Healthy Towns

Healthy Towns is a concept about towns helping themselves and by competing in the same arena for awards of nominal monetary value but having the prestige that the town is healthy and wishes to stay that way. Healthy Towns should set up a popular movement, where myths are tempered by fact.

It is understood that the Tidy Town programme under the national auspices of the Keep Australia Beautiful National Association but implemented at a state level runs overall on about a million dollars a year. Given the importance of a litter free environment, this programme is already, through its environment friendly programme, impinging on environmental health matters. Healthy Towns thus makes a complementary programme possible.

Like Tidy Towns, the underlying message of Healthy Towns is optimistic – however the implications of Healthy Towns where the communities have the information and the competencies to determine whether the criteria are met rather than necessarily dictated to by any one professional group needs the development of local lay "champions". In short, has the idea got legs?

The cost of implementing the concept can be modest; but the potential power of the imagery may restore yet another myth – namely that of the lean fit Australian, not bronzed because in the interest of the Healthy Town, he and she are both wearing an Akubra and the shirt sleeves are buttoned at the wrist.

Once you accept the possibility of a Healthy Town, then you have to accept that there is an environment in which there is a service plan for Rural Australia.