Glossary of Terms
Aboriginal Sovereignty: The inherent right of Aboriginal peoples to self-governance, land ownership, and cultural continuity grounded in pre-existing law and custom prior to colonisation.
CEA (Coast Environmental Alliance): A non-Indigenous environmental activist group implicated in obstructing legitimate Aboriginal governance and spreading conspiracist narratives under the guise of eco-activism.
Cultural Fraud: The appropriation of Indigenous identity or authority without community recognition, genealogical legitimacy, or lawful standing.
Custodianship: An Indigenous epistemological and ontological concept referring to a sacred responsibility and relationship with Country that includes care, respect, knowledge transmission, and intergenerational stewardship.
GuriNgai: A self-identified group lacking legitimate cultural recognition, whose claims to Aboriginal identity have been publicly refuted by recognised Aboriginal Land Councils and community leaders.
LALC (Local Aboriginal Land Council): Statutory Aboriginal organisations under the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 empowered to represent community interests, manage land claims, and engage in development and environmental planning.
Settler Magical Thinking: A belief system characterised by aestheticised spirituality, intuitionism, and pseudohistorical narratives that displace Indigenous epistemology while legitimising settler fantasies of belonging.
Settler Simulation: The reproduction of Indigenous cultural authority by non-Indigenous actors through performative, fraudulent, or aestheticised mimicry.
Sovereign Citizen Movement: A conspiratorial, anti-government ideology whose adherents reject state authority, often intersecting with anti-vaccination, white nationalist, and spiritualist fringe beliefs.
Spiritual Populism: A rhetoric that positions individuals or movements as spiritually ‘chosen’ or enlightened, often used to legitimise anti-scientific, anti-democratic, and culturally appropriative practices.
White Possessiveness: A concept developed by Aileen Moreton-Robinson describing how settler colonial society asserts ownership over land, culture, and identity as a mode of dominance and exclusion.
Introduction: Housing Justice and the Crisis of Custodianship on the Central Coast
The Central Coast of New South Wales is experiencing an acute and accelerating housing crisis. Rising rents, stagnant wages, and intensifying climate risks have placed immense strain on the region’s residents, particularly Aboriginal communities. Yet while public discourse often frames the crisis in economic or bureaucratic terms, this report contends that a deeper, settler-colonial logic underpins the region’s housing gridlock. The crisis is not merely mismanaged but manufactured: shaped by a confluence of settler resistance to Aboriginal land governance, the weaponisation of environmental aesthetics, and the circulation of pseudo-Indigenous identities that obscure legitimate cultural authority.
At the centre of this phenomenon are individuals and organisations performing a settler simulation; mimicking the appearance of cultural custodianship to advance agendas that ultimately undermine both Aboriginal sovereignty and the collective good. These simulations operate through a blend of magical thinking, cultic charisma, and conspiracist populism. Key actors include the so-called “GuriNgai” group, the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), and public figures such as Jake Cassar, who fuse apocalyptic survivalism, environmental rhetoric, and settler spirituality into a potent anti-Aboriginal discourse.
Their influence is not confined to fringe communities. Local councils, media outlets, and political figures have lent legitimacy to these actors by granting consultation status, project influence, and public platforms. In the process, Aboriginal Land Councils such as Darkinjung and Metropolitan LALCs have faced coordinated obstruction: their housing proposals delayed or defeated by a settler-led aesthetic of protest disguised as heritage defence. This manipulation of cultural and environmental narratives has stymied development, misled communities, and perpetuated structural inequality.
Only by revealing and dismantling the simulation can the region move toward justice, truth-telling, and lawful custodianship.
Chapter 1: Settler Cultism and Charismatic Fraud on the Central Coast
This chapter investigates how settler actors such as Jake Cassar and Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) utilise charismatic leadership, apocalyptic prepping culture, and pseudo-Indigenous alliances to destabilise legitimate Aboriginal governance across the Central Coast. Cassar, an influential figure whose persona fuses bushcraft survivalism with conspiracist spirituality, represents a new archetype of settler cult leadership: one that blends settler magical thinking with settler environmentalism and antagonism to Aboriginal sovereignty.
Cassar’s strategy revolves around themes of societal collapse, ecological disaster, and spiritual warfare. His pedagogy, heavily infused with hypermasculine survivalism, transforms Country into a theatre of settler endurance. This sharply contrasts with Indigenous pedagogies grounded in reciprocity and cultural continuity (Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Yunkaporta, 2020).
Drawing on cultic control literature, Cassar’s methods align closely with characteristics outlined by Singer (2003), Coco (2023), and Zablocki (2001): authoritarian leadership, us-versus-them worldviews, emotional manipulation, and performance-based loyalty. Public bushcraft events double as ritualised performances of spiritual combat, reinforcing dependency on his leadership and deterring institutional trust.
CEA, as Cassar’s organisational vehicle, operationalises these strategies in the realm of environmental politics. Through campaigns such as “Save Kincumber Wetlands” and “Save Kariong Sacred Lands,” Cassar collaborates with non-Aboriginal individuals falsely claiming cultural authority, like those identifying as “GuriNgai.” These campaigns present settler-led narratives as Indigenous custodianship while rejecting authentic community voices and Aboriginal land councils (Cooke, 2025; Guringai.org, 2025).
Such actions mirror Ferretti’s (2023) analysis of conspirituality, where ecological concern and anti-institutional paranoia converge. Cassar’s network taps into these affective circuits, using platforms like social media, TikTok, and community rallies to perform an eco-spiritual insurgency that cloaks settler interests in anti-colonial aesthetics.
This pattern exemplifies Moreton-Robinson’s (2015) “white possessiveness”: settler efforts to appropriate land, culture, and custodianship by reimagining themselves as its defenders. Through this inversion, Cassar and CEA function not as conservationists, but as agents of dispossession, reinforcing white authority by neutralising Aboriginal governance.
Chapter 2: The ‘Save Kincumber Wetlands’ Simulation and the Aesthetic of Sabotage
This chapter examines how the “Save Kincumber Wetlands” campaign, led by the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) and affiliated pseudo-Indigenous activists, functions as a settler simulation that obstructs Aboriginal-led housing initiatives while appealing to aestheticised environmental concern. The wetlands, located within lands under custodianship and governance of the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council (DLALC), have become a symbolic battleground where settler fantasies of preservation collide with the reality of Indigenous land rights.
CEA’s campaign against proposed DLALC developments on the site invokes tropes of environmental destruction, sacred land desecration, and spiritual warfare. Yet these narratives are not grounded in authentic Aboriginal custodianship. Instead, they rely on self-appointed “custodians” and discredited spiritualist rhetoric, including pseudoarchaeological claims and settler reimaginings of Aboriginal cosmology (Cooke, 2025; Bungaree.org, 2025). Jake Cassar and his associates draw heavily from fringe beliefs, presenting themselves as aligned with “ancient truths” while actively undermining legitimate cultural governance.
Media coverage of the “Save Kincumber Wetlands” campaign frequently foregrounds dramatic imagery, placards, vigils, and spiritual ceremonies, while excluding the voices of DLALC representatives and Elders. This aesthetic strategy, common to settler sabotage movements, centres settler affect and eco-anxiety while erasing the structural context: the ongoing dispossession of Aboriginal people and the bureaucratic hurdles to land restitution (Darnett, 2025; AIATSIS, 2023).
Cassar’s rhetoric frames DLALC as a “corporate developer,” a move that delegitimises its legal status and moral authority as an Aboriginal organisation (Guringai.org, 2025). This language reproduces colonial tropes of the “inauthentic native” and casts legitimate governance structures as sellouts to capitalism, thereby obscuring the broader policy frameworks of land rights, restitution, and cultural resurgence.
By transforming legitimate land development into a spiritual and environmental crisis, the campaign mobilises settler publics through emotion, fear, and spectacle. It aligns with what Watego (2021) calls “the aesthetics of colonial grief,” where settler responses to perceived loss are prioritised over the lived realities of Aboriginal dispossession and the possibilities of Indigenous futures.
The chapter demonstrates how “Save Kincumber Wetlands” is not an environmental justice movement, but a settler-led simulation. It serves to delay housing solutions, miseducate the public, and bolster the influence of actors with no cultural legitimacy. In doing so, it exemplifies the need for identity verification, culturally-informed media protocols, and decolonised environmental governance.
Chapter 3: Why Undermining Local Aboriginal Land Councils Contributes to the Climate Catastrophe
The global climate emergency demands urgent and systemic change across governance, land use, and energy generation. In Australia, Local Aboriginal Land Councils (LALCs) have emerged as key actors in facilitating climate resilience and energy transition through their unique statutory authority, cultural stewardship, and land-based knowledge systems.
As outlined in the Australian Public Policy Institute’s Powershift paper, the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 provides LALCs with a mandate that includes land acquisition, development, and environmental planning, positioning them as potentially transformative players in Australia’s renewable energy future (APPI, 2025, pp. 7–8).
Yet, as this paper argues, the systematic undermining of LALCs by settler pseudo-Indigenous groups, conspiracy-driven environmentalists, and alt-right populists does not simply threaten Aboriginal sovereignty. It actively obstructs climate solutions and worsens ecological degradation. The actions of figures such as Jake Cassar, Lisa Bellamy, and Kate Mason, together with their organisation, Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), must be understood not as isolated anti-development sentiments but as manifestations of a broader settler-conspiritualist movement that is both anti-Indigenous and anti-climate.
Aboriginal Land Councils as Agents of Climate Justice
The governance and development capacities of LALCs enable them to lead projects that both reduce emissions and empower communities. As noted by researchers at UNSW (2025), the scale and location of LALC-owned land align closely with areas identified as suitable for renewable energy zones (REZs) across NSW. These lands are often geographically proximate to transmission lines, solar access corridors, and wind corridors. More significantly, projects undertaken on Aboriginal land are not merely technical transitions, but culturally grounded acts of repair, justice, and future-making (UNSW, 2025).
The Conversation (2025) similarly highlights that First Nations landholders, including LALCs, are uniquely positioned to benefit from, and lead, the clean energy revolution. Their involvement ensures the energy transition avoids replicating colonial patterns of extraction and exclusion. LALCs can use leasehold agreements, partnerships with clean energy providers, and culturally appropriate governance models to ensure that energy infrastructure is installed with consent, consultation, and co-benefit (The Conversation, 2025). The Powershift paper explicitly warns that failing to include LALCs in energy transition planning will not only reproduce injustice but squander critical opportunities for climate innovation (APPI, 2025, p. 12).
Settler Environmentalism, Cultural Fraud, and the Obstruction of Climate Action
The potential of LALC-led development has come under sustained attack from settler-activist networks that claim Aboriginal identity, spiritual connection, and/or ecological custodianship without legal or cultural legitimacy. The GuriNgai group, frequently associated with CEA, has been publicly disavowed by Metropolitan and Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Councils, who assert that these individuals are not descendants of Bungaree or any recognised Garigal people (MLALC, 2020; DLALC, 2022). These identity claims have been used to contest Aboriginal-led developments and assert unauthorised control over land and heritage sites.
Coast Environmental Alliance has repeatedly positioned itself against LALC initiatives by claiming that developments on Aboriginal land destroy ‘sacred lands’ or threaten the spiritual ecology of the Central Coast. However, CEA campaigns rarely include actual expertise, Aboriginal voices or cultural authorities. Their leadership consists overwhelmingly of non-Aboriginal individuals with links to conspiracy theories, climate denialism, and anti-renewable rhetoric. As demonstrated in the qualitative content analysis of over 200 CEA Facebook posts (Guringai.org, 2025), the group has shown consistent opposition to renewable infrastructure, Aboriginal housing developments, and biodiversity offsetting, despite purporting to support environmental justice.
Jake Cassar’s public statements and bushcraft activism have included opposition to the Kariong development (led by DLALC), Lizard Rock (Patyegarang, led by Metro LALC), and a potential project at Kincumber (led by DLALC). Cassar’s narratives regularly invoke the sacredness of trees, rocks, or waterways, but are silent on legal Aboriginal authority. His rhetoric merges settler ecological spirituality with sovereign citizen tropes, framing Aboriginal councils as “corporate developers” while ignoring the colonial origins of his own legitimacy crisis (Taplin, 2023).
Kate Mason, meanwhile, leads Community Voice Australia and is involved in My Place Central Coast, both groups that share ideological overlap with COVID-19 denial, sovereign citizen movements, and climate conspiracy narratives. These groups reproduce what Taplin (2023) and Walker (2023) describe as “superconspiracies”: ideologically dense and emotionally charged narratives that merge spiritual warfare, climate denialism, white possession, and hostility to Indigenous rights.
Undermining LALCs = Undermining Climate Transition
The systematic undermining of LALCs by these groups contributes directly to the climate catastrophe in several ways. First, it delays or prevents the development of renewable energy projects on Aboriginal land, particularly in REZs that are critical to NSW’s emissions reduction targets. Second, it delegitimises Aboriginal-led ecological planning and fire management, which have historically maintained biodiversity and carbon sinks. Third, it reframes Aboriginal governance as a threat to the environment, thereby shifting public support away from lawful climate-aligned development and toward reactionary settler populism.
The APPI Powershift report emphasises that “Aboriginal land must not be treated as a battleground for the culture wars of settler politics” (APPI, 2025, p. 15). Yet this is precisely what CEA and its affiliates have done, turning cultural fraud, anti-renewable disinformation, and spiritual populism into weapons of territorial disruption. The result is a landscape of epistemic and ecological violence: truth is displaced by conspiracy, Aboriginal custodianship is replaced by settler performance, and climate adaptation is stalled under the guise of saving trees.
Climate Truth Demands Cultural Truth
The climate crisis requires not only scientific literacy and policy reform but also the decolonisation of land governance and the restoration of Indigenous authority. LALCs embody a model of environmental stewardship that is holistic, lawful, and climate-aligned. Their marginalisation by settler-environmentalist imposters like CEA is not a minor distraction, it is a structural impediment to climate justice.
It is no coincidence when those who reject Aboriginal sovereignty also reject climate science. In their refusal to acknowledge both Indigenous legitimacy and environmental reality, they reveal the settler colonial logic that binds identity fraud, ecological sabotage, and climate denialism into a single reactionary project. The only way forward is to reaffirm and resource LALC leadership in climate planning, and to hold accountable those who exploit Aboriginal identity and environmental discourse for settler agendas.
Chapter 4: Settler Spirituality and the Cult of Jake Cassar
Jake Cassar, founder of the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) and the public face of Jake Cassar Bushcraft, exemplifies a form of charismatic settler leadership rooted in spiritual populism and ecological appropriation. His carefully curated identity draws upon themes of bush survivalism, apocalyptic prophecy, and mystical land stewardship, reflecting what Coco (2023) terms “entrepreneurial spiritual leadership.” Cassar’s authority is not derived from any recognised Aboriginal lineage or community endorsement but from self-fashioned mythologies and an aesthetic of spiritualised environmentalism.
His teachings fuse survivalist pedagogy with esoteric narratives about government collapse, sacred landscapes, and cosmic struggle. As Crockford (2021) and Ferretti (2023) explain, such themes are central to the contemporary rise of conspirituality: a hybrid worldview where ecological concern, New Age mysticism, and conspiracy theory converge. Cassar’s promotional materials emphasise his ability to live “indefinitely” in the bush, projecting an image of radical autonomy and prophetic insight. These narratives were amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic and the regional rise of sovereign citizen rhetoric, positioning him as both spiritual guide and political dissenter.
However, this performative identity functions ideologically to undermine Aboriginal sovereignty. Through CEA, Cassar leads campaigns like “Save Kariong Sacred Lands” and “Save Kincumber Wetlands,” in partnership with the GuriNgai group, whose members lack verified Aboriginal ancestry or recognition from any land council (Cooke, 2025a; guringai.org, 2025). These campaigns invoke spiritual custodianship while actively opposing developments led by legitimate Aboriginal bodies such as DLALC and MLALC.
Cassar’s events and survival workshops serve as both recruitment platforms and ideological indoctrination spaces. Followers are introduced to narratives that blend ecological esotericism with mistrust of science, hostility to government, and settler entitlement. The result, as observed in cult studies (Singer, 2003; Zablocki, 2001), is a high-control environment where charismatic leadership replaces critical inquiry, and participants become emotionally and epistemically dependent on Cassar’s worldview.
Cassar’s rhetoric is steeped in a revivalist mystique, often invoking ancient wisdom and non-specific Aboriginal motifs, yet erasing the specific governance systems and cultural authority of real Aboriginal nations. His collaborations with discredited groups like GuriNgai, and platforms like Coast Community News, amplify this simulacrum of legitimacy, constructing an illusion of traditional custodianship that appeals to the spiritual longings of disaffected settlers.
By appropriating ecological concern and deploying settler mythologies of land, Cassar contributes to a larger pattern of white possessive environmentalism (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). He and CEA weaponise the language of sacredness and conservation to resist Aboriginal-led development and governance. Their invocation of fake sites, faux-Elders, and mystical narratives displaces real cultural knowledge, creating a settler fantasy of land care in which Aboriginal people are marginalised or rendered suspect.
The growing entanglement between CEA and far-right, anti-science, and conspiracist movements, including My Place and Community Voice, reinforces this pattern. Cassar’s aesthetic of survivalist resistance and sacred activism blends seamlessly into sovereign citizen discourse, particularly as his messaging frames Aboriginal councils as illegitimate corporate agents while elevating CEA’s settler followers as the land’s true protectors.
In doing so, Cassar exemplifies what Cochrane, Gillespie, and Ross (2024) call the “masculinist bushcraft turn” in contemporary far-right politics: a fusion of gendered survivalism, land fetishism, and reactionary populism. His cultic influence, while masked in green politics and spiritual aesthetics, ultimately operates as a force of settler reenchantment and Aboriginal displacement.
Understanding Jake Cassar’s role requires more than exposing identity fraud or pseudoscience. It demands recognising the broader cultural and political project of settler spiritual resurgence: a postcolonial mimicry that reshapes land politics around charismatic settler subjectivity and erodes pathways to Aboriginal governance, housing justice, and climate adaptation.
In the context of the Central Coast housing and environmental crises, Cassar and CEA are not marginal actors. They are central agents in a settler-colonial simulation that must be dismantled through truth-telling, institutional reform, and Aboriginal-led sovereignty.
Chapter 5: Settler Policy Capture and the Housing Crisis on the Central Coast
The housing crisis on the Central Coast cannot be disentangled from settler simulation and institutional complicity. It is not merely a failure of policy or planning, but the product of strategic obstruction led by settler interests masquerading as cultural or environmental protectors. Groups such as CEA and the so-called GuriNgai have repeatedly mobilised settler narratives of cultural authority to derail projects led by Local Aboriginal Land Councils (LALCs), most notably the Darkinjung LALC (DLALC), whose developments aim to address housing shortages while affirming Aboriginal land rights.
The opposition to DLALC’s housing initiatives in Kariong and Kincumber, often spearheaded by Jake Cassar and CEA, has been justified through appeals to “sacred land” and “community consultation.” However, these appeals rely on fabricated claims, unverified pseudo-Aboriginal identities, and pseudoarchaeological myths (Cooke, 2025; guringai.org, 2025). They mask an agenda of white possessiveness; what Moreton-Robinson (2015) defines as the settler-colonial desire to control land and narrative under the guise of care and stewardship.
Housing developments proposed by DLALC are subjected to scrutiny and sabotage unmatched by comparable non-Aboriginal proposals. The Save Kincumber Wetlands campaign, for instance, leverages social media spectacle and aestheticised protest to simulate ecological and cultural concern, while sidestepping the legitimacy of Aboriginal governance and the urgent need for housing (Darnett, 2025; Central Coast Homelessness Analysis, 2025).
This pattern of resistance is reproduced through digital media networks, petitions, and alliances with sympathetic councillors or planning bodies, often bypassing formal Aboriginal consultation mechanisms. The resulting delays not only exacerbate homelessness but signal a broader crisis of governance: where the state’s planning frameworks are vulnerable to settler interference rooted in bad-faith identity claims and spiritualised obstructionism.
At its core, the housing sabotage on the Central Coast exemplifies a wider national pattern, as analysed by Watego (2021) and Andrews et al. (2022), where Aboriginal-led progress is reframed as threat, and settler opposition is laundered through aesthetics of preservation, spirituality, or procedural fairness.
To address this, planning systems must be recalibrated to privilege verified Aboriginal governance. AIATSIS (2023) outlines clear criteria for Aboriginal identity verification, including descent, community acceptance, and cultural continuity. These standards must be embedded in all heritage, environmental, and housing consultations to prevent the weaponisation of settler simulation.
Furthermore, institutional partnerships with unverified actors must cease. Public funding, planning recognition, and consultation access must be conditional on demonstrated cultural authority, co-signed by LALCs or Registered Native Title Bodies Corporate. This would dismantle the incentive structures that currently reward settler mimicry and sabotage.
Housing justice on the Central Coast, therefore, is inseparable from cultural justice. Addressing the crisis requires dismantling the settler simulations that monopolise narrative and authority. Only through truth-telling, governance reform, and Aboriginal-led planning can the region hope to meet its dual obligations: to shelter its people and to honour its sovereign custodians.
Chapter 6: Housing Precarity, Cultural Authority, and the Ethics of Consultation
The housing crisis on the Central Coast must be understood as both a material emergency and an epistemological failure. At its centre is a disjuncture between who is recognised as a legitimate stakeholder and who is erased. This chapter argues that consultation practices in regional NSW have been structurally corrupted by the incorporation of unverified groups like the so-called GuriNgai, whose influence has diverted resources, policymaker attention, and community legitimacy away from properly constituted Aboriginal organisations.
Under the guise of cultural advocacy, these actors undermine local housing developments led by bodies such as Darkinjung LALC, despite the fact that such developments are some of the only housing responses designed by and for Aboriginal communities. The repeated privileging of settler mimicry within council processes exacerbates housing precarity by halting or delaying projects through faux-cultural objections, often supported by pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological narratives (Cooke, 2025; AIATSIS, 2023).
The ethics of consultation demand that decision-makers apply cultural verification procedures consistently and transparently. As outlined by AIATSIS (2023), legitimate Aboriginal identity must meet the tri-fold criteria of descent, community acceptance, and ongoing cultural connection. These principles have not only legal weight but epistemic consequence: they protect the integrity of Aboriginal knowledge systems from opportunistic settler reappropriation.
Moreover, the proliferation of false claimants dilutes the capacity of real Aboriginal communities to assert authority over Country. In Kincumber and Kariong, consultations involving the so-called GuriNgai led to confusion over who speaks for Country, with real consequences for environmental planning and housing policy. When settler-led objections are validated over verified Aboriginal consent, the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent is violated in both spirit and practice (UNDRIP, 2007).
This chapter further explores the ways settler simulations have leveraged aesthetic tropes of cultural revival, grassroots resistance, and ecological care to create a false equivalence between settler and Aboriginal interests. By embedding themselves within planning and media frameworks as ‘the Aboriginal voice’, settler actors not only silence real communities but recast Aboriginal-led development as cultural harm.
To counteract this, housing policy must embed Aboriginal-led ethical consultation frameworks, including community verification mechanisms, cultural impact assessments conducted by LALCs, and enforceable standards for institutional accountability. In tandem, public education campaigns must dismantle the credibility of pseudo-Aboriginal entities and expose their role in housing obstruction.
True housing justice can only proceed by recognising the authority of genuine custodians. This means actively excluding false voices, not merely including real ones. It means understanding housing not as a battleground between environment and development, but as a field of cultural sovereignty and ethical governance. Only then can we begin to repair the dual harms of dispossession and displacement.
Chapter 7: Counterinsurgency by Simulation – From Media Disinformation to Institutional Capture
The housing crisis on the Central Coast of NSW is not merely the result of policy neglect or market failure; it is actively produced through a coordinated campaign of simulation, misinformation, and institutional misdirection. At the heart of this crisis lies a settler-colonial counterinsurgency that deploys false Aboriginal identities, aestheticised environmental activism, and disinformation campaigns to undermine Aboriginal authority and halt critical housing and infrastructure development.
Drawing on the framework developed by Darnett (2025), simulation in this context refers to the strategic mimicking of Aboriginality by settler actors who use surface-level cultural signifiers such as language fragments, stylised ceremony, pseudo-sacred geographies, to claim legitimacy in decision-making processes from which they would otherwise be excluded. These simulations are not random or benign; they function as tools of colonial resistance, designed to obstruct decolonial progress, disable verified Aboriginal governance, and disrupt projects that challenge settler control of land, narrative, and institutional power.
Media platforms such as the Jake Cassar Bushcraft page, Coast Environmental Alliance’s social channels, and uncritical local outlets have played a critical role in constructing and amplifying these simulations. Disinformation campaigns targeting Darkinjung LALC projects at Kariong and Kincumber have often relied on visually persuasive but factually baseless claims of environmental and cultural desecration. These narratives are bolstered by emotionally charged aesthetics—images of bushland, pseudo-spiritual rhetoric, and misattributed artefacts—intended to mobilise public outrage while masking the illegitimacy of the groups making these claims (Guringai.org, 2025; Bungaree.org, 2025).
Such settler disinformation operates not only in the media but also through institutional channels. Local councils including Hornsby, Central Coast, and Northern Beaches have, in several instances, conferred cultural authority and advisory positions to actors lacking genealogical or community recognition. The persistence of this practice constitutes what Moreton-Robinson (2015) calls “white possessiveness”, the institutionalisation of settler entitlement under the pretext of inclusion and consultation.
The strategic function of simulation becomes even clearer when viewed in relation to its impacts. At Kariong, claims of sacred Egyptian-style hieroglyphs comprehensively debunked by archaeologists were weaponised by the non-Aboriginal GuriNgai and their allies to delay land transfers, disrupt heritage assessments, and delegitimise the authority of Darkinjung LALC (AIATSIS, 2023; Cooke, 2025). In these instances, simulation does not merely confuse the public; it creates material delays, increases development costs, fractures Aboriginal representation, and erodes trust in legal processes.
Moreover, these campaigns increasingly intersect with global disinformation movements. As documented in the Guringai.org podcast A Long Con Gone on Too Long and media investigations from 2023 to 2025, figures such as Jake Cassar have aligned their messaging with QAnon-adjacent conspiracies, “My Place” community groups, and broader anti-government networks. This convergence of settler spiritual populism and conspiracist ideology has created a powerful rhetorical engine that presents legitimate Aboriginal-led governance as corrupt or elite, while casting settler simulation as grassroots resistance (Coco, 2023; Ferretti, 2023).
The result is an epistemic inversion: real custodianship is recoded as commercial exploitation, while false claimants are framed as defenders of sacred land. This dynamic has grave implications for housing justice. In 2025, Darkinjung LALC reported that nearly a dozen housing projects had been delayed or obstructed due to objections lodged by unverified cultural groups, many of whom lacked even basic compliance with AIATSIS guidelines on cultural legitimacy (Central Coast Homelessness Analysis, 2025).
To dismantle this counterinsurgency, it is essential to identify simulation as a structured phenomenon, not an anomaly. Its replication across multiple development sites, media campaigns, and council submissions indicates a strategic playbook designed to halt Aboriginal-led progress. Simulation is not merely a form of cultural misrepresentation; it is a method of settler sabotage.
Institutional reform must include the immediate defunding and de-platforming of unverified cultural actors, as well as the retrospective auditing of consultation processes in which these groups were involved. Media literacy programs, cultural authority verification policies, and stronger accountability for councils must be paired with enhanced resourcing for Aboriginal community media to counteract the visibility gap that enables simulation to flourish.
In this way, Chapter 7 identifies settler simulation as the connective tissue binding together disparate crises: disinformation, housing sabotage, and cultural appropriation. Only by naming and dismantling this simulation can NSW meaningfully address the housing crisis, uphold Aboriginal sovereignty, and protect the integrity of its public institutions.
Chapter 8: Toward Reparative Housing Policy and the Restoration of Aboriginal Governance
This final chapter offers a decolonial vision for housing and land justice on the Central Coast, one that directly addresses the harms inflicted by settler simulation, identity fraud, and institutional complicity. As shown across preceding chapters, housing obstruction in the region is not simply a matter of regulatory inefficiency but rather the outcome of systematic settler resistance dressed in the language of cultural preservation and environmentalism.
Reparative housing policy must begin by affirming the legal, cultural, and moral authority of Local Aboriginal Land Councils as lead stakeholders in any development or planning process. This requires state and local government adoption of verified community-controlled consultation frameworks that eliminate false claimants and centre actual custodianship.
Key to this process is a truth-telling mechanism; formalised in public education campaigns and institutional reforms that names and discredits simulation practices. Public authorities must withdraw recognition from any individuals or groups unable to satisfy the tri-partite identity criteria of descent, community acceptance, and cultural continuity (AIATSIS, 2023). A dedicated cultural integrity audit should be undertaken across all councils that have previously accepted submissions or advisory participation from the GuriNgai or affiliated settler networks.
The development of Aboriginal-led housing initiatives must be treated as not only a cultural right but a climate imperative. As demonstrated by Darkinjung LALC’s solar-compatible developments and the PowerShift findings (APPI, 2025), Aboriginal governance is uniquely positioned to deliver climate-resilient, culturally responsive housing at scale.
Institutional reform must also include a rethinking of how planning conflicts are mediated. The current model rewards performative opposition with delay and publicity, while marginalising substantive Aboriginal participation. Mechanisms that privilege genealogically verified authority, enforceable consent protocols, and proactive media regulation are essential to reversing this dynamic.
Finally, reparative justice demands the resourcing of Aboriginal-led media, education, and governance bodies so they may counter settler disinformation with cultural truth. Projects like Bungaree.org and Guringai.org demonstrate the power of community media in reclaiming narrative space and safeguarding cultural sovereignty.
Only through these coordinated actions—truth-telling, verification, institutional overhaul, and community-led development—can we break the cycle of simulation, sabotage, and erasure that defines the manufactured housing crisis on the Central Coast. Aboriginal people must not only be included in future housing frameworks; they must lead them.
Anything less will reproduce the very problematic dynamics we must urgently dismantle.
JD Cooke
A Long Con, Gone on Too Long. 
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