Performing equity, preserving power: the double bind for Aboriginal Australian women in public sector workplaces

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.