He just wants his home of 30 years to be treated like any other Canberra suburb.

"I'd like to see it established as just another suburb, with shops, and somewhere to sit outside and have a cup of coffee," he said.

Oaks Estate, isolated on the NSW-border near Queanbeyan, is bereft of most services taken for granted in the rest of the city.

The only shop it has is a liquor store, and the township experiences high rates of unemployment and crime, and has the lowest median wage of any Canberra suburb.

There is a high concentration of public housing - roughly half of all households, compared to the ACT average of seven per cent - and there is no direct bus to Canberra, although the government recently established more frequent routes to Queanbeyan.

Now, the independent and minor party candidates for Kurrajong, the electorate covering Oaks Estate, have joined together to demand that the major parties do more to help residents.

In a rare move, ungrouped candidates Graeme Strachan, Peter Robinson, Marea Fatseas, and Deborah Field, Like Canberra's Maryann Mussared, Sustainable Australia's Oliver Tye, the Liberal Democrats' Greg Renet, and Canberra Community Voters' Lucinda Spier have issued a joint statement saying the "government's neglect of the poorest and most disadvantaged community in Canberra must end now".

"Oaks Estate has the highest rates of public housing and unemployment and the lowest median wages of all Canberra suburbs, yet has seen rates rises of 300 per cent in the past decade and is denied basic government services that other suburbs take for granted," the statement reads.

The candidates have agreed that, if they are elected, they will push for a direct ACTION bus to Canberra, and the finalisation of heritage protections for the historic suburb, which predates the ACT.

They would also push for the 40-year-old public housing flats to be updated as part of the government's public housing renewal program, and would take measures to improve road and pedestrian safety, including measures to curb dangerous driving in the area.

Mr Strachan, a public housing tenant himself, said the government had ignored Oaks Estate for too long.

He said Oaks Estate had been treated like a "leper colony", and called for urgent action to reverse the area's neglect.

"I don't pretend to have all the answers, but we should be asking questions," he said.

"We should be talking about this instead of pretending that it doesn't exist."

The joint-statement is largely a result of campaigning by the Oaks Estate Progress Association, which has been fighting for better services to the area since 1926.

"This is disadvantage by design," association vice-president Hugh Griffin said.

"The government has increased public housing to 55 per cent of households, and abandoned 50 vulnerable men with complex mental health and drug problems, many of whom have recently left jail," he said.

"They have left them with no public transport and nothing to do, and in older flats they refuse to fix up to a healthy standard."

Mr Bassmann doesn't think he'll be around to watch the future of Oaks Estate.

His lungs are wracked by a lifetime of smoking, and he relies on an oxygen machine, which he keeps next to his armchair.

But he says the progress association had done well to keep the pressure on government to ensure Oaks Estate is not neglected in the future.