A panellist warned against building a segregated support system for autistic founders

At the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne in June 2024, a panellist whose focus, by their own account, was on changing existing systems made an argument about how support for autistic entrepreneurs should be built. Australia, the panellist said, was at a point where the end of segregated workplaces and segregated schools was being called for. Building a separate support system for autistic founders at that moment risked repeating the pattern the country was trying to leave behind.

The session was titled Autistic Entrepreneurship: Building a Support Ecosystem, and its premise was that such an ecosystem needed to be designed. The panellist accepted that support was needed and had doubts about how it was being designed. Late in the session, when Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, raised the notion of systems change, the panellist went back to rights. The right to support to start a business and be entrepreneurial, the panellist told the room, was already in the United Nations disability convention. The Disability Royal Commission, the panellist said, had called for an end to segregation. Together, those two points framed the choice the panellist put to the room, between setting up something new and separate for autistic entrepreneurs and making what already exists accommodate them.