The bigger picture

The political question of who is permitted to heal, what counts as legitimate care, and who pays, is one of the oldest political questions in any society. Pre-modern healing traditions across cultures embedded healing in religious, kinship, ceremonial, and community frameworks. The political project of producing a formal medical profession, with state-regulated authority and exclusive professional rights, was a political settlement, contested across centuries and reaching contemporary wellness through the political tension between formal medicine and the practices that operate outside it.

The Israeli-American sociologist Eva Illouz has documented in detail how the political conditions of late twentieth-century capitalism produced what she called therapy culture: a political project of organising emotional life through professional and quasi-professional services, and of converting personal distress into commodifiable problems. The argument reaches Australian wellness through the political conditions of life coaching, of wellness retreats, of the political conversation about mental health scope, and of the broader political settlement on emotional labour as a paid commodity.

The American historian Anne Harrington documented how the political contest between mind-body medicine and conventional clinical medicine has been continuous across the modern era. Practices that drew on traditional, holistic, and integrative frameworks have moved in and out of political acceptability, depending on political conditions about evidence, regulation, and the political authority of the medical profession. The argument reaches Australian wellness through the political contests about complementary medicine, about evidence-base scrutiny, and about regulator attention on advertising claims.

The colonial transfer 

Wellness in colonial Australia inherited British political settlements about medicine, healing, and what counted as legitimate practice. The British political contest between professional medicine and folk medicine, between licensed apothecaries and herbalists, between regulated and unregulated practice, was transmitted into Australia and modified through local political conditions.

What that political vision excluded is part of the history. First Nations healing traditions, developed over millennia and grounded in Country, kinship, and ceremony, were not recognised by colonial Australian medicine. The political project of suppressing First Nations healing knowledge, particularly through the political conditions of mission medicine, did political work that continues to reach contemporary wellness politics.

Migrant healing traditions reshaped Australian wellness in successive waves. Chinese medicine, Indian Ayurveda, Filipino traditional healing, and Vietnamese herbal practice all entered Australia through migration and operated for decades in political conditions that were politically marginal to mainstream medicine. The political achievement of partial recognition for some of these traditions, ongoing across the past several decades, has been the work of political organising and slow shifts in regulatory attention.

The counterculture political moment 

The post-war political settlement on wellness was reshaped by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The political project of questioning conventional medical authority, of organising women's health collectives, of taking up Eastern practices in Western contexts, of developing holistic and integrative frameworks, operated as a political contest with broad consequences for how wellness was understood, who practised, and on what terms.

The political legacy is significant. The Australian wellness industry as it exists today is partly the result of political organising in the 1970s and 1980s, including women's health movements, environmental movements, queer health movements, and movements that organised against medicalisation of women's lives. 

The neoliberal turn and the wellness industry

From the 1980s, a different political settlement began to assert itself in wellness. The political idea that wellness was a private matter, a consumer service, and an individual responsibility, became increasingly dominant. The political project of converting collective health practices into individualised consumer services reshaped what wellness was politically.

The political conditions of the contemporary wellness industry reflect this turn. The casualisation of the workforce, the political conditions of women practitioners as the dominant labour force, the rise of premium wellness as a luxury consumer category, are all political legacies of decades of political decisions.

The political project of regulating wellness, intensifying through the 2010s and 2020s, has reshaped what practitioners can claim and what political conditions they operate inside. The political contests about cosmetic injecting, about complementary medicine advertising, about scope of practice for unregulated modalities, all reflect this political settlement.

The cultural sovereignty and evidence political moments

Two political conversations have intensified in wellness across the past decade. The political conversation about cultural appropriation, particularly in relation to yoga, meditation, ayurvedic methods, and First Nations healing practices, has reshaped what operators can claim and what cultural accountability is required. The political pressure for genuine partnership with originating communities has intensified.

The political conversation about evidence-based practice has hardened in some quarters, with public commentary about wellness practices that do not fit conventional clinical evidence frameworks becoming sharper and more hostile. Practitioners working in traditional, multicultural, or integrative frameworks are politically exposed.

The present moment

Regulator attention, cultural sovereignty politics, and the political backlash against rights-based recognition are reshaping wellness now.

Regulator attention on cosmetic injecting, complementary medicine advertising, and scope of practice across unregulated modalities is intensifying continuously. The political settlement on what wellness practitioners can claim, advertise, and offer is being renegotiated through federal and state regulatory action.

The political contest about cultural sovereignty in wellness practice, accelerating since the 2010s, is sustained. Studio operators, retreat leaders, and individual practitioners offering services rooted in Asian, South Asian, Indigenous, or Pacific traditions sit inside political contests they did not author.

The political backlash against feminist, queer, trans, and racial-justice politics reaches wellness through hostility to inclusive practice, through political attacks on body-positive movements, and through the wellness-to-conspiracy political pattern that has reached parts of the global wellness sector.