On the Disability-Industrial Complex Driving the National Autism Strategy.
Let’s talk plainly about the disability-industrial complex emerging around the National Autism Strategy and the Thriving Kids program.
Behind the polished language of “evidence-based practice”, “workforce reform”, and “early intervention”, a familiar machinery is grinding away - one that converts Disabled lives into markets, converts structural exclusion into billable hours, and converts political neglect into professional authority.
Behavioural organisations, consultancy firms, and large NGOs are lining up to shape these reforms because they see what’s coming: a multi-billion-dollar opportunity to consolidate power, colonise childhood, and define autistic life on their terms. Not ours.
And even when shouting "lived experience" and "We're Autistic too!", advocates for these proposals often operate within professional or commercial structures that reward allegiance to behavioural orthodoxy, speaking from positions tethered to the very industries that benefit from behavioural expansion. Representation is not liberation when it is deployed to stabilise systems of control.
This is how neoliberal disability governance works: it absorbs critique, markets identity, and redeploys it to protect the very institutions generating harm. Proximity to oppression does not cancel complicity. And harm reframed as expertise is still harm.
And the pattern is not new. And we are already seeing the consequences.
Whenever governments outsource responsibility for disability justice, an industry grows. It feeds on compliance, surveillance, functioning labels, and the fantasy that distress is an individual deficit rather than a structural harm. It rewards those who can produce the neatest data set, not the safest community.
This is how we end up with the same cycle every time:
• Behavioural programs replace developmental and relational supports
• Low-cost labour expands while skilled allied health workers are pushed out
• Choice and Control is reframed as a “risk” to be managed
• Families are funneled into narrow, one-size-fits-all “approved” therapies
• Disabled people are recast as problems in need of professional correction
This is the disability-industrial complex: a system that profitises pathologisation and sells “rehabilitation” back to us.
And the downstream impacts are devastating, far beyond therapy rooms.
When children are forced through compliance pipelines, when distress is punished instead of understood, when autistic communication is rebranded as “behaviour to extinguish”, we see ripple effects across every institution:
• Escalating school exclusions
• Restrictive practices and disciplinary pathways
• Involuntary treatment and crisis-led responses
• Surveillance-oriented family interventions
• And ultimately, the care-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately captures Disabled youth- especially those who are racialised, poor, queer, or otherwise marginalised
Much of this is driven not by individual malice but by an industrialised social-work and behavioural sector that cannot see beyond its own training. But intent does not erase impact. A system designed for control will always produce more control.
he National Autism Strategy risks entrenching this further if behavioural interests and consultancy gatekeepers dictate the terms. Thriving Kids risks becoming a funnel into corrective pathways rather than community ones.
We don’t need more programs that teach autistic children to comply. We need systems that listen, resource, and respect us.
We don’t need workforces trained to manage risk. We need workforces trained in rights, communication, development, and anti-oppressive practice.
We don’t need functioning labels. We need supports that honour lived realities without sorting us into categories of “cost”.
GRANN rejects the colonisation of Autistic lives for profit or political convenience. We reject the behavioural takeover disguised as reform. And we reject any strategy that trades away our autonomy to satisfy industry stakeholders.
A real National Autism Strategy would centre Disabled leadership, relational supports, community infrastructure, safety, interdependence, and the UNCRPD. It would dismantle the pipelines- not fortify them.
And we will keep saying this:
If reform does not centre rights, it is not reform. If reform expands behavioural control, it is not safety. If reform feeds the disability-industrial complex, it is not for us.
We are watching. We are naming it. And we will not consent to futures being designed by those who profit from our compliance.
In Solidarity
The Collaborators @ GRANN
