Introduction: A Manufactured Crisis in Plain Sight
The Central Coast of New South Wales is experiencing a deepening homelessness and housing crisis of both visible and concealed proportions. Tents and makeshift encampments in parks, reserves, and under bridges mark the growing presence of the unhoused, while an even larger population remains hidden in overcrowded homes, temporary shelters, and vehicles. The crisis is not the result of natural market fluctuations alone, but the product of active obstruction, misinformation, and settler simulation. This comprehensive analysis synthesises recent reports, data, and academic studies to examine how identity fraud, performative environmentalism, and the manipulation of Aboriginal identity by settler actors, most notably the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai” group, Jake Cassar, and the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), have obstructed viable housing solutions, worsened homelessness, and undermined Aboriginal sovereignty.

Over the past five years, the Central Coast has seen a dramatic rise in housing stress, informal encampments, and public concern, as the number of individuals and families without stable shelter has escalated sharply. Structural factors such as policy lags, rental inflation, and planning inefficiencies have contributed to this crisis; however, a growing body of evidence suggests that anti-development activism by the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai,” Jake Cassar, and CEA has compounded the problem. These groups, invoking contested cultural and environmental claims, have delayed or opposed developments that could have alleviated housing shortages. The following analysis critically examines these dynamics through the lens of misinformation, performative conservation, and settler simulation, incorporating recent housing data, council planning responses, and the rhetoric and tactics employed by these activist entities (Cooke, 2025; Darnett, 2025).

Chapter 1: Faux Custodianship as Obstruction: The Role of Settler Simulation in Development Delays
The Central Coast’s housing crisis has not occurred in a political vacuum. While economic factors such as housing market failure, rental inflation, and planning bottlenecks have played a role, the epistemic and political sabotage carried out by non-Aboriginal activists posing as custodians has emerged as a powerful and underexamined force. This chapter examines how faux-Indigenous claims and settler performances of custodianship have impeded legitimate development, exacerbated homelessness, and eroded the governance authority of authentic Aboriginal land councils and communities.

1.1 The Simulated Sacred: Performing Cultural Authority without Lineage
At the forefront of this obstructionist movement is a coalition of settler-led groups, including the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai,” and public figures such as Jake Cassar. These actors strategically invoke the language of sacredness, custodianship, and Aboriginality to oppose land development. Cassar, who presents himself as a spiritual environmentalist and survivalist, has no verified Aboriginal ancestry (Darnett, 2025). His collaboration with figures like Laurie Bimson and Tracey Howie, who claim the “GuriNgai” identity despite genealogical and communal rejection, creates a media spectacle of settler spirituality masquerading as Aboriginal resistance (AIATSIS, 2023; Cooke, 2025).

This simulation of cultural authority functions as what Darnett (2025) calls a “settler magical thinking,” in which settler actors appropriate Indigenous epistemes, not through historical descent or communal belonging, but through aesthetic and spiritual mimicry. The result is a powerful epistemic confusion in which false custodianship gains credibility in public discourse, particularly when amplified by social media, local press, or performative protests staged at development sites.

1.2 Epistemic Mimicry and the Blocking of Housing Projects
This simulation is not without material consequence. In recent years, several housing and infrastructure proposals have been delayed or obstructed by campaigns invoking unverified sacredness or environmental sensitivity. The Kariong development proposal, supported by the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council (DLALC), has been subjected to ongoing protests by CEA and the GuriNgai-affiliated network. Despite DLALC’s formal endorsement, which included extensive cultural heritage assessments, Cassar and his supporters claimed the land was sacred and under threat, asserting a false custodial authority that contradicted legitimate Aboriginal governance (NSW DPE, 2024; DLALC, 2024).

The NSW Ombudsman (2025) later rejected allegations of departmental misconduct, affirming that the Kariong project adhered to required environmental and cultural protocols. Yet the damage had already been done: the public narrative had been hijacked by actors lacking cultural legitimacy, and crucial housing was delayed during a period of escalating homelessness.

1.3 Settler Conservation as a Weaponised Narrative
These campaigns are further bolstered by settler environmentalism that operates through a faux-Indigenous epistemology. Phrases such as “sacred land,” “songlines,” and “ancestral sites” are deployed without cultural authority, often based on pseudoarchaeological claims and speculative geographies (Guringai.org, 2023a). The Kariong “glyphs” controversy is emblematic: despite being long discredited as a hoax by archaeologists, Cassar and his allies continue to cite them as evidence of Aboriginal significance (Guringai.org, 2023b).

This is not conservation in the traditional sense; it is what Blancke and Boudry (2021) describe as epistemic simulation, where unqualified actors mimic the language, posture, and credibility of science or Indigenous knowledge systems to mislead the public. The aesthetic appeal of such performances, complete with face paint, didgeridoos, and social media livestreams, grants them a seductive power in public debates, despite their underlying falsity.

1.4 Erosion of Trust and Institutional Paralysis
The cumulative effect of these campaigns is a paralysis in local governance. Central Coast Council documents acknowledge that misinformation and illegitimate cultural claims have impeded development approvals and contributed to planning gridlock (Central Coast Council, 2020; 2025). Local MPs such as David Mehan have publicly criticised the disruption caused by these groups, noting the irony that some developments opposed by Cassar and CEA were in fact initiated or supported by Aboriginal land councils (ABC Central Coast, 2025).

This contradiction, settler activists opposing projects supported by Aboriginal communities, illustrates the epistemic harm at play. It displaces real Aboriginal authority in favour of settler-simulated sovereignty. More than obstruction, this is an act of epistemic violence: it undermines legitimate knowledge holders, destabilises governance, and prolongs the suffering of the unhoused.

Chapter 2: Homelessness and Housing Scarcity: A System in Breakdown

2.1 Quantifying the Crisis: Scale, Speed, and Visibility
The scale and speed of the homelessness crisis on the Central Coast defy past precedent. According to Coast Community News (2025a), homelessness has increased by 60 percent since 2024, with some neighbourhood centres reporting a fourfold increase in the number of people seeking help. As of mid-2025, 97.6 percent of rentals on the Central Coast are unaffordable to those on low incomes (Shelter NSW, 2025). Emergency services are overwhelmed, and makeshift encampments have proliferated across picnic areas, underpasses, and parks in towns such as The Entrance, Woy Woy, and Gosford.

This transformation has rendered homelessness increasingly visible, exposing its intergenerational dimensions and geographic intensities. Entire families, elderly persons, and individuals with disabilities are now forced into public space. Services describe “little cities of homelessness” forming in areas where infrastructure is least equipped to manage such vulnerability (Coast Community News, 2025a).

2.2 A Demographic in Collapse: Families, the Elderly, and Youth
Contrary to persistent stereotypes, the homeless population on the Central Coast now includes a wide range of people: single mothers, retirees, unemployed youth, and even individuals who once owned businesses or homes. Coast Community News (2025a) reports that 21.4 percent of homeless individuals are under 19, while 17 percent are aged 55 and over. Some families have been forced to separate children from parents simply to access shelter, a reality that undermines not only basic wellbeing but long-term psychological health.

The maxim repeated by service providers, “You’re only two pay cheques away from homelessness,” has become a lived truth for many. The economic fragility underpinning this statement highlights a systemic failure in housing provision and income support, compounded by inflation and the collapse of affordable rental supply.

2.3 Structural Drivers: Domestic Violence, Mental Health, and Addiction
The region’s housing crisis is shaped by interlocking social vulnerabilities. Domestic violence remains one of the most significant and underreported drivers of homelessness. Local organisations note that more people report barking dogs than abuse, underscoring how hidden and widespread the issue is (Coast Community News, 2025b). Mental health issues and addiction compound the situation: Health on the Streets (HoTS) reported that over 85 percent of their clients present with one or more of these challenges (Coast Community News, 2025c).

In Woy Woy, 42 percent of JobSeeker recipients struggle with substance addiction, a figure that reveals how precarious survival becomes for people already marginalised by structural poverty. These intersecting conditions make reintegration difficult, creating a recursive cycle of exclusion.

2.4 Bureaucratic Failures and Planning Paralysis
What compounds the crisis is not only a lack of resources but the bureaucratic refusal to adapt. Emergency shelters for families are scarce, and red tape often prevents unused public spaces, such as community halls and churches, from being repurposed as temporary accommodation. According to Toukley Neighbourhood Centre, many facilities that could house the unhoused remain inaccessible due to outdated regulations (Coast Community News, 2025a).

Despite government initiatives like the Services Australia CPSO program, which successfully streamlines support access, other public responses remain fragmented. Without urgent reform, bureaucratic constraints will continue to undermine well-meaning policy interventions.

2.5 Political Inaction and Epistemic Obfuscation
The Central Coast Council’s Affordable and Alternative Housing Strategy outlines several long-term goals, but implementation remains hamstrung by misinformation and settler-led activism. Local MPs such as David Mehan have called for stronger measures to override pseudocultural obstruction, yet activist networks like CEA persist in blocking development projects, even when Aboriginal land councils support them (ABC Central Coast, 2025).

This contradiction, between the urgent need for shelter and the invocation of falsified custodianship to block housing, reveals the deeper epistemic battle over authority and truth. Settler simulation obscures public understanding, disrupts planning, and prolongs homelessness, even as the crisis demands swift and evidence-based action.

Chapter 3: Activism, Obstruction, and Simulation: The Case Against Development

3.1 Delayed Developments: The Kariong and Kincumber Case Studies
Two major housing developments on the Central Coast, Kariong and Carrak Road in Kincumber, demonstrate how activist-led obstruction has directly delayed shelter solutions. The Kariong proposal, backed by the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council, aimed to rezone land for 50 new dwellings. At Kincumber, a proposal for a supermarket and community housing hybrid was in discussion. In both cases, opposition was spearheaded by Jake Cassar’s Coast Environmental Alliance and the self-identified GuriNgai, who claimed sacred or ecological significance (Coast Environmental Alliance, 2025; Guringai.org, 2023a).

Despite both proposals undergoing cultural heritage assessments, and in Kariong’s case receiving Indigenous endorsement, activist groups invoked claims of sacredness that lacked genealogical support or community consensus (AIATSIS, 2023; Cooke, 2025). These contested narratives generated public confusion, stalled planning approvals, and ultimately prevented critical housing from being delivered to a region already in crisis.

3.2 Epistemic Simulation and Credibility Mimicry
The tactics used by groups like CEA constitute what Blancke and Boudry (2021) define as “epistemic simulation”: the performance of cultural or scientific legitimacy without possessing actual authority or expertise. Cassar, for instance, routinely presents himself as a spiritual environmentalist and eco-mediator with implied Aboriginal alignment, despite no documented ancestry and no recognition by local Indigenous organisations (Darnett, 2025).

These performances borrow from the language of sovereignty, ecology, and sacred custodianship, yet serve to simulate rather than protect Aboriginal ways of knowing. In this sense, settler mimicry does not merely confuse the public; it competes with and obstructs actual Aboriginal authority and governance. By creating a counterfeit knowledge regime, these actors undermine legitimate policy discussions about development, equity, and heritage.

3.3 Delays as Displacement: The Cost of Manufactured Controversy
In a region where over 97 percent of rental properties are unaffordable for low-income households (Shelter NSW, 2025), the deferral of housing projects is not a neutral delay; it is an act of displacement. The mythologising of Kariong as sacred, despite contrary findings from authorised cultural heritage consultants, has real consequences. Each stalled dwelling represents a lost opportunity to house an at-risk family, senior, or disabled individual.

This situation constitutes a form of policy sabotage through misinformation. Coast Community News (2025a) and council documents show that activist claims, when unchecked by government clarification or cultural verification, can derail well-intentioned developments. The cost is not only measured in housing delays but in human suffering: people living in tents, separated families, and traumatised children.

3.4 Institutional Responses and Complicity
While some councils and agencies have attempted to respond through fact-checking and cultural assessments, there remains a lack of assertive policy enforcement. The NSW Ombudsman (2025) reviewed complaints regarding Kariong and rejected activist allegations of wrongdoing by the Department of Planning. Yet these findings did not lead to the retraction or silencing of misinformation campaigns. Instead, Cassar and his allies pivoted to social media platforms, mobilising broader publics through pathos-driven appeals and ecological mysticism.

Institutions that fail to confront epistemic simulation risk complicity. Without proactive defence of cultural legitimacy and development policy, public trust erodes, and crisis planning becomes vulnerable to ideological sabotage.

Chapter 4: Intersecting Vulnerabilities: Domestic Violence, Mental Health, and Systemic Collapse

4.1 Hidden Harms and Visible Failures
Homelessness on the Central Coast cannot be understood solely as a crisis of shelter. It is also a crisis of safety, of mental health, and of bureaucratic incapacity. Many individuals forced into homelessness are not only without a home but also fleeing violence, battling untreated health conditions, or facing the cumulative trauma of system failure. This intersectional lens, spanning gender, age, ability, and socioeconomic precarity, exposes how policy neglect magnifies harm for already vulnerable populations.

Domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness in the region. Local services report that hundreds of women and children are forced to choose between abuse and rough sleeping every month (Coast Community News, 2024a). With shelters full, women often remain in unsafe environments or seek refuge in tents and vehicles. The underreporting of domestic violence, described as “less likely to be reported than barking dogs,” underscores the silencing of this crisis (Coast Community News, 2024a).

4.2 Mental Health and Addiction: The Cycle That Entraps
The overwhelming majority of those experiencing homelessness in the region also suffer from mental health challenges, addiction, or both. Health on the Streets (HoTS) reports that over 85 percent of its clients face these intersecting burdens, complicating both their pathway into and out of homelessness (Coast Community News, 2025a). These are not isolated pathologies; they are cyclical outcomes of trauma, exclusion, and neglect.

Without housing, managing chronic mental health conditions is nearly impossible. And without treatment or stability, the likelihood of securing employment or tenancy diminishes. This creates a self-perpetuating feedback loop of vulnerability. Furthermore, the lack of wraparound services and the rigid separation of health, housing, and justice portfolios within government agencies results in systemic inertia: no agency sees the whole person, and thus no system responds holistically.

4.3 Bureaucracy as Barrier: The Paradox of Red Tape
Despite the urgency of the crisis, frontline workers frequently describe being paralysed by administrative regulations. Empty church halls, unused community centres, and secure carparks sit vacant while individuals freeze outside. These spaces could offer immediate, low-cost shelter, yet councils and NGOs are often blocked by insurance concerns, zoning restrictions, or lack of ministerial coordination (Coast Community News, 2025b).

This bureaucratic rigidity reveals a fundamental tension: institutions designed for order and risk management have become incapable of emergency adaptation. In many cases, they have become complicit in prolonging suffering. When frontline workers are forced to use personal funds to relocate at-risk women interstate, the system has not only failed; it has outsourced responsibility to exhausted volunteers (Coast Community News, 2025a).

4.4 Structural Violence and Family Separation
A particularly devastating outcome of these failures is the fracturing of families. Due to a lack of refuges that accommodate families as cohesive units, parents are often separated from their children or forced to relinquish temporary custody in order to secure a bed (Coast Community News, 2025a). This fragmentation is not only traumatic but compounds intergenerational disadvantage.

When governance systems design emergency responses without consideration for kinship, they reproduce settler logics of disconnection. These are not neutral oversights; they are expressions of structural violence. The rhetoric of crisis management obscures the fact that policy design has actively excluded familial cohesion from its housing models.

4.5 A Crisis Requiring Integration, Not Isolation
The intersection of domestic violence, addiction, and bureaucratic delay constitutes a form of systemic entrapment. It is not enough to build more houses; what is required is a radical rethinking of how care, shelter, and justice are interwoven. Programs such as Health on the Streets (HoTS), which provide integrated care with demonstrable cost savings to the public health system, offer a compelling template. For every dollar invested, $33 to $90 is saved in emergency response costs (Coast Community News, 2024b).

These models succeed not because they innovate new technologies, but because they return to relational ethics: meeting people where they are, addressing health before judgment, and recognising dignity before data.

Chapter 5: Complicity, Collapse, and the Erosion of Public Trust

5.1 Institutional Paralysis and Policy Gaps

Despite mounting evidence, institutional responses to the Central Coast’s housing crisis remain fragmented, underpowered, and inconsistently enforced. Local councils, though charged with planning and community care, are hamstrung by regulatory red tape, underfunding, and political risk aversion. While Central Coast Council has issued strategies such as the Affordable and Alternative Housing Strategy (2020), the implementation lag has allowed misinformation campaigns to take root, particularly in developments like Kariong and Kincumber.

The NSW Ombudsman (2025) decisively dismissed claims made by CEA activists concerning cultural and environmental fraud in the Kariong proposal. Yet no sanctions or public retractions followed. Instead, the activist narrative continued unimpeded, amplified across community groups, social media, and local protests. This institutional silence signals not only a failure of enforcement but also a tacit complicity that enables epistemic simulations to flourish unchecked (Blancke & Boudry, 2021).

5.2 The Fatigue of Frontline Services

The paralysis at the policy level stands in stark contrast to the overextension of community organisations. Neighbourhood centres, shelters, and health vans such as Health on the Streets operate beyond capacity, offering critical but ultimately insufficient stopgap responses (Coast Community News, 2025a; 2025b). As noted in interviews, staff members use personal funds to relocate domestic violence victims, house disabled women in tents, and provide emergency medical care to those rejected by the system.

This exhaustion is not metaphorical; it is structural. The expectation that overwhelmed local actors can compensate for delayed housing, red tape, and the consequences of settler obstruction constitutes a systemic dereliction of duty by the state. Moreover, the continued legitimacy given to actors such as Cassar and the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai” reinforces the futility felt by those working on the front lines. When performative activists gain more traction than evidence-based housing policy, public servants lose faith in governance itself.

5.3 Settler Affect, Simulated Sacredness, and Moral Hijacking

A critical driver of this legitimacy crisis is the rhetorical and emotional power of settler simulation. Cassar’s eco-spiritual performances, alongside the invented “GuriNgai” identity, are not simply acts of deception; they are affective appeals designed to hijack moral discourse. By invoking sacredness, spiritual danger, and ancestral obligation, these campaigns mobilise guilt, wonder, and urgency—displacing the real, legally recognised, and community-endorsed claims of Aboriginal people (Darnett, 2025; Cooke, 2025).

This strategy mirrors what Hartelius and Gellar (2023) describe in vaccine discourse: the replacement of verified authority with emotionally resonant simulation, often spread virally through digital media. The consequence is an epistemic flattening, where all truth claims appear equal, and the loudest or most emotionally manipulative voices dominate. In the Central Coast housing debate, this results in moral confusion: development is cast as cultural violence, even when endorsed by Aboriginal land councils; heritage is claimed by those with no descent; and crisis intervention is framed as ecological destruction.

5.4 Public Distrust and the Crisis of Planning Legitimacy

The result is a crisis not only of housing but of planning legitimacy. When council meetings become battlegrounds for misinformation, and when development applications are derailed by unverifiable claims, trust in the public planning system erodes. Residents, developers, and even advocacy groups lose confidence in consultation processes that can be hijacked by loud, performative minorities.

This dynamic mirrors the broader “epistemic crisis of belief” that Darnett (2025) and Blancke et al. (2022) trace across pseudoscientific and conspiratorial domains. As settler actors simulate Indigenous identity and ecological expertise, they erode the very frameworks—heritage law, planning policy, cultural validation—designed to protect Country and community. In their place, they install a politics of spiritual spectacle, where visibility and virality displace legitimacy and accountability.

Chapter 5: Complicity, Collapse, and the Erosion of Public Trust

5.1 Institutional Paralysis and Policy Gaps
Despite mounting evidence, institutional responses to the Central Coast’s housing crisis remain fragmented, underpowered, and inconsistently enforced. Local councils, though charged with planning and community care, are hamstrung by regulatory red tape, underfunding, and political risk aversion. While Central Coast Council has issued strategies such as the Affordable and Alternative Housing Strategy (2020), the implementation lag has allowed misinformation campaigns to take root, particularly in developments like Kariong and Kincumber.

The NSW Ombudsman (2025) decisively dismissed claims made by CEA activists concerning cultural and environmental fraud in the Kariong proposal. Yet no sanctions or public retractions followed. Instead, the activist narrative continued unimpeded, amplified across community groups, social media, and local protests. This institutional silence signals not only a failure of enforcement but also a tacit complicity that enables epistemic simulations to flourish unchecked (Blancke & Boudry, 2021).

5.2 The Fatigue of Frontline Services
The paralysis at the policy level stands in stark contrast to the overextension of community organisations. Neighbourhood centres, shelters, and health vans such as Health on the Streets operate beyond capacity, offering critical but ultimately insufficient stopgap responses (Coast Community News, 2025a; 2025b). As noted in interviews, staff members use personal funds to relocate domestic violence victims, house disabled women in tents, and provide emergency medical care to those rejected by the system.

This exhaustion is not metaphorical; it is structural. The expectation that overwhelmed local actors can compensate for delayed housing, red tape, and the consequences of settler obstruction constitutes a systemic dereliction of duty by the state. Moreover, the continued legitimacy given to actors such as Cassar and the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai” reinforces the futility felt by those working on the front lines. When performative activists gain more traction than evidence-based housing policy, public servants lose faith in governance itself.

5.3 Settler Affect, Simulated Sacredness, and Moral Hijacking
A critical driver of this legitimacy crisis is the rhetorical and emotional power of settler simulation. Cassar’s eco-spiritual performances, alongside the invented “GuriNgai” identity, are not simply acts of deception; they are affective appeals designed to hijack moral discourse. By invoking sacredness, spiritual danger, and ancestral obligation, these campaigns mobilise guilt, wonder, and urgency, displacing the real, legally recognised, and community-endorsed claims of Aboriginal people (Darnett, 2025; Cooke, 2025).

This strategy mirrors what Hartelius and Gellar (2023) describe in vaccine discourse: the replacement of verified authority with emotionally resonant simulation, often spread virally through digital media. The consequence is an epistemic flattening, where all truth claims appear equal, and the loudest or most emotionally manipulative voices dominate. In the Central Coast housing debate, this results in moral confusion: development is cast as cultural violence, even when endorsed by Aboriginal land councils; heritage is claimed by those with no descent; and crisis intervention is framed as ecological destruction.

5.4 Public Distrust and the Crisis of Planning Legitimacy
The result is a crisis not only of housing but of planning legitimacy. When council meetings become battlegrounds for misinformation, and when development applications are derailed by unverifiable claims, trust in the public planning system erodes. Residents, developers, and even advocacy groups lose confidence in consultation processes that can be hijacked by loud, performative minorities.

This dynamic mirrors the broader “epistemic crisis of belief” that Darnett (2025) and Blancke et al. (2022) trace across pseudoscientific and conspiratorial domains. As settler actors simulate Indigenous identity and ecological expertise, they erode the very frameworks—heritage law, planning policy, cultural validation—designed to protect Country and community. In their place, they install a politics of spiritual spectacle, where visibility and virality displace legitimacy and accountability.

Chapter 6: Reclaiming Sovereignty, Rebuilding Shelter: A Dual Mandate for Truth and Justice

6.1 Restoring Epistemic Authority: Truth Against Simulation
The Central Coast crisis demands more than policy reform; it requires an epistemic reckoning. The proliferation of settler-led simulations, especially by figures such as Jake Cassar and the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai,” has created an alternate reality where unverified claims of sacredness and custodianship derail legitimate planning. These narratives thrive in a vacuum of authority: where institutions hesitate, simulation prevails. Restoring clarity means confronting false equivalencies. As Blancke and Boudry (2021) argue, pseudoscientific or pseudo-Indigenous claims gain traction not through evidence but through mimicry, aesthetic familiarity, and affective resonance. In response, institutions must reaffirm who speaks with cultural authority and on what grounds.

This includes centering Aboriginal land councils, community-controlled organisations, and genealogically verified elders in all decisions involving heritage, land use, and development. Epistemic clarity must become a governance priority. If every assertion of sacredness is treated equally regardless of legitimacy, then heritage protection becomes meaningless, and settler sabotage masquerading as advocacy continues unchallenged (Darnett, 2025; AIATSIS, 2023).

6.2 Crisis Intervention: Housing as Urgent Justice
The immediate homelessness crisis on the Central Coast cannot wait for long-term targets alone. Although the goal to make one in ten homes social housing by 2050 is commendable, it contrasts sharply with the “out of control” frontline reality in 2025, where services are exhausted and families are living in tents (Coast Community News, 2025a). Emergency responses must include the removal of bureaucratic obstacles that prevent the use of churches, halls, and carparks for shelter. Furthermore, policy must adapt to keep families together, as current refuge models often separate women, men, and children due to infrastructure limitations.

Government responses must also integrate support services: mental health, addiction recovery, and domestic violence resources must be embedded in every housing initiative. The compounding vulnerabilities outlined in Health on the Streets’ reports (2024) demonstrate that housing cannot be disaggregated from care. Homelessness is a multi-system failure, and it must be addressed as such.

6.3 Accountability and Cultural Repair
Actors like Cassar have not simply delayed housing; they have undermined the integrity of Aboriginal identity. Cassar’s performance of eco-spirituality and his collaboration with identity fraudsters like Laurie Bimson and Tracey Howie represent more than settler overreach; they constitute a theft of voice and space from legitimate Aboriginal people (Cooke, 2025; Andrews, Day, & Carlson, 2022). Institutions must not only reject these claims but rectify the damage done by previously entertaining them. This requires formal exclusion of false actors from consultative processes, transparent public communication debunking misinformation, and reparative engagement with Indigenous communities harmed by simulation.

6.4 Toward a Future of Shared Equity, Not Shared Illusion
Housing justice on the Central Coast cannot be separated from truth-telling. The crises of homelessness and heritage are intertwined: both reflect deeper failures to distinguish legitimate authority from aesthetic deception. The rise of faux custodianship is not an anomaly; it is a consequence of systems unprepared to question settler sincerity. But the remedy is clear: embed Indigenous governance at the core of planning, treat housing as a social right rather than a commodity, and resist all attempts to weaponise culture for settler preservation.

In a context where the visible defenders of “sacred lands” are settlers with no cultural legitimacy, and many of the most vulnerable people live unsheltered on those same lands, the priorities of justice are clearly inverted. 

False sacredness cannot outweigh real suffering. The Central Coast deserves both cultural integrity and homes.

JD Cooke

Glossary of Key Terms

Affective Appeal: The strategic use of emotion to persuade or mobilise audiences. In the context of settler simulation, affective appeals often invoke guilt, awe, or sacredness to override empirical scrutiny or policy analysis (Hartelius & Gellar, 2023).

Cultural Heritage Assessment: A formal process conducted by authorised Aboriginal bodies and consultants to determine the cultural significance of land or objects. In NSW, this is a legal and governance mechanism, frequently disregarded by settler activist groups who claim alternative authority (NSW DPE, 2024).

Epistemic Crisis of Belief: A collapse in shared standards of credibility, in which misinformation, simulation, and conspiracy displace verified knowledge. This concept describes the condition that enables settler simulation to gain traction in planning and heritage debates (Blancke et al., 2022; Darnett, 2025).

Epistemic Harm: Damage caused to the public understanding of truth, legitimacy, or cultural authority. In the context of faux custodianship, epistemic harm results when simulated voices displace legitimate Aboriginal governance (Cooke, 2025).

Epistemic Mimicry: The imitation of legitimate knowledge systems—such as Aboriginal cultural law or scientific environmentalism—by those without training, authority, or community endorsement. This term captures how settler activists simulate expertise for obstructive or performative ends (Blancke & Boudry, 2021).

Epistemic Simulation: The strategic performance of truth, cultural legitimacy, or scientific authority in the absence of actual credentials, descent, or governance backing. Simulation confuses public discourse and disrupts planning processes (Cooke, 2025).

Faux Custodianship: A settler practice of claiming custodial or sacred ties to land without genealogical descent or community recognition. This form of impersonation undermines Aboriginal self-determination and obstructs policy implementation (AIATSIS, 2023; Darnett, 2025).

Frontline Fatigue: A state of exhaustion and overextension experienced by housing, health, and social service workers forced to compensate for systemic inaction. It is a structural condition, not a personal failure (Coast Community News, 2025a).

Genealogical Verification: The process by which Aboriginal identity claims are confirmed through documented ancestry, usually involving descent from a known Aboriginal person, community recognition, and connection to culture. False claimants often bypass this standard, contributing to settler simulation (AIATSIS, 2023).

Heritage Sabotage: The use of misinformation or pseudo-cultural claims to obstruct or derail planning processes under the guise of heritage protection. It often masks settler interests in maintaining land use or obstructing development (Guringai.org, 2023a).

Homelessness Crisis: A rapidly escalating condition on the NSW Central Coast, driven by housing unaffordability, domestic violence, bureaucratic delay, and obstructed development. It includes visible homelessness and the hidden crisis of overcrowded or unsafe living arrangements (Shelter NSW, 2025).

Moral Hijacking: The appropriation of moral language and symbols—such as sacredness, spiritual danger, or ancestral obligation—by illegitimate actors to displace or delegitimise verified Aboriginal voices and governance (Hartelius & Gellar, 2023; Cooke, 2025).

Performative Environmentalism: Activism that enacts environmental concern primarily as symbolic spectacle or social capital, often without grounding in environmental science or community consultation. It may serve to obstruct rather than protect land and ecosystems (Darnett, 2025).

Planning Paralysis: A condition in which planning authorities are rendered inactive or indecisive due to misinformation, public confusion, or pressure from loud minority groups. This leads to delays in housing and infrastructure projects (Central Coast Council, 2025).

Pseudocustodianship: The act of claiming Aboriginal custodial identity or authority without legal, genealogical, or community recognition. It is a form of identity fraud that can mislead institutions and the public (Andrews et al., 2022).

Sacredness Simulation: The strategic invocation of terms such as “songlines,” “ancestral sites,” or “sacred land” without cultural authority, typically to block development or accrue legitimacy. Often supported by pseudoarchaeological claims (Guringai.org, 2023b).

Settler Affect: The emotional and symbolic language settlers use to align themselves with Aboriginality or ecological purity. This includes appeals to “connection to Country” or “mother nature” as proxies for authority (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Darnett, 2025).

Settler Magical Thinking: A form of epistemic belief in which settler actors attribute spiritual or sacred significance to places and identities without grounding in Indigenous knowledge or governance. It often merges New Age ideas with settler guilt and identity longing (Darnett, 2025).

Settler Mimicry: The performance of Aboriginal identity, authority, or culture by non-Aboriginal individuals for strategic purposes. This includes adopting language, symbols, or practices in ways that displace real Indigenous leadership (Watego, 2021; Cooke, 2025).

Simulated Sacredness: The fabricated use of Aboriginal cultural references to generate credibility or obstruct development. This tactic is central to the campaigns of figures like Jake Cassar and groups like CEA (Guringai.org, 2023a; NSW Ombudsman, 2025).

Structural Violence: The systematic production of harm or inequality through policies, institutions, and social structures. In this context, it includes the forced separation of families, the denial of shelter, and the failure of planning systems to protect the vulnerable (Coast Community News, 2025a).

Systemic Entrapment: A condition in which individuals cannot escape cycles of poverty, homelessness, addiction, or violence due to the interaction of failing services, underfunded systems, and bureaucratic inflexibility (Health on the Streets, 2024).

Truth-Telling: A foundational principle in Indigenous governance and reconciliation. In this context, it refers to confronting false claims of custodianship, affirming genealogical legitimacy, and correcting public misinformation that obstructs justice or development (AIATSIS, 2023; Darnett, 2025).