Recent reporting drawing on data from the Australian Institute of Company Directors has reignited concern about the lack of diversity on Australian boards. Just eight per cent of directors of the country’s largest companies come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, despite more than half the population identifying as having migrant roots. The conclusion is familiar: boards do not reflect the communities they serve, and that disconnect has real consequences.
But even this critique, as important as it is, does not go far enough. It still operates within a narrow frame of what diversity means, and more importantly, who is imagined as eligible to govern in the first place. There is another group whose exclusion is far more absolute, far more deeply entrenched, and almost entirely absent from these conversations.
Criminalised people.
Representation, But on Whose Terms?
In the ABC Business segment, Tahlia Isaac claims that when she left prison, there were no organisations that fundamentally understood what it was like to sit in a prison cell. That claim is not just inaccurate, it risks overlooking decades of work and the long-standing presence of other organisations. For more than three decades, Sisters Inside has been led by criminalised women who have not only sat in those cells but have built entire movements from that knowledge. Seeds of Affinity in South Australia has been working tirelessly for twenty years, without major funding, for criminalised women in Adelaide. Justice Action, co-founded by former prisoner, Brett Collins in 1979, has advocated for the rights of people in the criminal justice and mental health systems, with a particular focus on abuses of authority. Lorraine Pryor, alongside her mother and fellow director, Marie Pryor, established Aboriginal corporation, Voice for Hope in 2022, to make a difference for Aboriginal women caught up in the Justice System. In 2007, Kat Armstrong (alongside others) established WIPAN (Women in Prison Advocacy Network) to advocate for systemic change, address the lack of support available for women in prison and upon release, and the rising recriminalisation rate for women in NSW. The work of these organisations did not suddenly appear. They have been fought for, often without recognition, by people whose expertise had long been ignored until it became convenient to platform it.
However, Isaac’s frustration about being invited into spaces to provide input, to advise, to share insight, but not to hold decision-making power resonates with many people with lived prison experience. As formerly incarcerated woman, Hayley Brown, founder of Lived Impact states: ‘the future of lived experience work is not about whether people are invited into the room, it is about whether their expertise has the authority to shape what happens inside it.’ The distinction drawn, is therefore, critical: consultation without authority is not inclusion; it is containment.
In this respect, organisations with boards led by criminalised people matter. They demonstrate what becomes possible when formerly incarcerated people are resourced to lead, not just contribute. It disrupts the idea that governance must be reserved for those who have never encountered the criminal legal system.
But there is a risk in focusing too narrowly on these examples of success. They can give the impression that the barriers are softening across the board, when in reality, most remain firmly in place.
Exclusion is Built into the System
The absence of criminalised people from boards is not incidental. It is the product of legal frameworks that explicitly and systematically exclude them.
Across Australia, people with certain convictions, particularly fraud-related offences, can be disqualified from serving as company directors. People who are bankrupt are similarly barred for set periods of time, regardless of their expertise, leadership, or the context of their so-called offending.
Layered over this are screening regimes that extend far beyond their stated purpose. In Queensland, for example, the Working with Children (Risk Management and Screening) Act 2000 underpins the Blue Card system, which is often applied broadly across organisations, including at Board level. Even where roles do not involve direct work with children, the requirement for holding a Blue Card is often imposed as a matter of policy or risk management.
The effect is predictable. Large numbers of people with criminal records are excluded outright. Not because there has been any assessment of their current capacity to contribute safely or effectively, but because the framework itself assumes exclusion as the starting point.
Governance Without the Governed
This is not an abstract issue. It has direct and personal consequences.
There are many people who have built organisations, shaped programs, and led movements from the ground up, only to find themselves legally barred from participating in their governance. Bankruptcy laws, in particular, operate in ways that disregard the structural conditions that produce financial hardship, while simultaneously stripping people of the ability to formally lead.
One of the authors of this article, has lived this reality. ‘Being excluded from Board participation in organisations I had helped establish was not a matter of community trust or capability. It was a matter of legal prohibition. The message was clear: your labour is welcome, your insight is valuable, but your authority is not,’ said Tabitha Lean.
This is the contradiction at the heart of so-called “inclusive” governance. Systems will draw on the knowledge of criminalised people, but they will not relinquish control.
The Illusion of Progress
There are, of course, exceptions, and they are important.
People like Tina McPhee, who after serving more than six years in prison is now a Board member of Project:herSELF, representing a significant shift.
McPhee was convicted of 181 counts of theft for the misappropriation of funds totalling $1,949,827.43 over which she had control by virtue of her position as a court appointed trustee. The offending was considered aggravated by McPhee’s abuse of a position of trust, and she received a life long ban by ASIC from providing financial services and from engaging in credit activity.
However, McPhee being appointed as a board member of Project:herSELF represents a regime of change for people convicted of serious fraud or other dishonesty offences who seek to apply for positions on boards. We are told not all members of Project:herSELF’s Board hold Blue Cards, which suggests that the organisation does not require them as a condition of Board participation. This approach makes it possible for criminalised women to hold governance positions within that organisation.
It is important to be clear about what this represents. It is not evidence that the system has become more inclusive. It is evidence that inclusion is only possible when organisations actively work around existing constraints.
In other words, these examples do not demonstrate that the barriers have been removed. They show how much effort it takes to navigate them.
This Work Has Been Fought For
The small openings that do exist have not emerged spontaneously. They are the result of sustained, often unrecognised advocacy.
Organisations like Sisters Inside have spent decades challenging the exclusion of criminalised women from decision-making spaces, including Boards. This work has involved pushing against legal frameworks, institutional policies, and deeply held assumptions about who is “fit” to govern. The Chairperson of Sisters Inside’s Board is now a formerly incarcerated woman.
It is important that this labour is acknowledged. Without it, the limited gains we are now seeing would not exist. But recognition alone is not enough. The conditions that produce exclusion remain largely intact.
We Don’t Want a Voice. We Want Power.
Much of the current conversation about diversity rests on the idea of giving people a “voice.” It is a language that sounds progressive, but in practice, it often reinforces the very hierarchies it claims to challenge. As Brown describes it: ‘Too often, lived experience is invited into the room in ways that are more about optics than influence. A seat at the table can become a way of signalling inclusion, while the real decisions, priorities and narratives remain controlled elsewhere.’
A voice can be heard and ignored.
A voice can be invited in and then sidelined.
A voice does not, in itself, shift power.
What is required is not more opportunities to speak, but the redistribution of decision-making authority. That includes real governance roles, the ability to set agendas, to determine priorities, and, crucially, to refuse or veto decisions that perpetuate harm.
For criminalised people, this is particularly important. We are not simply another demographic category to be represented. We are people whose lives have been shaped, constrained, and often damaged by the very systems that Boards oversee and influence.
To include us only as advisors, or in symbolic roles, is to maintain control while appearing inclusive.
Diversity That Stops at the Prison Gate
Until criminalisation is recognised as a central axis of exclusion, conversations about Board diversity will remain incomplete.
It is not enough to track cultural background, gender, or age, while leaving intact legal and regulatory frameworks that automatically disqualify entire groups of people. It is not enough to celebrate isolated examples of inclusion while the broader system continues to exclude.
If organisations are serious about reflecting the communities they serve, then they must confront the ways in which their own governance structures are complicit in exclusion.
That means challenging director disqualification laws. It means interrogating the overreach of screening regimes like Working with Children Checks/Blue Cards. It means reconsidering what risk actually looks like, and who gets to define it.
Most importantly, it means accepting that genuine inclusion will require a shift in power, not just optics.
Because the issue is not that criminalised people are missing from the table.
It is that the table has been built in a way that was never meant to include us.
Editors’ Note: Tina McPhee was contacted by RAD Faction for comment but did not respond.
Former prisoners lived experience is about prison. The vast majority of organizations that have boards have nothing to do prisons. I’m all in favour of them being given significant roles in organizations that are concerned with the welfare of prisoners and just as importantly ex-prisoners. Ex prisoners are where the crucial battle against recidivism is won or lost and I feel society is being foolish for not paying much attention to them.
But fundamentally prisoners and ex prisoners are a small part of the population and most organizations have a focus on things that have nothing to do with prisons or the justice system. I can’t help thinking there’s a fair amount of ego-centricity underlying this piece. Furthermore a criminal record stems from a conscious choice that puts it in a quite different category from matters of race, gender or disability that are the focus of most concerns about inclusion and discrimination.
Finally, do the writers really believe that people with convictions for fraud should be allowed to be company directors where they potentially have control over vasts amounts of money? Money that belongs to other people? Get real. Since when has the right to be a company director became a universal human right?