Premier Colin Barnett has finally signed a national hospitals plan after facing 18 months of vagueness over the proposed scheme. Mr. Barnett confirmed yesterday that the Western Australian Government has given green signal to the contentious agreement.

The Premier notified that the former Prime Minster Kevin Rudd had proposed the reform earlier and it meant that the states had to lose one third of their GST revenue to provide funds to it. However, Western Australia opposed the proposal and did not sign it.

After that other states had pulled back from the deal and now, reform has not been working on the basis of financial issues. He added that WA will keep hold of its GST and will control the state government funding that will go into the pool arrangement.

Mr. Barnett stated that the government will be looking forward for the benefits in pooling of the federal and state funding in order to enhance the standard of care in Australia. However, some health care issues and planned size of the federal bureaucracy, falling under proposed plan, were still a matter of concern.

“If the WA government did not sign, the state would have to risk losing future, and perhaps even existing, commonwealth funding to support its hospitals”, he said.