Oaks Estate Residents Association Fiona McGregor and Inner South Canberra Community Council chair Colin Walters. Photo: James Coleman.
Fiona McGregor has two little dogs, but she doesn’t dare walk them through the streets of Oaks Estate.
“Because of roaming vicious dogs,” she says.
Ms McGregor is among more than 350 people who live in the small 40-hectare village east of Jerrabomberra. She’s also the president of the Oaks Estate Residents Association. But after 20 years, she’s had enough of the crime.
She’s joined forces with politicians from across the spectrum to push the ACT Government to remember “the forgotten suburb of Canberra” and do something to fix the area’s many issues.
“Residents are constantly finding people trespassing on their properties, and sheds and homes being broken into,” she wrote in a letter to ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr late last month.
“Residents can often hear shouting and screaming sounds from individuals who are experiencing severe mental health episodes, and at times people have felt unsafe due to mentally ill people using threatening behaviour toward them in the street.”
Just after midnight on 1 May 2024, a man fired a shot from his car at a couple as they were walking down the village’s George Street.
Then, later last year, two residents broke into another’s home where Ms McGregor says “the victim was confined and smashed in the face with a hammer”.
Most recently, a dispute between neighbours on a property on George Street in January this year turned ugly when one of them pulled out a samurai sword and took half of one of the other’s fingers clean off.
Shortly after this, a nearby car was firebombed. The wreck is still there today.
There’s more.
A block of public housing units on George Street was decommissioned after a fire in 2023 and has been left vacant and derelict since.
The entrance to Oaks Estate. Photo: James Coleman.
Oaks Estate has the highest proportion of public housing of any suburb in the ACT – up to 47 per cent of all dwellings – and many of them are inhabited by older people or people who are on the NDIS. But there’s little way to get to health facilities in either Queanbeyan or Canberra, short of having your own car.
“There are bus connections provided by the Queanbeyan council … but then they go into the interchange in Queanbeyan, so you have to buy two tickets to get from here to the city – one here and then one to get from Queanbeyan to the city or to Woden,” Ms McGregor says.
Residents also missed out on their usual polling booth at the Oaks Estate Community Hall during the ACT election in October 2024, which Ms McGregor says meant many were unable to vote.
“When I first came to live here, there used to be a T-shirt that was sold here that showed a picture of the railway track and writing on it that said ‘Oaks Estate? Where’s that?’ That’s a bit of an indication of what people think,” she says.
Oaks Estate started as ‘The Oaks’, a part of Robert Campbell’s farming estate, Duntroon. It then birthed Queanbeyan’s industrial area before the ACT border was drawn along the adjacent railway line in 1911.
Today, it’s part of the ACT’s Kurrajong electorate – contested at the last election by Labor Chief Minister Andrew Barr, Greens leader Shane Rattenbury and former Canberra Liberals leader Elizabeth Lee.
Ms McGregor and many other residents have met with representatives from the ACT Government many times over the years, but say the responses have been “piecemeal and haphazard, at best”.
In early 2023, the government established a working group to examine the problems with the public housing precincts on George and River streets, but Ms McGregor says the group “only met twice … with no outcome”.
“Usually we get a response that’s, ‘Well, you know, Oaks Estate is just a small suburb. ‘”
Mr Rattenbury and Ms Lee, alongside Thomas Emerson from Independents for Canberra, have now taken up their case.
Together, they’re putting forward a motion for the ACT Government to “develop a five-year strategic plan … to holistically address the problems that are entrenching Oaks Estate residents in disadvantage, including homelessness, crime, drug use, low community service availability and lacking public transport”.
They’ll then want their first update from the government on how it’s going within a year of implementation.
“Oaks Estate does tend to get a bit left behind in the ACT, being somewhat separated from the bulk of the city,” Mr Rattenbury said.
“But we all received a letter from the community association, at various times we each came and made a visit, and we got back to the Assembly and said, ‘Let’s work together to try and get some movement here.'”
Mr Rattenbury said there were efforts to improve Oaks Estate during the last term of government when he was one of the ministers, but “it is clear from the recent correspondence from the community association, the issues have escalated”.
Thomas Emerson, Elizabeth Lee and Shane Rattenbury met in Gillespie Park in Oaks Estate. Photo: James Coleman.
Ms Lee described her Canberra Liberals predecessor for Kurrajong, the late Steve Doszpot, as a “great champion” for Oaks Estate, but the fact that nothing has been done 10 years later is “not good enough”.
Mr Emerson said the motion is “really about echoing the calls that have been coming from the community for such a long time”.
“A strategic plan would send a clear signal that the government’s actually focused on what’s happening here and making this a fantastic place to live.”
During a press conference on Monday morning (7 April), when asked if the ACT Government had neglected Oaks Estate, Chief Minister Barr said, “No, but I understand there are some specific issues that will be responded to”.
“I’m comfortable that everyone in Canberra is safe relative to any other city in Australia or indeed elsewhere in the world, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t occasional incidents and issues that would be concerning for people’s personal safety.”
