In our recent article, “Australian racial capitalism, Indigenous exploitation and the racial regime of recognition and reconciliation” (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2025), my co‑authors Alana Lentin, Kieron Turner and I examine what the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum reveals about race, labour, and power in Australia.
Rather than treating the referendum as an isolated political failure, we approach it as a moment that exposes the enduring structure of Australian racial capitalism: a system built on Indigenous dispossession and labour exploitation, yet sustained through narratives of recognition, reconciliation, and inclusion that obscure these foundations.
Our central argument is that the Voice debate—like earlier reconciliation projects—operated as a racial regime: a dynamic assemblage of discourses, policies, and institutions that manage Indigenous demands while leaving settler colonial capitalism intact.
What the referendum debate made invisible
In the lead‑up to the referendum, the public conversation was dominated by fear‑mongering claims that the Voice would enable land confiscation or grant Indigenous people special powers. In response, proponents of the Voice sought to reassure non‑Indigenous voters that it would do none of these things. The Voice, they insisted, was purely advisory and would not threaten existing property relations.
While factually accurate, this reassurance had a deeper political effect: it foreclosed discussion of material redress altogether. The question of how Australian prosperity has been built on Indigenous dispossession and labour exploitation—past and present—was largely absent from mainstream debate.
This absence matters. Australian colonialism did not rely solely on the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. It also depended on their systematic exploitation as workers: as enslaved, indentured, unpaid, or underpaid labour across pastoral, domestic, agricultural, pearling, and plantation industries well into the twentieth century. These histories sit uneasily with Australia’s national self‑image and are therefore routinely denied, minimised, or rendered invisible.
The persistent claim that “there was no slavery in Australia” is not simply a historical error. It is a political move that protects the legitimacy of settler colonial capitalism by severing race from exploitation.
Racial capitalism and racial regimes
To analyse this dynamic, we draw on Cedric J. Robinson’s theorisation of racial capitalism, which insists that capitalism has always been racial in its organisation. Race is not an accidental distortion of an otherwise neutral economic system; it is one of the primary means through which exploitation, dispossession, and hierarchy are organised and justified.
Robinson also introduces the concept of racial regimes: unstable but powerful systems of meaning that legitimate racial domination by presenting it as natural, inevitable, or already resolved. Racial regimes adapt over time, recalibrating in response to resistance while preserving underlying relations of power.
We argue that in contemporary Australia, recognition and reconciliation function as a racial regime. They promise inclusion and progress while displacing demands for land, sovereignty, reparations, and an end to exploitation. In this sense, the Voice was not a break from earlier recognition projects but part of a longer trajectory through which Indigenous demands are reshaped to fit settler political and economic priorities.
Indigenous labour and the myth of inclusion
One of the key sites where this racial regime operates today is the workplace. Indigenous inclusion is increasingly framed in terms of representation: Indigenous leaders, mentoring programs, Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs), and diversity initiatives.
Drawing on my long‑standing research on racism in employment, we show how these initiatives often function symbolically rather than structurally. Indigenous workers remain concentrated in lower‑paid and insecure roles. Indigenous leaders are frequently isolated, under‑resourced, and burdened with the expectation that their presence alone signals institutional transformation. Indigenous women, in particular, carry disproportionate loads of unpaid cultural and emotional labour.
Mentoring programs commonly individualise responsibility for “overcoming disadvantage”, placing the burden of change on Indigenous workers rather than addressing organisational racism. RAPs, meanwhile, frequently operate as non‑performative gestures: their existence is taken as evidence of non‑racism, even as systemic inequalities persist.
In this way, Indigenous employment is framed as a pathway out of disadvantage for individuals, while the broader structure of racial capitalism—built on land theft, labour exploitation, and extraction—remains untouched.
The Gurindji walk‑off and the inseparability of land and labour
To underscore what is lost when labour is detached from land and sovereignty, we return to the 1966 Gurindji walk‑off. Commonly remembered as a strike for equal wages, the walk‑off was, as Gurindji elders have consistently explained, a struggle for land, autonomy, and self‑determination.
The demand for wages was strategic—it was legible to white Australia and capable of attracting broader support. But the walk‑off itself was a refusal of settler authority and a collective assertion of Indigenous sovereignty. It reminds us that for Indigenous peoples, struggles against exploitation have always been inseparable from struggles for land and decolonisation.
Beyond recognition
The failure of the Voice referendum should not be read simply as a failure of messaging or political will. It should be understood as a moment that reveals the limits of recognition within a settler colonial capitalist system.
Recognition without redistribution, and inclusion without decolonisation, cannot deliver justice. If we are serious about addressing Indigenous inequality, we must confront the material foundations of Australian racial capitalism: the ongoing extraction of Indigenous lands, the racialised organisation of labour, and the institutions that continue to manage Indigenous life without Indigenous sovereignty.
Our hope is that this work contributes to a more honest reckoning with Australian history and present—and strengthens conversations about what meaningful decolonisation might require.
Bargallie, D., Lentin, A. & Turner, K. (2025). Australian racial capitalism, Indigenous exploitation and the racial regime of recognition and reconciliation. Ethnic and Racial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2570475
Access our full paper (PDF) here: Australian racial capitalism, Indigenous exploitation and the racial regime of recognition and reconciliation