A participant argued that a grant process that excludes anyone is wrong

A participant at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne described a problem with access to funding. They had been applying for government grants and programs and found them extremely inaccessible. When they approached organisations to ask for assistance, the response, they said, treated it as though “if we help you that’s an unfair advantage”. Their question to the panel was whether to explain that they were autistic, set out the challenges they faced, and argue from a human rights perspective that they should be able to apply for the funding in a way that was accessible to them.

The human rights framing has a legal counterpart. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s guide to the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 says the Act makes it against the law to discriminate against a person because of disability when providing goods, services or facilities, and requires reasonable adjustments to give people with disability access, unless an adjustment would cause unjustifiable hardship. The guide is written for businesses and does not deal with grants, so it does not settle whether the organisations the participant approached had such a duty. It does supply the vocabulary the participant was reaching for, since in the Act’s terms help that lets a person with disability take part is described as an adjustment for access.