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Lived experience, Think Autism Sydney 2025
When employment shuts autistic people out, building a business becomes the pathway
In short
At Think Autism Sydney in 2025, the panel on autistic entrepreneurship treated self employment as a response to inaccessible workplaces, and a panellist said she wanted children to see that it was possible.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
The case for autistic entrepreneurship that the panel made at Think Autism Sydney on 31 May 2025 began with a plain observation about work. Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, told the panel that families usually aspire to see autistic people employed, and said he was not claiming that was the right aspiration. The difficulty is that “for us autistic people employment is structured in a way that is inaccessible”. So the pathway into work is sometimes a business of your own, and building a business means becoming an entrepreneur. Without structures and a system to support that, he said, autistic people have no pathway to independence.
Gold added a qualification in the same breath. Not everybody needs to be independent, he said, and society does not throw away people who cannot be. He then asked the panel whether it agreed.
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Sources the story draws on
- Supported Employment: Submission to the Department of Social Services (opens in a new tab), Inclusion Australia (published on the DSS Engage consultation site)
- Autism in Australia, 2022 (opens in a new tab), Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 27: Work and employment (opens in a new tab), United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
- Disability Royal Commission Progress Report 2025, Recommendation 7.32: End segregated employment by 2034 (opens in a new tab), Australian Government (health.gov.au)
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