Lessons from Australia

DURING my 30-day sojourn Down Under, I once commented to a Filipino friend living there that Australia is a place where you can “get tired” of all the open space with trees and vegetation in its cities and suburbs. There are just too many public parks even with facilities for recreations and sports that we, Filipinos, are not used to.

Easily, my estimate is that there is at least 50 percent of open space in the suburbs that are owned and maintained by their respective councils (Local Government Units or LGUs in the Philippines). In the cities, there are also pleasant parks like in Sydney and Melbourne that are an oasis to the structures of concrete, steel and glass.