Performing Equity,Preserving Power: The Double Bind for Aboriginal Australian Women in Public Sector Workplaces

Abstract

In Australian public institutions, Aboriginal women's visibility is often mobilised as an instrument of containment rather than a marker of structural change. Focusing on the Victorian Public Sector, this article examines how equity regimes incorporate Indigenous presence while preserving settler-colonial authority. Drawing on Make Us Count and interviews with 25 Aboriginal women, we show how they are hypervisible as symbols of diversity and reconciliation, yet excluded from leadership, safety and decision-making. This double bind is produced through the intersecting operations of race, gender, settler sovereignty and bureaucratic whiteness, in which Aboriginal women perform cultural and emotional labour under conditions of conditional belonging, while their critique is marginalised or penalised. Using Ali Meghji’s notion of theoretical synergy, we bring Critical Race Theory and Critical Indigenous Studies into the conversation, drawing particularly on Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorisation of the white possessive logic. We argue that equity, as currently enacted, operates as symbolic inclusion, a technology of governance that sustains institutional power, contributing to critical debates on race, settler colonialism, whiteness and Indigenous refusal.

Introduction

‘Stress this to your daughters. There are two distinctly disadvantaged groups in Australian society – Aborigines and women. And try being both.’

—Aboriginal woman at an employment seminar in Victoria, 1987 (Runciman, 1994, p. 5)

More than three decades later, this incisive observation still resonates, as the compounded disadvantages it describes remain embedded in Australia's public institutions. This persistence is not due to a failure of equity frameworks, but to how inclusion has been reconfigured as a mechanism to manage Indigenous presence while preserving settler authority. The Victorian Public Sector (VPS) encompasses the agencies and departments that constitute the state government of Victoria, Australia. Like other public sector workplaces nationally, the VPS positions Aboriginal women as highly visible symbols of reconciliation and diversity, even as they remain systematically excluded from leadership, protection and decision-making power. Their labour sustains the performance of inclusion, while their authority is constrained by precarious employment, conditional belonging and institutional surveillance. Inclusion, in this context, is not a vehicle for empowerment; it is a strategy of containment, where equity is operationalised to legitimise institutions without challenging the structures of settler-colonial power.

Successive waves of public sector reform, affirmative action policies, Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs), Aboriginal employment strategies, and diversity infrastructure suggest a trajectory of progress, yet have often stabilised rather than disrupted the authority of whiteness and bureaucratic governance. Reconciliation and inclusion become institutional performances: symbolic gestures that celebrate Indigenous visibility while disqualifying Indigenous authority and critique. The contradiction between public-facing diversity and structural exclusion is not incidental; it reflects a patterned logic through which settler-colonial institutions absorb Indigenous presence to reinforce their legitimacy.

We work within Critical Indigenous Sociology, informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS). We are Indigenous sociologists whose accountability lies with Indigenous peoples and collectives. Our positionality informs both our methodological commitments and our theoretical lens. We reject frameworks that position Aboriginal women's experiences as peripheral or anecdotal. Instead, we recognise these narratives as theoretical interventions that diagnose how settler-colonial governance, institutional whiteness and gendered racism are reproduced beneath the veneer of equity reform. This reflects our commitment to Indigenist research principles, which centre Indigenous sovereignty, relational accountability and resistance to colonial knowledge production.

This article draws on qualitative research involving 25 Aboriginal women employed across various VPS departments and roles. Although both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were invited to participate, only Aboriginal women responded. Using the Indigenous research method of yarning, a culturally grounded conversational approach that positions participants as epistemic authorities (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010), the study engages participants in critically analysing the institutions they navigate daily. Across their narratives, a recurring pattern emerges: Aboriginal women are recruited to symbolise diversity, perform cultural labour, and advance reconciliation agendas. Yet when they challenge systemic harm, critique institutional norms, or assert leadership, they encounter resistance, surveillance and exclusion. They are celebrated for their presence but penalised for their power.

At the heart of these experiences lies a structural contradiction: Aboriginal women are made hypervisible within diversity performances yet rendered invisible where decisions are made and protections enforced. We conceptualise this as a double bind: Aboriginal women are required to perform equity while denied transformative power, with their labour, legitimacy, and belonging governed by intersecting forces of race, gender, settler-colonialism and institutional whiteness. This bind is not caused by policy gaps or poor implementation; it is reproduced through the very mechanisms that claim to advance equity, cultural inclusion strategies, complaints systems, leadership schemes and diversity metrics.

This article makes two key contributions. First, it provides a grounded, theorised account of how Aboriginal women's inclusion in the public sector workplace operates as a strategy to legitimise rather than to redistribute institutional power. Second, it advances debates in sociology, CRT, and CIS by exposing how equity regimes function as technologies of governance, transforming diversity from a promise of justice into a mechanism of control. Rather than asking how inclusion might be improved, we interrogate whether inclusion, as currently enacted, can deliver justice at all.

Before presenting our theoretical and methodological framing, we situate our analysis within a broader context of Aboriginal women's labour in the public sector. Despite policy commitments to inclusion and diversity, Aboriginal women are often rendered hyper-visible as cultural representatives while being structurally contained within precarious or undervalued roles. Their contributions, particularly cultural, emotional, and epistemic labour, are routinely extracted without recognition, resourcing, or advancement. This dynamic reflects a longer colonial history in which Aboriginal women's labour has been both indispensable and devalued, shaped by the logics of settler governance, control, and racial capitalism.

In what follows, we outline our theoretical and methodological approach, demonstrating how Critical Indigenous Sociology, CRT, and Indigenist methodologies frame our analysis. We then present findings across three interlocking domains of the bind: the strategic incorporation of Aboriginal women without structural advancement; the extraction of cultural, emotional and epistemic labour; and the failures of complaints systems to address − and often reproduce − harm. We conclude by challenging the terms of inclusion itself, arguing that Aboriginal women are not seeking better accommodation within existing structures, but are naming the logics of containment, and calling for their dismantling.

Background: Aboriginal Women's Labour, Visibility and Containment in the Public Sector

This article builds on the Aboriginal-led study Make Us Count: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women in the Victorian Public Sector (Bargallie, Carlson et al., 2023), which situates contemporary workplace experiences within a longer history of racialised containment and bureaucratic misrecognition. Using a Critical Indigenist Research Methodology and an intersectional lens, the report shows how policy instruments such as RAPs, Indigenous employment strategies, and complaints systems frequently manage Indigenous presence without redistributing power, thereby sustaining institutional whiteness and settler authority.

Victoria's public sector encompasses all government-owned departments, agencies and organisations that deliver public services. It has two main employer groups: the Victorian Public Service (about 40 departments, agencies, and administrative offices); and roughly 1,750 public entities (including schools, hospitals, emergency services, water authorities, creative industry bodies, and sport and recreation organisations). As of June 2021, 345,866 people were employed across 1,840 employers − around 10% of the state's labour force. Women comprised 68% of employees; 0.7% identified as transgender, non-binary or gender diverse; and 0.8% identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander.

Survey data indicate that harm is patterned and institutional. The VPS ‘People Matter’ survey (Victorian Public Sector Commission, 2021) shows that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander respondents were more likely than non-Indigenous colleagues to report bullying, sexual harassment, aggression or violent behaviour, and discrimination. Eleven per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women reported discrimination; among these women, 68% identified race as the basis and 49% said the perpetrator was a senior manager. A quarter did not report, commonly citing fear of career repercussions or futility − classic markers of institutional betrayal. These patterns indicate not isolated incidents but institutionalised dynamics that we theorise here as a double bind: hypervisibility within equity agendas paired with exclusion from authority, safety, and progression.

The Foreword to the Make Us Count report (Bargallie, Carlson, et al., 2023) by Jackie Huggins offers a genealogy of this bind from the 1970s–1980s to the present. Reflecting on her public service career, Huggins writes that Aboriginal women have long laboured in and against the state, often as ‘small cogs in a huge machine believing [they] could change the system … only to find out they are deceiving themselves,’ concluding that ‘the great deception can only be changed by those in power,’ which is ‘generally not Aboriginal peoples … and most definitely not Aboriginal women.’ Her account anticipates this article's argument that inclusion is routinely operationalised as containment rather than transformation.

A broad national literature shows the same dynamics across sectors. Moreton-Robinson's (2015) analysis of the case of Aboriginal nurse ‘Leesa’ demonstrates how racial unity among white colleagues and managerial recoding of racism as ‘bullying’ work to discredit Aboriginal complainants and protect institutions, at great personal cost. Nielsen and colleagues’ (2014) account of the ‘whiteness of nursing’ and Fredericks’ (2009) finding that empowered Aboriginal women are perceived as disruptive, tolerated only when compliant with white institutional expectations, underscore that whiteness operates as organisational common sense. Across these studies, the pattern is consistent: Aboriginal women are celebrated as symbols of progress when performing cultural labour but silenced or excluded when they assert epistemic authority or name harm. This duality, visibility without power, inclusion without protection, is central to the logic of containment in contemporary equity regimes.

In policing, Fleming et al. (2013) found Indigenous women officers routinely subjected to racist assumptions, harassment, and institutional disregard for complaints − findings echoed by ex-police officer Veronica Gorrie, who describes the psychological toll of being a ‘token’ Aboriginal employee expected to tolerate racism in exchange for visibility (Gorrie, 2021). Public reporting further shows Indigenous employment targets in policing have failed to deliver meaningful inclusion where systemic barriers remain intact (Kolovos, 2022).

Even at senior levels, research across the Australian Public Service (APS) identifies systematic barriers to Indigenous leadership: the devaluation of Indigenous skills and leadership styles; reliance on informal mentoring in place of transparent progression pathways; and the persistence of racialised norms that equate whiteness with neutrality and merit. Ganter (2016) documents pressures on Aboriginal senior public servants to act as symbolic representatives while being excluded from consequential decision-making. Faulkner and Lahn (2019) show that informal mentoring, rather than clear pathways, is often the only route to progression. Larkin (2014) and Bargallie (2020) further demonstrate how the racial contract persists in the APS, maintaining whiteness as the institutional norm and reframing Indigenous critique as organisational risk.

What unites these accounts, across states, agencies and decades, is a shared diagnosis: Indigenous inclusion is permitted only insofar as it does not unsettle whiteness or settler sovereignty. Aboriginal women are recruited as evidence of change but denied the power to enact it. Their identities are appropriated to signal transformation, while their knowledge and experience are disqualified from shaping institutional norms. When they challenge this structure, they are dismissed as ‘too sensitive,’ ‘too angry,’ or ‘not strategic enough,’ echoes of the affective discipline described by participants in Make Us Count (Bargallie, Carlson, et al., 2023) and theorised in this article.

Recent Aboriginal-led studies, Gari Yala (Diversity Council Australia/Jumbunna) and Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Australian Human Rights Commission), show how Aboriginal women's workplace experiences have been misread, under-theorised, or sidelined by dominant frameworks. A central implication is that Indigenous women must be positioned not as passive subjects of inclusion efforts but as epistemic authorities whose critique, refusal, and survival are themselves theory and resistance. These studies also call for more robust, intersectional data practices so policy responds to the specific realities that Aboriginal women face, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other identities (LGBTQIA+), living with disability, or navigating age-based and geographical exclusion.

We therefore focus in depth on the structural and symbolic conditions that produce this double bind: Aboriginal women are rendered hypervisible within equity agendas while remaining structurally excluded from authority, safety and advancement. Extending the theoretical and empirical insights of Make Us Count (Bargallie, Carlson, et al., 2023), we offer a granular account of how equity is weaponised to manage critique, extract labour, and preserve the racial-gendered logics of settler-colonial governance. Moreover, research shows that Aboriginal women's cultural and emotional labour, essential to the functioning of diversity and inclusion agendas, is extracted without recognition, resourcing, or protection. Bargallie (2020) and Faulkner and Lahn (2019) demonstrate that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees are frequently excluded from senior roles and decision-making structures, even as they are recruited to symbolise change. Other studies, including Ganter (2016) and Larkin (2014), show that institutional resistance to Indigenous leadership is compounded by the assumption that whiteness is synonymous with neutrality, objectivity and competence. These findings are not limited to Aboriginal women: as Bargallie (2020) shows, Aboriginal men also navigate racialised colonial power dynamics and are routinely subjected to surveillance, stagnation and disqualification. However, these experiences are not uniform; intersectionality clarifies that race and gender are co-constitutive in producing harm. Aboriginal women are not simply affected by racism and sexism in parallel; rather, they are subject to a system in which the two are entangled, making their marginalisation more complex and more resistant to correction through conventional equity frameworks. Further, the field continues to emphasise the need to include the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are LGBTQIA+ or gender-diverse, who face heightened risks of tokenism, discrimination and exclusion, yet remain largely invisible in mainstream data and policy discourse.

Against this backdrop, our analysis theorises the double bind across three interlocking domains: symbolic inclusion with structural exclusion; extraction and devaluation of cultural/emotional labour; and institutional betrayal within complaint systems. We treat participants’ accounts not as anecdote but as diagnosis − a sovereign standpoint that renders visible the logics through which equity performs governance rather than transformation.

Critical Indigenist Research Methodology

Our methodological framework is grounded in Indigenist research principles (Rigney, 1999), which centre Indigenous sovereignty, relational accountability and resistance to colonial knowledge extraction. We bring CRT and CIS into theoretical synergy (Meghji, 2020) to diagnose how equity regimes operationalise containment, while respecting the ontological and epistemological differences of each tradition. From CRT, we engage Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins & Bilge, 2016; Collins, 2000) to illuminate how race, gender and colonial power are structurally intertwined rather than additive. From CIS, we draw on Moreton-Robinson's (2015) theorisation of the white possessive logic to analyse how Indigenous inclusion is framed to secure institutional legitimacy without redistributing authority. Ahmed's (2012) concept of non-performative diversity complements this, exposing how equity statements project transformation while deflecting critique. These frameworks are not applied as external lenses; they emerge from, and are sharpened by, Aboriginal women's theorisation of institutional life.

We also draw on Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory (Moreton-Robinson, 2013) to position Aboriginal women as epistemic authorities who theorise settler-colonial power from a sovereign standpoint. This perspective challenges dominant constructions of neutrality and meritocracy, revealing how whiteness is maintained through conditional inclusion, the appropriation of Indigenous labour and identity, and the disqualification of Indigenous authority and resistance.

Our methodological practice privileges Indigenous voices, knowledge systems and relational accountability. Data were drawn from the Make Us Count: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women in the Victorian Public Sector project (Bargallie, Carlson et al., 2023), involving 25 Aboriginal women employed across the VPS. We employed Yarning (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010) not as a neutral qualitative tool, but as a culturally sovereign epistemological practice embedded in relationality, reciprocity and Indigenous modes of knowledge production. Analysis was guided by a listening approach that prioritised resonance over code frequency or thematic saturation, attending closely to moments where participants’ narratives illuminated what we later conceptualised as structures of containment, critique and refusal.

Rather than treating participants’ contributions as ‘data’ to be extracted, we approached them as co-theorists (Bargallie, 2020) whose insights are theoretical interventions into the workings of settler-colonial institutions. We read these narratives not as lived experience contrasted with theory, but as critical interventions that expose how equity regimes operate as technologies of containment. In the sections that follow, we present three interlocking structures of the double bind: racialised career stagnation masked as inclusion; the extraction of emotional and cultural labour; and institutional betrayal embedded in complaint processes. These are structural mechanisms through which settler-colonial institutions enrol Aboriginal women as symbols of change while denying them material authority. Framed through the insights generated by the synergy of CRT and CIS and anchored by Indigenist research principles of epistemic sovereignty and refusal, the analysis illuminates how equity operates not as transformation but as governance.

Framing the Findings

This analysis identifies three intersecting structures through which the double bind operates within the public sector workplace. The first, Inside the Bind, shows how Aboriginal women's labour is strategically contained through precarious employment, career stagnation and symbolic inclusion. The second, The Cost of the Bind, examines how cultural, emotional and relational labour is extracted without recognition, sustaining institutional functioning while reinforcing epistemic inequality. The third, Breaking the Bind? reveals how formal complaint mechanisms reproduce intersectional harm and institutional betrayal under the guise of accountability. These are not discrete experiences but structural logics, mechanisms through which diversity is repurposed to preserve institutional authority and settler-colonial control.

Inside the Bind

Racialised Stagnation and Symbolic Inclusion in the VPS

Participants’ narratives expose how precarious employment − characterised by short-term contracts, stalled career progression, and exclusion from secure leadership pathways − functions as a key mechanism through which the double bind is maintained. Far from being a neutral labour practice, this precarity ensures that Aboriginal women remain hypervisible within diversity agendas, yet structurally marginal, contingent and easily displaced when their presence challenges institutional norms. As one participant explained:

‘I’ve been in this job for 19 years. Still at Level 3. I’ve seen new grads come in, move up, get tapped on the shoulder. But I’m the one they call for NAIDOC ¹ .’ (P13)

Others described career ceilings that were impervious to time, experience, or commitment:

‘I am in a contract position and have been working at higher level since 2019 … I go from contract to contract … I do not feel valued at all, it is making me depressed.’ (S8)

‘No-one will notice you. If you’re Level 5, you’re no one.’ (P15)

These accounts reflect what we term racialised gendering − Aboriginal women's labour is valued when it affirms institutional diversity goals, but not when it demands structural power. As one woman observed:

‘I’ve expressed quite clearly I’d like to be a VPS 5 … I’ve been unsuccessful ever since … it's dissatisfying, especially seeing the meteoric rise of the non-Indigenous staff.’ (P22)

Rather than advancement, many were relegated to symbolic functions. Participants were added to committees, events, or reference groups for ‘representation,’ but were excluded from key decision-making processes:

‘They want us in the room, but not at the table. They say they want our input, but the decisions are already made.’ (P8)

‘When there's an event, I’m the face. When it's budget decisions or planning, I’m not invited. That's not inclusion — that's decoration.’ (P21)

This dynamic reflects how diversity operates as a symbolic economy within settler-colonial institutions, where Aboriginal women's presence is leveraged to signal transformation, while decision-making authority remains securely held within whiteness (Ahmed, 2012). In this context, representation functions as organisational capital: highly visible when it serves institutional branding, but systematically excluded from sites of power. This selective inclusion exemplifies what Moreton-Robinson (2015) terms the white possessive logic − the incorporation of Indigenous presence without surrendering control over knowledge, leadership, or structural authority. Many also noted the conditional nature of their participation. Speaking out or naming racism risked reputational harm. Being included was contingent on remaining ‘safe,’ ‘agreeable’ and emotionally restrained:

‘I learned early − don’t be too loud. Don’t make them uncomfortable. If you speak up too much, you’re not seen as a team player.’ (P5)

Some observed that even Aboriginal initiatives were managed by non-Indigenous staff − a practice that reinforced epistemic inequality and the relegation of Indigenous expertise to advisory roles:

‘The person leading Aboriginal strategy isn’t Aboriginal. We all know it. It happens everywhere. It's like we’re good enough to advise but not to lead.’ (P3)

This theme demonstrates how the double bind manifests through symbolic inclusion coupled with structural exclusion. Aboriginal women are made visible to legitimise institutional claims of equity, but remain excluded from decision-making power. Their cultural identity is public-facing, but their professional trajectory is constrained by racialised expectations, career ceilings and conditions of silence. Inclusion is permitted only to the extent that it does not disrupt whiteness or organisational order.

What appears as equity is revealed, through their stories, to be a logic of containment. Aboriginal women are required to perform reconciliation yet are prevented from transforming the institutions in which they labour. Their visibility is aesthetic; their leadership, disqualified. This is the first face of the bind: where performing equity becomes a condition of employment, but accessing power remains foreclosed by settler-colonial and racialised logics of containment.

The Cost of the Bind

Cultural, Emotional and Invisible Labour

The second expression of the bind lies in the extraction of unpaid, invisible and emotionally costly labour. Aboriginal women in the VPS reported consistently performing cultural, emotional and relational work beyond their job descriptions, work that was both essential to institutional reconciliation agendas and wholly unrecognised in formal performance structures. They were expected to serve as mentors, mediators, educators and cultural representatives, often in addition to their core roles, and without formal reward or institutional protection.

One participant explained:

‘I do the Welcome to Country, support the new Black staff, help out with the RAP. None of that is in my PD [Position Description]. But if I didn’t do it, who would?’ (P9)

Others similarly described the automatic assumption that they would shoulder reconciliation and representational work:

‘There's an automatic default to the Aboriginal team … They write the RAP, run NAIDOC Week, staff events … It all just falls to them.’ (P1)

‘I wasn’t in an Indigenous Identified role, but still they’d come to me … they had me drafting their RAP. But I’m working full time [in my role] − I can’t do that as well.’ (P20)

This work, which is simultaneously emotionally and culturally taxing, is made to appear voluntary, a moral obligation rather than a recognised form of labour. As such, it is rendered invisible in performance reviews, career progression and job planning. One participant put it simply:

‘I don’t feel valued. I feel useful. That's a slightly different perspective.’ (P17)

This reflects a key component of the bind: Aboriginal women's hypervisible identity is institutionally celebrated, while their labour remains structurally invisible. They are required to embody the reconciliation agenda while being denied the authority or resources to shape its direction.

Participants also reported high levels of emotional labour, particularly in relation to supporting other Aboriginal staff, absorbing microaggressions and managing workplace racism, often with little to no support:

‘When something racist happens, people come to me. HR [Human Resources Department] doesn’t deal with it. So, we deal with it. Quietly. Behind the scenes.’ (P19)

This form of institutional reliance on Aboriginal women to ‘clean up’ the consequences of racism without formal acknowledgement amounts to structural outsourcing of cultural responsibility. It reveals how inclusion operates not through care, but through delegated emotional risk.

Many also described the need to perform affective restraint, knowing that any expression of anger, exhaustion, or frustration would be weaponised against them:

‘You have to be careful how you say things. Don’t get too passionate or they’ll say you’re attacking. Stay calm, even when you’re dying inside.’ (P2)

This affective discipline expected of Aboriginal women but not their peers reflect the racialised management of emotion in white institutional settings (Ahmed, 2012). Emotional suppression becomes a precondition for continued inclusion.

Even when they fulfilled every cultural expectation, Aboriginal women were often evaluated as lacking the skills or focus to advance. One participant shared:

‘If we don’t do the cultural stuff, it doesn’t happen. But then we’re told we’re not strategic enough or not focused on outcomes. We can’t win.’ (P11)

Such comments point to a profound epistemic contradiction. The work Aboriginal women do to keep the institution culturally afloat is treated as ‘soft,’ unmeasurable, or outside the scope of ‘real’ professional contribution. Their labour is essential but remains untranslatable within white managerial logics, a key component of intersectional exclusion:

‘I do not feel valued by most and am only wanted if there is a cultural issue to address … I am invisible.’ (S8)

This theme highlights the institutional dependence on Aboriginal women's unpaid labour to perform reconciliation, support diversity goals and emotionally sustain workplaces that frequently exclude or harm them. While their cultural presence is constantly requested, their time, expertise and wellbeing are not protected. This is the cost of the bind: to be used but not valued, present but expendable, visible but unsupported. Seen in this light, the extraction of cultural and emotional labour without recognition reflects the white possessive logic (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), in which Indigenous contributions are appropriated to strengthen institutional legitimacy while control over resources, authority and decision-making remains securely in settler hands.

Aboriginal women's cultural and emotional labour is essential to the VPS's public performance of equity yet is invisibilised by the very systems that benefit from it. Their contributions are not only unpaid, but they are also often disqualified as ‘not strategic,’ marking them as unfit for advancement. In this way, the bind is not only a contradiction, it is a machine of extraction, legitimised by equity discourse but grounded in racialised gendered expectations.

Breaking the Bind?

Complaint Systems, Institutional Betrayal and the Failure of Protection

The third expression of the bind is found not just in exclusion or extraction, but in the institutional failure to provide protection. This failure is part of a deeper pattern in which the authority to decide whose safety counts, and on what terms, remains with those the institution was designed to safeguard. Many Aboriginal women described the inaccessibility, futility, or active harm associated with formal complaint processes. Far from offering redress, these mechanisms often produced a second wave of violence: disbelief; minimisation; retaliation; and professional isolation. The bind is most acute here, when Aboriginal women are expected to represent equity yet are disciplined for naming its failure. As one participant plainly stated:

‘I didn’t report it. HR doesn’t work for us. HR works for the department. They’re here to protect the brand.’ (P19)

Others similarly described complaint processes as bureaucratic shields − designed to protect the institution rather than those harmed within it:

‘The complaints process is not great. I could never see that process benefiting me more than not doing anything.’ (P23)

‘So, it's kind of just discouraged me a lot around not reporting.’ (P22)

Several participants expressed that complaints were recoded as emotional responses or interpersonal misunderstandings rather than structural or racialised harm:

‘I reported the incident … I was subjected to ongoing ghosting … I did not feel heard … It was not addressed, and I was left to feel isolated and unheard.’ (S8)

In some cases, Aboriginal women were directly warned not to make complaints, particularly when they were seen as high-potential or ‘on track:’

‘I was told, “I know you’ve got a future in the department, so be mindful of that if you’re thinking of making a formal complaint.’” (P12)

This is a textbook case of institutional betrayal (Smith & Freyd, 2014), where formal mechanisms for justice are weaponised to silence or protect the powerful. These betrayals are not neutral failures; they are built into the logic of systems that recode racism and sexism as individual ‘conflict’ rather than structural violence. As Sara Ahmed (2021) observes, complaint is often treated as a kind of deviation from the institutional path, a disturbance to be managed rather than a call to address harm. Institutions respond not by repairing the wrong, but by redirecting the complaint into procedures that exhaust, isolate and ultimately remove the complainer from the space. The act of complaining, as Ahmed (2021) argues, can itself mark the complainer as the problem, even when they identify structural harm − a dynamic repeatedly evident in these accounts.

Even when Aboriginal women attempted to flag issues informally, through direct conversations or internal escalations, they were routinely told that what they experienced did not count:

‘I talked to my manager … the response I got back was that what I described wasn’t considered a cultural safety issue.’ (P8)

Another noted how complaints against white men were handled in exclusive, masculinised ways:

‘There was a real boys’ club type relationship … they got to discuss what was wrong with me, but I wasn’t allowed to say what I thought was wrong with him.’ (P1)

The complaint process thus emerges not as a mechanism of equity, but as a site of emotional risk. For many, the only path to safety was silence, withdrawal, or exit, a forced compliance that protects institutional legitimacy while erasing structural harm.

Perhaps most powerfully, one participant captured the paradox of representation and silencing:

‘They want our stories for the reconciliation strategy. But not our truth when it makes them uncomfortable.’ (P4)

This speaks to the selective incorporation of Aboriginal voice, welcome when it supports organisational branding, rejected when it critiques institutional complicity. What is extracted as narrative value is disqualified as political testimony.

This theme reveals the final, most damaging face of the bind: institutional betrayal. Complaint systems do not merely fail to protect Aboriginal women; they participate in their silencing. These systems are not neutral or broken; they are functioning as designed, preserving institutional image while denying the legitimacy of intersectional harm.

When Aboriginal women report racism or exclusion, they are routinely repositioned as unstable, emotional, or unprofessional. This is the culmination of conditional inclusion; you can belong, but only on the condition that you do not disrupt. To complain is to risk career damage. To stay silent is to carry the weight alone.

This structure of betrayal, dressed in the language of process and fairness, exemplifies the epistemic and emotional cost of performing inclusion in spaces not built for justice. It shows that equity without safety is surveillance, and that Aboriginal women are both the public face of transformation and its most intimate casualties.

Within this logic, acts of critique, dissent and disengagement by Aboriginal women are often misread as resistance to progress or as cultural noncompliance. Yet these actions are better understood as forms of refusal − not a rejection of work, but a rejection of settler-institutional terms of participation. When Aboriginal women withdraw labour, challenge policy, or refuse to perform reconciliation, they are not stepping away from equity. They are theorising its limits and refusing its co-optation. This refusal is not a breakdown of inclusion but a deliberate interruption of containment, an assertion of sovereignty against reform processes that preserve control in familiar hands.

Discussion

Inclusion Without Transformation: The Bind as Institutional Logic

This study set out to examine how Aboriginal women experience equity and inclusion within the VPS. What emerged through participants’ narratives was not a picture of uneven implementation or isolated policy failure, but a deeply patterned structure of institutional contradiction − a double bind. Aboriginal women are hypervisible as symbols of diversity and reconciliation, yet structurally excluded from authority, protection and recognition. This is not accidental. It reflects a broader state logic of containment, where inclusion is operationalised to manage Indigenous presence, not to redistribute power.

We have shown that this bind is not the result of policy failure or individual bias, but the product of three interlocking institutional mechanisms. First, Aboriginal women are celebrated as symbols of diversity in public-facing narratives yet consistently overlooked in opportunities for advancement and decision-making, a pattern of career stagnation masked by symbolic inclusion. Second, they are expected to uphold the cultural scaffolding of equity initiatives, taking on disproportionate emotional and cultural labour − labour that is both essential to institutional functioning and systematically unrecognised. Third, when harm is experienced, whether through racism, lateral violence, or gendered microaggressions, Aboriginal women often find that complaint systems are not sites of justice but instruments of further exclusion. These processes of discrediting, disbelief, or silencing exemplify what participants described as institutional betrayal, wherein the very systems that claim to protect equity instead reproduce harm. This harm does not end when the complaint process concludes. As Ahmed (2021) shows in her discussion of complaint, it leaves an afterlife, a persistence of injury in the institution's memory and in the everyday working lives of those who speak up. Once labelled a complainer, an individual can be permanently coded as risky, difficult, or disruptive, a designation that shapes future opportunities, relationships and credibility. Even resolved or abandoned complaints can continue to shadow the person who made them, embedding harm into the organisational fabric. Within the bind we describe, this afterlife of complaint reinforces conditional inclusion. In this bind, refusal, understood as an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty and an act of self-determination, is remembered by the institutions as disloyalty, further constraining the terms on which Aboriginal women are permitted to belong. This pattern makes visible not only how complaints are managed, but how they are folded back into the broader machinery of diversity work − a system that cites inclusion to legitimise itself while disciplining those who challenge its terms.

Taken together, these mechanisms reveal how the bind is sustained not through accident or oversight, but through an institutional architecture in which equity discourse itself operates as a form of discipline. As Ahmed (2012) argues, diversity work often operates through non-performative speech acts, declarations that cite equity while blocking the conditions for its enactment. In this framing, the performance of inclusion substitutes for structural change. In the VPS, diversity policies and reconciliation commitments offer rhetorical evidence of progress, while the realities of harm, exclusion and precarity persist. Aboriginal women are positioned as the evidence of change, but not as its architects. Their labour and identity are appropriated to sustain institutional narratives, while their critique is reinterpreted as risk. Containment operates through formalised complaints mechanisms that recode structural violence as interpersonal conflict, the managerial appropriation of cultural labour, and a bureaucratic epistemology that frames Indigenous critique as organisational dysfunction or risk. Bargallie and Lentin (2021) argue that institutional recognition of Indigeneity is conditional, extended when it convergences with organisational interests. In this way Aborginal identity is co-opted as evidence of equity, even as strutures that produce harm remain intact. Within this logic, Aboriginal women's presence is not neutral; it is instrumentalised to secure legitimacy while deflecting demands for transformation, a dynamic that, as Moreton-Robinson (2015) argues, reflects the operation of the white possessive. This dynamic is sustained by the operation of institutional whiteness, not merely as demographic dominance, but as an epistemological and organisational logic that frames Indigenous presence as something to be managed, and Indigenous critique as a threat to bureaucratic order (Ahmed, 2012; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Nicholl, 2004).

Through this lens, the double bind is not a metaphor; it is a sociological structure. It emerges at the intersection of racialised gendering, conditional inclusion, and the epistemic failure of complaint systems to account for intersectional harm. The convergence of symbolic inclusion, cultural labour extraction and institutional betrayal exposes how race, gender, and colonial governance operate not in isolation, but as intertwined structures of institutional harm. Intersectionality helps diagnose this harm, not as a series of overlapping oppressions, but as a unified system of disciplinary power. As Crenshaw (1991) warned, when institutions remain oriented around single-axis frameworks of sexism or racism, Aboriginal women become unintelligible within the very systems that claim to serve them.

These findings also affirm the enduring relevance of Indigenous women's standpoint theory (Moreton-Robinson, 2013), which locates Aboriginal women as epistemic subjects, not merely as objects of institutional discourse but as critical theorists of its operation. Their stories are not simply experiential; they are diagnostic. They reveal how settler-colonial and patriarchal power continue to structure public institutions, even, and perhaps especially, under the banner of equity. This underscores the need to move beyond inclusion practices that reduce Aboriginal identity to symbolic presence or cultural celebration. As Bargallie, Fernando et al. (2023) argue, racial literacy demands that race be understood not as a surface identity to be recognised, but as a deeply embedded structure of institutional power. From this perspective, cultural inclusion alone is insufficient if it does not directly confront the systems of whiteness and colonial governance that continue to shape state institutions. Aboriginal women's narratives illuminate precisely this tension. While they are asked to perform cultural roles to advance institutional branding, the structural dynamics of racialised exclusion remain unchallenged. These refusals, to internalise harm, to perform institutional loyalty, or to silently carry the weight of exclusion, are not breakdowns in inclusion, but deliberate acts of resistance that expose its structural limits. Racial literacy, as framed in their testimony and theorised through Indigenist frameworks, emerges not only as critique, but as refusal, praxis and a call for epistemic realignment.

By taking Indigenist methodology seriously, this study has shown how relational, narrative-based research grounded in community accountability can produce not just data, but insight. The use of yarning and yarning circles revealed emotional, affective, and relational dimensions of workplace life that would have been invisible in traditional interviews. It also reaffirmed that knowledge is produced with participants, not extracted from them, a methodological commitment that mirrored the political stakes of the research itself.

Beyond the Bind: Rethinking Institutional Inclusion

This article does not argue that Aboriginal women should be included more ‘effectively’ within existing structures. Rather, it calls for a fundamental shift in how inclusion is understood and enacted. Inclusion that depends on silence, invisibility and emotional containment is not equity; it is assimilation by another name.

Calls to ‘decolonise’ or ‘Indigenise’ the public sector, have increasingly entered institutional discourse. However, as Bargallie, Fernando et al. caution, ‘Moves to “Indigenise” and “decolonise” workplaces must be disarticulated from metaphoric uses within white frames that normalise coloniality’ (Bargallie, Fernando, et al., 2023, p. 1536). In the context of this study, participants’ testimonies reveal how such moves often operate as performative gestures, hollowed of structural commitment and sustained by the institutional whiteness that normalises coloniality. What is framed as inclusion is frequently a mode of containment, where the presence of Aboriginal women is symbolic rather than transformative. Decolonisation, in this light, cannot be equated with cultural visibility or event-based recognition; it must entail epistemic, material and organisational reckoning with settler-colonial power.

To move beyond the bind requires more than policy reform or improved implementation. It demands a redefinition of institutional success, one not measured by visibility metrics or representation targets, but by the redistribution of voice, labour and leadership within public institutions. It also necessitates a transformation of complaint and accountability systems so that intersectional harm is recognised not as interpersonal conflict but as a structural manifestation of race and gender power. Additionally, there must be formal recognition of cultural labour as real, strategic work, embedded within roles through funding, time allocation and institutional protections, rather than treated as voluntary or symbolic. Crucially, this shift must centre Aboriginal women's epistemic authority: not as cultural advisers to existing agendas, but as leaders, theorists, and decision-makers with the power to shape the terms of change. This authority must be embedded in the core architecture of institutional governance, not appended to it.

Importantly, this does not mean more consultations, strategy documents, or performance indicators. It means recognising that equity cannot be achieved without relinquishing settler-colonial institutional control, and that true accountability to Aboriginal women requires material, procedural and epistemic transformation.

Conclusion

This article has shown how Aboriginal women's inclusion in public sector workplaces is governed not by empowerment, but by containment. Visibility is instrumentalised; labour is extracted; critique is rendered illegible. Equity is operationalised not to redistribute power, but to protect it. The double bind that Aboriginal women navigate − participation without protection, hypervisibility without authority − is not a flaw of implementation, but a function of settler-colonial design.

Aboriginal women's experiences reveal the paradox at the heart of inclusion without transformation: they are called upon to perform reconciliation, uphold cultural legitimacy, and embody the image of institutional progress, yet are denied decision-making power, epistemic authority and institutional safety. These are not incidental tensions or temporary oversights; they are the conditions under which conditional inclusion operates. In this sense, inclusion is less a pathway to equity than a technology of governance − a means by which settler institutions absorb Indigenous presence while neutralising its potential to transform. Through non-performative policy (Ahmed, 2012), white possessive logics (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), and complaint systems that discipline dissent, the public sector converts participation into compliance and visibility into institutional capital. What appears as opportunity is, in practice, a carefully managed containment. In this paradox, refusal to internalise harm, perform institutional loyalty, or remain silent in the face of betrayal becomes more than self-protection. It is a political and epistemic act that exposes the limits of the inclusion being offered.

What this article offers is not a roadmap for more ‘inclusive’ equity regimes, but a diagnosis of their logics. To take seriously what Aboriginal women have articulated as critique, theory, and refusal is to recognise that genuine transformation will not come from more consultations, improved metrics, or broader access to systems that are working exactly as designed to contain them. It will come from dismantling the very foundations that use equity as performance and governance as a benevolent façade masking control.

Refusal is not the opposite of inclusion; it is the blueprint for futures beyond it.