Victoria has finally agreed to a rescue package for the Murray-Darling Basin in a major triumph for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
And all states and territories have agreed to publish report cards on their public hospitals in return for a $1 billion funding injection at Wednesday's Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting.
The Murray-Darling negotiations pushed the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting well past the six-hour mark.
But Mr Rudd, the premiers and chief ministers emerged from the talks in Adelaide hailing their deals on health, water, cutting red tape and radically reshaping commonwealth-state funding.
"We entered this process with the objective of ending the blame game and today we've taken practical steps in this direction by brokering a historic agreement on the future of the Murray-Darling Basin and the future of the health and hospital systems," Mr Rudd told reporters.
"We've made a solid start but there's still a lot of work to go."
The meeting broke a year-long stalemate over the $10 billion rescue package for the Murray-Darling Basin, with Victoria agreeing to former prime minister John Howard's rescue plan.
COAG agreed to combine the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission together into a new national body with the power to set a cap on the amount of water to be taken out of rivers and groundwater systems.
In return, Victoria will get $1 billion of federal funding for its food bowl modernisation project.
Mr Brumby said the agreement probably would not have been reached had Labor not won last year's federal election, putting the party in power across the nation at the state and federal level.
"You work with whichever government is in office," Mr Brumby told reporters.
"We always said that about the Howard government, you always do your best. But it was just impossible to get agreement on this.
"Former premier Steve Bracks ... had meeting after meeting after meeting and we just got nowhere with it - we could never sign off."
Mr Rudd said Labor had promised a year ago to end the blame game between state and federal governments if elected.
"And today what we have done is acted to end that blame game in critical areas including water, health and hospitals and also boosting the productivity of our economy," he said.
States and territories will get a $1 billion funding injection for public hospitals - $500 million immediately.
In return, they will have to publish report cards on how their hospitals are performing so progress can be compared across the nation.
The current health care funding agreement expires on July 1. The $1 billion will act as a stopgap until a new agreement is negotiated, to take effect from July 1 next year.
The next agreement will look at increasing the ratio of federal to state spending on health, which has slipped from 50-50 a decade ago to 60-40.
In some states like Tasmania, the ratio has slid to 69-31, with the state government contributing $2.32 for every dollar spent by the federal government.
A controversial scheme for a national register of health professionals, including doctors, will also be set up, despite opposition from the Australian Medical Association.
NSW Premier Morris Iemma said the AMA's concerns were unjustified, and the register was about safety in health care.
"It's not about building another layer of administration or in some way reducing the authority of doctors. It is all about ensuring that patient safety is at the top of our list of priorities," he said.
COAG will meet again in Sydney on July 3.
