasn't done that yet and there is no clear timetable on when it might.

It creates a ridiculous situation where the taxpayers have spent millions of dollars on a machine for next to no benefit, but we can't blame one tier of government more than the other. Instead, they should have both worked it out before the MRI announcement was made.

Worse is the fact that this is not a new story.

The people of Dubbo were put through the same drawn-out battle when their hospital received an MRI before a licence was finally granted.

That is what we should all expect will happen here eventually, providing our Nationals state MP and Nationals federal MP can come together to find some common ground on the issue.

With friends like that, who need enemies?