The City of Greater Geelong has officially launched its Council Plan 2025-29 at an event at City Hall.
The plan, adopted by the council group at its meeting last week, outlines the municipality’s strategic direction over the next four years.
Built around the City’s long-term aspiration to create ‘Clever and Creative Future’ for the Geelong region, the plan has six main pillars: core and critical infrastructure; healthy and caring community; economic development; heritage and culture; environment and circular economy; and governance and integrity.
Available online, the 21-page document outlines the challenges facing the region, which include financial sustainability, lack of available and affordable housing, cost of living, areas of high disadvantage, traffic and a lack of public transport, climate change and sustainability and infrastructure.
The plan also includes information on how 16,000 community members helped contribute to the document and the indicators that will be used to measure how the council’s progress satisfies the aspirations of the people of Geelong.
Councillor Emma Sinclair, who presented the plan at the council meeting last week, said the Council Plan was “genuinely a community-led initiative”.
“This, alongside our budget, is one of the most important documents that we will work on; this is the strategy that the budget now funds for the next four years,” Cr Sinclair said.
“This plan doesn’t exist in isolation. If you read through the plan, there’s two pages of supporting documents that actually detail how we are going to implement it over the four years.
“I think we’ve got a really strong plan that reflects the will of the Geelong community and I’m really pleased to be presenting that.”
Cr Sinclair emphasised the focus on ‘caring’ and ‘equity’ within the plan.
“Equality treats everyone the same, whereas equity recognises that some groups face additional barriers and need tailored support to be able to succeed,” she said.
“We want to make Geelong inclusive and accessible to everyone.”
Councillor Anthony Aitken echoed Cr Sinclair’s sentiments, saying it was “pointless” to develop a clever, creative and prosperous Geelong “if you’re not caring for everybody”.
“What is important about this plan is that we’ve tried to elevate caring higher in our responsibility,” Cr Aitken said.
“So to the broader community, yes, we do have a four-year vision of how we wish to undertake our responsibilities… as (your) elected leaders.”
Visit yoursay.geelongaustralia.com.au/CP202529 to view the Council Plan 2025-29.
