The sludge of assimilation

What an absurd time we’re living in!

This country’s obsession with assimilation is its greatest undoing.

A highly accomplished refugee advocate and lawyer is pushed out of her livelihood after being tokenised and unsupported by an institution. Facing profound racial fatigue and the compounding financial and mental toll of institutional betrayal, she is forced to launch a fundraiser to survive and recover.

In challenging the status quo, the public‘s knee-jerk reaction lands somewhere between moral ledger and cultural loyalty test. The message being sent: if you won’t assimilate, expect to be punished.

The irony of a country faced with a productivity and innovation crisis ‘making an example’ of a woman of colour who has spent her life demonstrating mastery in resilience, innovation and resourcefulness is absolutely not lost on me.

Grateful for my legacy

On my father’s side, I’m Noongar. Traditional owners who never needed permission to belong to this land. On my mother’s side, I come from multigenerational farmers, with my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother recorded in history as pioneers who took on harsh conditions for the benefit of Western Australians.

No one “assimilated” into some polite national story. They adapted, endured, and built in conditions that would break most modern corporate strategies. Their innovation wasn’t a buzzword; it was survival, sharpened by country, climate, and consequence.

This glorious inheritance has been my mandate to keep building in places others walk away from.

Innovation and productivity

The lived and practical experience, the academic discipline and the industry insights I have developed over the last two decades have convinced me that Black, Indigenous and Women of Colour (BIWOC) are a key innovation lever the world needs right now.

The typical harsh conditions faced over our lifetimes have equipped us with the exact skills innovation demands. Skills like:

Macro Risk Agility: Navigating hostile systems conditions an advanced “contextual intelligence” that allows BIWOC to spot hidden market threats and pivot fluidly under extreme structural uncertainty.

Institutional Fluency: A lifetime of bypassing rigid, exclusionary systems build an unparalleled capacity for non-obvious problem-solving, turning bureaucratic friction into tactical leverage.

Reciprocal Innovation: Rejecting purely linear, transactional Western frameworks to build circular business models that capture massive, overlooked market demographics by treating enterprise as an extension of community wealth.

Kinship Capital: Radical, hyper-efficient resourcefulness that transforms deep social networks and community trust into self-sustaining economic ecosystems, bypassing a broken venture capital market.

Skills that are well documented as critical for successful innovation and progress.

A nation in crisis

Articles, media releases, reports and submissions on Australia’s innovation and productivity crisis are in abundance. You’d have to be a pretty checked-out professional if you hadn’t read or heard about the significant investment and resources gap behind a national innovation and productivity crisis in this country.

The irony of a country that insists on cultural conformity while complaining about stagnant productivity cannot possibly be serious about innovation.

Innovation requires a specific skill set, as we’ve just established. What if instead of defaulting back to toxic measures that have long been proven to be ineffective, we started exploring and supporting other levers that could help the nation get back on track? It shouldn’t be a radical thought, yet here we are.

One of them might be to lean into the lived experience, strategic intelligence and sheer talent of BIWOC instead of treating them as a box to tick on a panel, in a campaign or the recruitment process. I’ve met too many who have confirmed the significant investment into the candidate attraction process only to be isolated and scapegoated not long after appointment. Maybe stop demanding that people “fit in” to broken systems and start asking what those systems would look like if they were designed by people who’ve had to innovate just to survive in them.

The powerhouse story of Nyadol Nyuon being reduced to exhaustion, institutional friction, and superficial questions of loyalty should read as a systemic failure instead of the scraping of the bottom of the barrel for clickbait it currently is in dominant media. The same systems that demand assimilation are the ones burning out the very people who could help reinvent them. Especially the systems facilitating an innovation and productivity crisis.

The scale being wilfully ignored

We are not talking about a niche. We are talking about an economic and cultural force: approximately 4 million (estimated from the ‘shock horror’ limited data) Black, Indigenous, and Women of Colour (BIWOC) currently living in Australia. Treating this demographic as invisible, a minority slice, is a domestic market failure.

To put a human scale on 4 million people in the Australian landscape, consider the cultural and financial institutions we aggressively fund and celebrate:

• The Global Event: 615 consecutive global conferences the size of Women Deliver 2026, an event of 6,500 women that injected an estimated $42 million into the Victorian economy in one week.

• The Stadium Capacity: 40 entirely sold-out, capacity-packed MCG stadiums.

• The Cultural Footprint: Nearly half the national membership base of the entire AFL, one of the largest cultural and sporting drivers in the country.

Australia is leaving a multi-billion-dollar capacity of its own innovators, builders, and leaders on the table.

While the United Kingdom aggressively deploys a £500 million targeted capital framework backing their diverse entrepreneurs, alongside initiatives like the Future 100 Growth Fund, while Australia deploys less than 0.03% of its venture capital funding to women of colour founders.

Levers, not scapegoats

Maybe, instead of pushing assimilation, we could invest in stewardship and co-design. Let BIWOC lead the redesign of workplaces, policies, and pathways. Let our “too direct” communication, our refusal to be “nice” for comfort’s sake, and our impatience with performative inclusion be the pressure that forces real change for the greater good. But invest in the right infrastructure that will support us to see it through and ensure maximum benefit instead of rehashing the ‘glass cliff’ phenomenon where, particularly, women of colour are appointed to leadership roles during times of crisis or tasked with fixing deeply entrenched institutional issues (like systemic workplace harassment) with inadequate structural support.

If Australia truly wants innovation, it must drop the loyalty test and start innovating by investing in those who have already proven they can build in the harshest conditions, conditions the rest of the country is only now beginning to feel.

An Australian of Nyadol’s calibre, along with the many others quietly building our future, deserves investment, backing, and adequate resources to support the complex, politically scrutinised, and emotionally taxing work they shoulder, often alone.

The lever is right in front of us. The question is whether we have the courage to pull it.

By Bec