Autistic advocates at a strategy panel said change could start at council

The draft National Autism Strategy was the subject of the Melbourne panel on autism strategies at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, on 8 June 2024, but some of the most concrete advice in the session was about local government. A participant from Western Sydney described what changed when they stopped waiting on the national process. They had been going into their local government, they said, and asking for its policies, procedures and practices. Then they had contracted themselves, telling the council to engage them to help write the policies and practices, and changing them at a local level.

Before the national strategy, the participant said, they would have called themselves political, but they had not been engaging with the detail. Engaging with the detail locally, and educating themselves about it, was what changed things, they said, and now “I see pathways to act rather than feeling like I’m not on the oversight council so I’m at the mercy of something.” The work also affected exactly where they lived, with their own community. They said Western Sydney is where 10% of Australia’s population lives.