The Australian Institutional Industrial Complex
“A Need for Action NOT Apologies”
By Holly Czinke
Lived Experience Matters Pty Ltd
The Social Sustainability Project
holly@livedexperiencematters.com
livedexperiencematters.comForward
Forward
This paper will not make many “Up There” comfortable. It is not meant to.
My lived experience has shown me — in ways no academic qualification ever could — how corruption and harm occur through the misuse of the very systems designed for “Down Here.” For generations, policies aimed at “managing” marginalised people have not only failed but have actively persecuted them, producing communities so traumatised that the laughter of children — once the heartbeat of any healthy neighbourhood — has all but disappeared.
We are human beings with the same rights as any neighbour across the street. We are not culturally different because we chose to be; we are culturally different because we have spent lifetimes negotiating systemic abuse, institutional control, and the legacy of colonial governance that continues to shape our reality. The persistent belief that excessive policing, intrusive surveillance, and punitive legislation are necessary reflects far more about the system’s failures than about our ability to change.
If you grow up never seeing a healthy relationship, how are you expected to build one?
If you are born into a village stripped of nurture, stripped of resources, stripped of hope — how are you expected to rise alone?
The expectation that anyone could simply “step up” from Down Here without genuine support is not merely unrealistic — it is cruel. It mirrors what the British did to the Chinese during the opium wars: create the conditions of collapse, then blame the people for falling.
Those of us who currently volunteer at The Social Sustainability Project come, ironically, from backgrounds often described as “privileged.” We either did not grow up Down Here, or we had parents who fought tirelessly to shield us from its harshest edges. I have spent 15 years interrogating my own journey, my community’s suffering, and how so many wrongs could have been allowed to continue. I hold what I call a lived-experience PhD in Australia’s social justice landscape.
Perhaps it is precisely because I never sought endorsement from traditional institutions that I developed the critical thinking and fearlessness required to speak our truth without apology.
Over the past three years I have walked, lived, and worked among the people most harmed by systemic policy failures — listening for the right voices and ensuring my perspective was shared by those living these realities every day. It has not been easy. Many times, I have been dismissed as a relentless, “crazy woman” for believing that change was possible, and that we might be granted a fair go.
But I refused to stop.
And I have done the work to prove to my community — my mob — that if we present a strong, united, evidence-based argument, we can and must be heard. This document, and the submissions it supports, are our collective step into the light: a plan for meaningful change beginning in Redfern and Waterloo, the symbolic and literal heart of Australia’s social justice struggle.
We have created a model capable of delivering the social sustainability, community wellbeing, and liveability envisioned in the OECD’s Sustainable Development Goals — not as rhetoric, but as lived reality for the City of Sydney and, we hope, far beyond.
To those reading this paper, I ask for something simple, yet profound:
Sit with what it means to be branded, criminalised, controlled, and denied opportunity for generation after generation — and still be expected to rise.
Allow that reflection to reach your conscience.
Let it trouble you.
Let it unsettle the narratives you have been taught.
Let it do the work guilt is meant to do: call you to action.
Walk with an open heart.
Stand with us, your fellow human beings.
Support our work not out of charity, but out of recognition — recognition of the injustice we have endured, the truth we are naming, and the change we are building with our own hands.
This is our call to you:
Help us return the Village to our communities.
Abstract
Australia’s institutional–industrial complex is a systemic configuration of government agencies, religious charities, corporate contractors, and bureaucratic instruments. It has evolved from colonial missions and state protection regimes into a self-perpetuating economy of marginalisation. Drawing from Indigenous perspectives and structural analysis, it critiques the commodification of social need and the administrative rebranding of colonial paternalism.
The analysis highlights persistent inequities in mental health, child protection, and community care systems—such as disproportionate out-of-home care placements, barriers to NDIS access, and criminalisation of distress—that reproduce colonial hierarchies and suppress opportunities for genuine community empowerment. At the centre of this problem is the systemic exclusion of lived experience—especially from those “down here,” who often hold deeper insight into the issues affecting their lives than policymakers or the public. These systems are culturally inappropriate, shaped by misconceptions and discriminatory narratives that criminalise and over-manage marginalised communities while denying them pathways out of disadvantage.
Acts of survivalism and neurodivergent responses to systemic trauma are misrepresented as dysfunction, while the voices of those most affected are dismissed. We want to work. We want a better life—to dream and grow beyond addiction and trauma. We are disenfranchised, not disengaged. The hope that existed after Mabo has faded. Activists are gone, and many land council leaders have been corrupted, enriching a few while the majority suffer. This divide has fractured the culture and eroded trust.
The systems that exist to manage all people down here—especially the Indigenous community—are unfair and discriminatory. We are continually used as political commodities to control and manipulate the middle. The truly bad actors in society are rarely held accountable, while we are criminalised and traumatised repeatedly. There are no industries or services run or owned by the people, and the few we do have are more often rorted by those at the top than structured to help those in need. Community members already provide essential care, yet are excluded from formalised care roles due to criminal records and systemic bias.
Public funds are misallocated, propping up agency profits, imported workers, and corrupt frameworks that harm us. Taxpayer money is siphoned into bureaucracy while we remain unsupported and unheard.
This is not merely a matter of policy refinement, but of moral and fiscal necessity: repairing the harms of colonisation demands not only dismantling the architectures that sustain them but rebuilding systems grounded in justice, sustainability, and Indigenous self-determination.
1. Introduction: Reframing Marginalisation, Knowledge, and the Mental Health Discourse
The institutional–industrial complex in Australia continues to dominate the nation’s social service architecture, encompassing an extensive network of state, corporate, and faith-based organisations embedded within bureaucratic regimes of compliance, governance, and performance measurement. This configuration systematically manages, rather than transforms, marginalisation. It operates through inherited colonial logics that delineate who is rendered visible, who is categorised as in need, and who remains excluded from genuine empowerment. Indigenous peoples, individuals experiencing poverty, homelessness, or administrative invisibility, and those navigating intersecting forms of trauma and institutional surveillance remain its primary subjects of management.
An emergent discourse—the so-called lived experience workforce—has recently gained prominence within policy, research, and service domains. It ostensibly centres the voices of those with experiential knowledge of mental distress, trauma, and systemic harm. Yet, the very institutional frameworks that profess to valorise lived experience often reproduce its marginalisation. The lived experience workforce has become increasingly professionalised, credentialised, and mediated through academic and bureaucratic filters that privilege intellectual abstraction over embodied understanding. For Indigenous peoples in particular, whose lived realities encompass both historical and ongoing structural dispossession, this form of inclusion often amounts to symbolic recognition without structural power.
Mental health, as a disciplinary formation, remains dominated by theoretical and clinical paradigms that prioritise diagnostic and risk-based epistemologies over relational, cultural, and community-grounded modes of knowing. When experiential and academic domains are brought into authentic dialogue, they have the potential to generate more holistic and contextually responsive approaches to wellbeing. However, institutional inertia and career preservation within established systems constrain such convergence. Professionals, bound by compliance regimes and dependent upon bureaucratic funding, rarely deviate from orthodoxy. The result is epistemic stagnation—where reform is continually theorised but rarely materialised, and inequities persist under the guise of innovation.
2. The Institutional–Industrial Complex in Australia: Architecture and Ideology
The Australian institutional–industrial complex extends far beyond the well-documented prison-industrial model, encompassing an intricate assemblage of governmental departments, private contractors, multinational IT and CRM corporations, faith-based welfare providers, and non-government organisations (NGOs) sustained by cyclical public procurement. This apparatus constitutes a self-reinforcing ecosystem in which social need is commodified and transformed into economic opportunity. In such a system, disadvantage becomes administratively valuable—an asset to be managed through successive funding rounds, audits, and evaluative reporting rather than eradicated.
At the centre of this architecture lie enduring church–state alliances. Historically instantiated through missions and protection boards, these partnerships have evolved into contemporary arrangements whereby religiously affiliated NGOs deliver publicly funded social services under the banner of “community-based care.” Despite nominal reforms, this configuration reproduces colonial hierarchies of moral authority and administrative control. Governance remains vested largely in non-Indigenous institutions, while Indigenous peoples continue to be positioned as subjects of intervention, not agents of design.
Modern iterations of this dynamic are expressed through managerialist doctrines: contractualism, risk aversion, and compliance culture. Within these frameworks, success is quantified through key performance indicators, output metrics, and quarterly financial acquittals—technocratic instruments that displace cultural, relational, and communal measures of wellbeing. What emerges is the illusion of accountability: systems appear effective because they produce data, yet they divert vast fiscal resources toward the preservation of bureaucracy itself rather than the transformation of social conditions.
3. Historical and Structural Continuities:
Church, State, and the Governance of the Margins
Australia’s welfare and community service systems are the modern inheritors of a durable church–state compact. Missions, protectionist regimes, and philanthropic charities historically exercised near-total regulation over Aboriginal life; today, analogous functions are executed via outsourced service contracts and institutional governance frameworks. The paternalism that once justified the “civilising” mission persists—refined through the administrative idioms of welfare management, public accountability, and “care.”
The genealogy of this system is inseparable from colonial law. Central to this history is the doctrine of terra nullius—a Latin term meaning 'land belonging to no one.' This legal fiction asserted that the Australian continent was uninhabited or uncivilised at the time of British arrival, disregarding the existence of over 250 sovereign First Nations with their own systems of governance, law, and custodianship of Country. By declaring the land empty of ownership, terra nullius provided the legal justification for British annexation without treaty or consent, nullifying Indigenous sovereignty and enabling the wholesale expropriation of land. Its effects were catastrophic: dispossession, forced displacement, and the establishment of missions and reserves that sought to control every facet of Aboriginal life.
This doctrine persisted in Australian jurisprudence until the 1992 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) decision, when the High Court finally repudiated terra nullius and recognised the existence of native title. Yet, despite its formal overturning, the underlying logic of terra nullius—the presumption that Indigenous authority can be superseded by the state—remains deeply embedded in the architecture of contemporary governance and social service delivery. This legacy also continues through modern legal and property frameworks, including church-linked Property Trust Acts and Crown land arrangements that retain the assumption of state supremacy over Indigenous land and resource management.
Many of the major faith-based institutions that were central to the mission era still hold substantial assets and community facilities under these trust instruments, reflecting the material continuity of terra nullius in property ownership and governance. For Indigenous organisations seeking to establish community-based services or economic enterprises, these trust frameworks can create structural barriers—restricting land access, constraining leasing arrangements, and limiting opportunities for genuine land return or economic autonomy. At the same time, Indigenous-led land management programs, native title bodies, and ranger initiatives have demonstrated the social and fiscal sustainability that arises when land and resources are governed according to traditional custodianship rather than bureaucratic control.
These examples underscore the enduring relevance of terra nullius and its modern iterations: they reveal that the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and social sustainability is not merely symbolic but fundamentally tied to questions of property, jurisdiction, and governance.
4. Property, Faith-Based Monopolies, and Fiscal Responsibility in Community Care
The interlocking relationship between property ownership, faith-based entities, and the provision of community-based care represents one of the most persistent and least scrutinised continuities of colonial governance. Much of the property currently occupied by major charitable and social service organisations was originally acquired under state sanction for the explicit purpose of public welfare. Over time, these assets have been consolidated into vast church-affiliated property trusts that continue to hold schools, hospitals, aged-care facilities, housing stock, and community service sites across the nation. These institutions often maintain ownership regardless of whether the funding and service provision come entirely from the public purse.
This arrangement is increasingly indefensible from both a fiscal and ethical standpoint. Property accumulated or maintained for the purpose of public care ought to be held in trust by the people—not by religious corporations whose presence in the social sector is itself a legacy of colonial paternalism. Faith-based monopolies in community care have enabled certain denominations to preserve material wealth and institutional influence long after their spiritual or moral authority within the broader society has waned.
In a secular democracy where individuals are entitled to freedom of belief, it is inappropriate for public welfare delivery to remain structurally dependent on organisations whose governance, employment practices, and cultural frameworks are rooted in specific religious doctrines. From a fiscal responsibility perspective, the continuation of church property trusts as custodians of public assets produces inefficiencies and inequities. Public funds directed to maintenance, leasing, or service contracts on church-owned properties effectively subsidise private religious wealth accumulation. The result is a distortion of accountability: assets built or sustained with taxpayer funds become private capital holdings rather than enduring community resources.
In addition, Indigenous and community-controlled organisations are often excluded from access to these facilities due to restrictive trust provisions, denominational gatekeeping, or inflated leasing costs. A sustainable and socially just alternative would involve the progressive transfer of property used for public care into publicly accountable or community-controlled trusts. Such reform would honour the principle that assets created for collective wellbeing must remain in collective hands. It would also redress a key structural imbalance of the institutional–industrial complex—its persistent conflation of moral authority, property control, and state funding under the guise of benevolence. Decoupling faith-based institutions from the ownership and administration of public care infrastructure is therefore not merely a question of equity or efficiency; it is a prerequisite for both fiscal integrity and genuine social sustainability.
5. Corruption, Misallocation, and the Erosion of Community Empowerment
Although legislative and financial mechanisms have been established to support Indigenous advancement, many have been corrupted, mismanaged, or co-opted. Funds and resources ostensibly designated for the betterment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have too often been diverted through opaque administrative channels or appropriated by non-Indigenous intermediaries. In practice, this has enabled a pattern whereby non-Indigenous actors seek out Indigenous figures willing to serve as silent partners or symbolic representatives, while decision-making power and profit remain concentrated in white institutions and corporate structures.
This dynamic reproduces colonial hierarchies under a modern façade of inclusion. It simultaneously fosters internal community tension by selectively advancing a small cohort of individuals while leaving the majority excluded from genuine economic participation. The uneven distribution of opportunity perpetuates cycles of mistrust, intra-community conflict, and disillusionment with external initiatives that purport to serve Indigenous empowerment.
Post-Mabo reforms were intended to mark a turning point, creating pathways for land restitution, economic participation, and self-determination. Yet in practice, much of the financial capital generated through native title settlements and related mechanisms has failed to reach communities in a manner that fosters sustainable local development. The combination of bureaucratic complexity, external control, and occasional corruption has deepened disadvantage rather than alleviating it.
The consequences are visible: entrenched poverty, rising substance dependence, persistent trauma, and ongoing over-representation of Indigenous children within the criminal justice and child protection systems—an indictment of a nation that continues to incarcerate ten-year-olds, most of whom are Indigenous. The policy emphasis must therefore shift from managing disadvantage to cultivating community-owned industry.
Genuine empowerment requires investment in enterprises that are collectively owned and directed by Indigenous communities, providing meaningful employment within culturally safe and trauma-informed environments. Such initiatives must prioritise inclusivity for those most systemically marginalised or neurodivergent, enabling them to participate in dignified work that aligns with community values and cultural identity.
To achieve this, fiscal and administrative reform must ensure transparency, accountability, and local control. Wealth and property generated for the public good or through Indigenous settlements should remain under community stewardship, not external trusteeship. The reorientation of policy from extraction to co-creation—anchored in collective ownership, skill development, and self-directed growth—is essential if Australia is to redress the compounded harm of intentional neglect, corruption, and bureaucratic exploitation that has defined the post-colonial era.
6. Historical Parallels:
Imperial Exploitation, Religious Coercion, and Systemic DARVO
The British Empire’s use of religious authority, substance proliferation, and coerced "civilising missions" as instruments of control has deep historical resonance in Australia. Across colonies, the Crown and church worked in tandem to consolidate land, suppress resistance, and secure trade routes. Alcohol, opium, and other intoxicants were deployed as mechanisms of dependency and social disruption, softening resistance to dispossession and creating manufactured crises that justified further intervention. Religion served as both a moral cover and a disciplinary tool—offering “salvation” in exchange for submission, while legitimising economic extraction and cultural erasure.
This historical pattern continues in more subtle forms through the moral economies of contemporary welfare, justice, and child protection systems. Indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups experience a form of systemic DARVO—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender—in which their legitimate grievances are reframed as pathology or dysfunction. The state denies structural culpability, attacks through punitive interventions, and reverses roles by presenting itself as saviour of the very populations it harms.
Such mechanisms perpetuate cycles of dependency, surveillance, and criminalisation, particularly evident in the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in state care and detention. Despite a robust evidence base demonstrating the social determinants of violence, poverty, and child protection involvement, investment continues to flow into punitive and reactive systems rather than into prevention or empowerment.
Research has long established the efficacy of community-based, culturally led initiatives in reducing family violence, strengthening kinship networks, and improving health and education outcomes. Yet, these programs remain chronically underfunded or treated as peripheral "pilot" projects. The institutional preference for top-down control perpetuates inefficiency, fiscal waste, and moral hypocrisy.
7. Toward Authentic Sustainability and Transformative Industry
Addressing these failures requires a paradigm shift from management to empowerment, from control to collaboration. Within the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Australia’s current trajectory falls short on both social and environmental sustainability. True alignment with the SDGs necessitates a reorientation of resources toward self-determined, community-owned industries capable of generating dignified livelihoods while healing social and ecological systems.
The potential for transformation lies in sectors that integrate cultural continuity, environmental stewardship, and economic participation. Indigenous-led enterprises in urban food production, regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, and land restoration exemplify this intersection. These industries provide opportunities for trauma-informed, culturally grounded employment—spaces where those most marginalised, including neurodivergent and systemically traumatised individuals, can engage in meaningful work.
A compelling example of this reimagining is the proposal to transition from punitive incarceration models to restorative economic frameworks—shifting from prison cells to working farms. By offering full-wage employment, education, and skill development on community or state-supported agricultural enterprises, individuals can reintegrate as contributors rather than perpetual dependents of the justice system.
The economic rationale is incontrovertible: one-third of the New South Wales state budget—approximately $36 million annually—is consumed by the criminalisation and removal of children representing less than five percent of the population. This expenditure is neither socially just nor fiscally responsible. Redirecting even a fraction of these funds toward community-led employment and education initiatives would yield profound returns in productivity, cohesion, and long-term wellbeing.
Authentic social sustainability demands transparency, redistribution, and collective governance. The reclamation of public purpose from private interest, and of cultural authority from institutional paternalism, is essential. By empowering Indigenous communities to own and operate the industries that shape their futures, Australia can begin to reverse its historical trajectory—from exploitation to equity, from symbolic reconciliation to structural transformation.8. Conclusion: Returning Power, Redefining Systems
The examination of Australia’s institutional–industrial complex reveals a deeply embedded framework of governance, care, and control that continues to marginalise, surveil, and exploit those it claims to support. Rooted in colonial logics and sustained through bureaucratic inertia, faith-based monopolies, and politically convenient narratives, this system has reproduced intergenerational trauma, disempowerment, and economic exclusion—especially for Indigenous communities and the structurally disadvantaged.
The persistent absence of culturally safe, community-led, and trauma-informed systems has not only perpetuated harm but squandered public funds in service of institutional survival rather than community wellbeing. A disproportionate share of national resources continues to be absorbed by policing, incarceration, and managerialism, while lived experience voices—those best placed to reimagine solutions—are silenced or tokenised.
If Australia is to honour its commitments to justice, sustainability, and reconciliation, we must dismantle the architectures of managed inequality and reconfigure them into platforms for collective agency, transparency, and economic self-determination. This requires not incremental reform, but structural transformation: the redistribution of power, the return of assets and authority to communities, and the re-establishment of trust through authentic co-governance.
The challenge is not technical. It is moral, political, and urgent. The nation has the capacity, resources, and knowledge to pursue a socially sustainable future—it must now summon the courage to enact it.
References
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2023). *Child protection Australia 2021–22*. [https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/child-protection/child-protection-australia-2021-22](https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/child-protection/child-protection-australia-2021-22)
2. Productivity Commission. (2020). *Indigenous Evaluation Strategy*. [https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/indigenous-evaluation/strategy](https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/indigenous-evaluation/strategy)
3. Cunneen, C. (2020). *The criminalisation of Indigenous peoples in Australia*. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology.
4. Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. (2017). *Final Report*.
5. Grant, E., Parter, C., & Fogarty, W. (2018). *The Royal Commission and the cultural determinants of health*. Medical Journal of Australia, 209(5), 201-202.
6. Bielefeld, S. (2021). *Indigenous self-determination and neoliberal assimilation*. Australian Indigenous Law Review, 24(1), 3–23.
7. Davis, M. (2022). *Voice, Treaty, Truth: Steps toward justice*. In M. Davis & G. Williams (Eds.), *Everything you need to know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart*.
8. Sullivan, E. (2019). *Faith-based organisations and public accountability: The case of Australia*. International Journal of Public Administration, 42(7), 579–588.
9. United Nations. (2015). *Sustainable Development Goals*. [https://sdgs.un.org/goals](https://sdgs.un.org/goals)
10. Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee. (2022). *Missing and murdered First Nations women and children: Interim report*.
11. Dodson, M. (1994). *The Wentworth Lecture: The end in the beginning—re(de)finding Aboriginality*. Australian Aboriginal Studies, (1), 2–13.
12. Australian Human Rights Commission. (2017). *Bringing them home 20 years on*. [https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications/bringing-them-home](https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications/bringing-them-home)
13. Productivity Commission. (2023). *Report on Government Services 2023: Justice*. [https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/report-on-government-services/2023/justice](https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/report-on-government-services/2023/justice)
14. Australian Law Reform Commission. (2017). *Pathways to Justice—Inquiry into the incarceration rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples* (ALRC Report 133).
15. City of Sydney. (2020). *Sustainable Sydney 2030–2050: Continuing the Vision*. [https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/strategies-action-plans/sustainable-sydney-2030-2050](https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/strategies-action-plans/sustainable-sydney-2030-2050)