Page 808 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 18 March 2015
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The Environment and Planning Directorate has engaged extensively with the community and key stakeholders as part of the development of the Oaks Estate master plan. The key stakeholders include the Oaks Estate Progress Association, Queanbeyan City Council, Country Rail Contracts—that is, Transport New South Wales—the New South Wales Department of Planning and the ACT Heritage Council. Three rounds of community engagement have been undertaken to gather community and stakeholder concerns and priorities. Each stage informed the development of the draft and final master plans and is documented in two community engagement reports.
More than 250 people took part in these engagement activities and provided comment. These included completing surveys and feedback forms, attending public workshops, information displays and meet the planners sessions and presentations to stakeholders, and individual meetings and conversations. This important interaction helped identify what is important about Oaks Estate and how its character and quality should be conserved and enhanced.
I consider the engagement on the Oaks Estate master plan to be a positive exercise in facilitating valuable public input and feedback for the development of this master plan. It has considered complex and often conflicting issues together with technical background studies and the ACT’s strategic planning context.
The then President of the Oaks Estate Progress Association, Ms Karen Williams, publicly congratulated the government on the success of the master plan. Following the release of the plan, Ms Williams is quoted as saying:
Considering the long process that we’ve had, which had taken more than 20 years over time with different stops and starts, I think the planners should be congratulated.
Madam Deputy Speaker, as you have heard, on Monday of this week I met with other members of the Oaks Estate Progress Association, some of whom are in the gallery today, who are working with the community to make sure that the way forward in Oaks Estate takes into account the community views which are present.
The ACT government has committed to the maintenance of roads in Oaks Estate and this year Oaks Estate Road to Hill Street in Oaks Estate was resealed as part of the Roads ACT resurfacing program. Subsequent to this resealing, the roads around Oaks Estate are scheduled for detailed assessment for resealing in the 2016-17 financial year. This year $605,000 has been approved for the installation of traffic lights at the intersection of Oaks Estate Road and Pialligo Avenue as part of the black spot program in 2015-16.
I will just go to some of the comments from Mr Doszpot in regard to crime in Oaks Estate and advise that whilst we have heard from Mr Doszpot that there is a rise in levels of crime, in fact the advice we have from ACT Policing is that crime has decreased most recently. And I will go to some of the content around that too. We have seen that the number of selected offences reported in Oaks Estate for the period January 2015 to February 2015 decreased overall by 57 per cent. Policing operations took on some work from 14 January in response to a letter from an Oaks Estate
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