Russell Buzby

A new national survey is asking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who work and volunteer in Australia’s emergency services to describe something the sector has rarely measured: the cultural load they carry on top of the job itself. Led by Monash University’s National Indigenous Disaster Resilience program and announced in late June, the survey puts a name to that load, the colonial load (Natural Hazards Research Australia, 2026a). The term captures the cumulative burden of operating inside institutions that were built without Indigenous governance and knowledge, and at times against them. It is worth being precise about why this is a capability question and not a wellbeing footnote.

Most inclusion efforts in large institutions follow a recognisable shape. The organisation recruits people from the community it wants to serve, asks them to build trust, interpret culture and carry relationships the institution cannot manage on its own, and then leaves the actual decision rights where they have always been. Those new responsibilities are real, and they are added on top of the substantive job. What does not come with them is the authority to shape how the work is done. The colonial load is the predictable result of that asymmetry, and it explains why so many inclusion initiatives generate exhaustion and turnover instead of the durable change they promised. They distribute responsibility without redistributing authority.

The international research points to authority as the variable that matters. A study of Indigenous wildfire management published in June examined how Secwepemc Nation communities in British Columbia acted during wildfire response, and found them doing two things at once: resisting the authority of external experts, and asserting their own technical expertise where it was stronger than the agencies’ (Environmental Science & Policy, 2026). The authors’ conclusion is the one that should travel. Genuine collaborative governance is undermined wherever power and knowledge inequities persist, and Indigenous peoples have to hold meaningful decision-making authority rather than serving as consultees inside processes that agencies still control. Consultation that gathers Indigenous knowledge while leaving Indigenous people no say over how it is used is extraction with better manners, whatever it is called.

The gap between partnership in principle and authority in practice is not confined to agencies, which is part of what makes it stubborn. A factorial survey of public attitudes in western Canada found that people readily recognised Indigenous communities as key partners in fire management, and grew markedly less comfortable when asked to endorse direct Indigenous management of wildfires (Public attitudes to Indigenous fire stewardship, 2026). That gap is the colonial load expressed as public opinion. The community is welcomed as a partner and held at arm’s length from control, and the people sitting in the gap are the ones asked to carry both the cultural knowledge and the institutional disappointment when it changes nothing.

If authority is the variable, then accountability for shifting it is the missing instrument, and here there is at least a start. A Disaster Preparedness Scorecard, developed to evaluate how well emergency-management agencies meet their commitments to engage Indigenous peoples before disasters under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, makes the question measurable for the first time (Disaster Preparedness Scorecard, 2026). Whether an agency’s inclusion work actually moves decision rights, or simply adds load, stops being a matter of assertion once someone is scoring it. The value of a measure like that is the value of any honest metric. It makes it harder to claim credit for engagement that has not changed who decides.

None of this asymmetry is new, and it helps to see how old the structure actually is. In 1847 the colonial administration in Western Australia issued an ordinance that suppressed Noongar cultural burning, overriding a fire-management practice refined over a very long time and replacing it with the judgement of an administration that then proved unable to manage the country it had taken authority over. I have written separately about that ordinance in the context of prescribed and cultural burning, and the through-line to the present is direct. The colonial load is what it feels like, today, to work inside institutions still carrying the assumption that animated that ordinance, that Indigenous knowledge is a resource to be drawn on while Indigenous authority is a risk to be managed.

The cost of that assumption is not borne only by the people carrying the load. It shows up in fire outcomes. I have written about the quantitative case for restoring Indigenous fire management, where the disparity between cultural burning and the suppression-first model that displaced it runs to multiples, not margins. Put the two arguments together and the shape is clear. The same institutional reflex that overrides Indigenous authority on the fireground also overloads the Indigenous staff and volunteers inside the agencies, and it forfeits the capability they bring on both counts. Treating First Nations leadership as a wellbeing matter rather than a capability one misreads what is being lost.

This is where the distinction between representation and authority earns its keep. The Natural Hazards Research Forum in Adelaide in late June, framed around leading to impact, made a point of including First Nations representatives among its four hundred-odd participants, and representation of that kind is necessary (Natural Hazards Research Australia, 2026b). It is also not sufficient, because a seat in the room is not the same as a say over the decision, and the colonial load is precisely the weight of having the first without the second. For anyone advising government on organisational change, that distinction is a usefully sharp diagnostic. When an inclusion initiative is failing, the useful question is rarely whether the right people are represented, but whether their representation was ever allowed to become authority.

The emergency-management sector is a hard test case, and a fair one, because the stakes do not allow for euphemism. Lives, property and country depend on whether several knowledge systems can actually work together when a fire is running, and that cooperation fails whenever one system is invited to contribute and denied the authority to direct. The colonial load is the bill for inclusion without authority, and it is being paid right now in the burnout and turnover of the very people the sector says it wants to keep. An organisation can keep paying that bill, or it can do the harder thing the research keeps pointing to and move some decision rights. Real inclusion comes down to one thing, the say it grants over the decision that matters, and by that measure the sector still has a long way to travel.

References

Disaster Preparedness Scorecard: Closing the gap in emergency management. (2026). https://doi.org/10.26180/31610536

Public attitudes to forest disturbance and Indigenous fire stewardship: A factorial survey experiment in western Canada. (2026).

Natural Hazards Research Australia. (2026a, June 22). New survey investigates First Nations experiences in emergency management to improve leadership, representation and wellbeing.

Natural Hazards Research Australia. (2026b, June 24). Leading to impact: NHRF26.

The politics and co-production of knowledge in Indigenous wildfire management. (2026). Environmental Science & Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104424