Beyond Selidor

See, I disagree with you in that regard when it comes to the Hunger Games, not so much for the ending, but because the whole narrative contorts itself into knots to avoid Katniss ever getting her hands dirty or doing anything morally reprehensible. So yes, it ends with some of the injustices still in place (and its heroine finding a way to outrun/hide from those injustices, in her own space, on her own terms, with her trauma), but she's never had to descend to the level of the oppressive systems against which she fought. (Or at least that's my memory of it. It's been a while.)

The big Australian dystopias for me were:

Victor Kelleher's Taronga (a stand alone novel set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, the protagonist has developed telepathic powers and can communicate with animals; pretty much every Australian of my generation was taught this novel at some point during high school English class)

Kelleher's loosely linked trilogy Parkland, Earthsong and Fire Dancer. The three are a bit complicated to summarise so I have linked to blog posts I wrote about each nearly a decade ago.

Kelleher's stand alone novel The Beast of Heaven (two computers have been programmed to debate whether to trigger a nuclear device that will wipe out all life on Earth, and their choice hinges on whether the one can convince the other that human beings are worthy of continuing to exist, or vice versa).

Gillian Rubinstein's novel Galax Arena, in which abandoned children from poorer parts of the world are kidnapped to what they think is a circus arena in outer space, to perform for aliens. In actual fact, they are still on Earth and their performances (dangerous, done without safety equipment, with frequent deaths) are done to generate and harvest the children's adreneline, which is used to artificially prolong the lives of the extremely wealthy. The book is an extremely unsubtle metaphor for the exploitation of the 'third world' by the wealthy inhabitants of more privileged countries.

John Marsden's Tomorrow series, in which a group of teenagers who spent a week camping in the remote bushland return to their rural hometown to find that it was used as the starting point in an invasion of Australia; the teenagers have to flee back to the bush and they decide to become guerrilla fighters. It's never said outright who the invading country is, but it's pretty obvious from context that it is Indonesia, and Marsden later got a lot of criticism for the racism implicit in that framing. Your mileage may vary in this regard — it's pretty clear to me that the series, written in the '90s in direct reaction to what was going on in East Timor at the time (to which Australia did nothing in response), was meant to be a rebuke to Australian complacency, and the attitude that wars were something that happened far away. It was also a rebuke to politicians at the time continuing to cosy up to the US — in the series, politicians assume that the (real-world) alliance with the US means that America will step in and stop the invasion, whereas instead what happens is that America airlifts politicians and the wealthy out of the country and then abandons invaded Australia to its fate, and only New Zealand and Papua New Guinea do anything to help.

There are, as you would imagine, a lot of Australian dystopias that tackle climate change as a subject (so the idea, which I saw someone state recently on a panel of SFF authors/reviewers, that no SFF books of more than 20 years ago tackled climate change is laughable). One series I remember fondly is a quintet of books — aimed at middle grade rather than YA readers — by Jackie French, in which Australia has become so hot that going outside in daytime is impossible, and people have adapted by becoming nocturnal, living more like subsistence farmers. If I remember correctly, this one is very bluntly 'technology/industrial revolution bad' without much nuance.

The Kelleher books are probably my favourites, but Ruth Park's My Sister Sif comes a close second, because it's done so subtly that when you realise it's a dystopia it's absolutely horrifying. What you think you're reading is a science fiction story with themes of family drama, the weight of parental expectation, and tensions between siblings, set against this beautiful backdrop of a fictional Pacific island in which some people have developed the ability to live and breathe underwater. And then, every so often, there will be a throwaway line about tigers being extinct, or the main character's toddler niece/nephew never having seen a butterfly — just left there quietly, like part of the furniture. It's the matter of fact way that these things are revealed that makes them so powerful, and so horrific.

I'm not saying any of these books is particularly groundbreaking, and my deep affection for them is in large part coloured by nostalgia. The only one which I truly think still stands up is My Sister Sif. But none of them let their protagonists off the hook — they're still allowed to be good, brave, principled people, but they are never allowed to keep their hands clean. They live in dystopias, and the muck of that bleeds into their lives and choices, and the narratives do not blame them for that.