Australia is already experiencing climate change losses and damages. Australian governments and other institutional actors acknowledge vulnerability, yet they centre building resilience to climate change. Resilience is frequently used as a synonym for vulnerability reduction, but important ideological differences exist. Indeed, scholars have suggested that resilience, as a politico-ideological tool of subject formation, can be considered a type of governmentality. While there is much research on the political and ideological dimensions of resilience, there is less focus on illuminating how resilience, as a form of climate governmentality, interacts with vulnerability to climate change. Drawing on a climate ethnography in regional Australia, I ask how do resilience discourses and interventions influence vulnerability to climate change in regional Australia? To answer this question, I explore examples of the historical–structural, intersectional and psychosocial determinants of vulnerability, identify key resilience discourses and interventions and examine how, what I term, climate resilience governmentality is influencing vulnerability to climate change. Unable to identify clear causality, I instead show how resilience governmentality is working to reinforce rather than redress the root causes of vulnerability in regional Australia. I observe that resilience discourses emphasise shared responsibility, but in practice, this translates into a focus on individual capacities. Subjects’ psychological dispositions are targeted and neoliberal rationalities are desired outcomes. Climate resilience governmentality is not linked to a withdrawal of the state. Instead, it is a top-down process based on government prioritisation, subject formation strategies and the building of non-governmental institutional landscapes to provide services. I argue that climate resilience governmentality is a form of governmental gaslighting because it denies the lived experiences of precarity, insecurity and structural violence throughout regional Australia. I suggest that significant government investment in regional communities, critical societal reflection and truth-telling are urgently needed to reduce vulnerability in regional Australia.