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Debate, Think Autism Sydney 2025
A tender lost over two extra pages tested the autism strategy’s promise
In short
At Think Autism Sydney in 2025, Kyriakos Gold asked whether the strategy was changing anything for autistic people or only describing them well. The panel answered that its value depended on what autistic people did with it.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
The week before Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, the enterprise of Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the opening panel, tendered for a federal government project on the definitions of community. The reply was an email saying the application could not pass. It was vague, so Gold challenged it and asked for the feedback. The application, he was told, had too many pages.
Gold told the opening panel of the conference how that happened. Government procurement forms ask enterprises like his to write inside boxes, and for his diagnosis, and for many people he knows, that format is the most difficult thing to work with. Trying to fit the boxes in Microsoft Word, his enterprise ended up two pages over the limit, and “that excluded us from a $200,000 project”. Gold put the question to the panel directly. Is anything really changing, he asked, “or are we just slapping beautiful words on a document?”
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Sources the story draws on
- Release of the National Autism Strategy 2025-31 (opens in a new tab), Australian Government (health.gov.au)
- National Autism Strategy 2025-2031 (opens in a new tab), Australian Government (health.gov.au)
- National Autism Strategy 2025-2031 Reference Group: Terms of Reference (opens in a new tab), Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing
- National Autism Strategy 2025-31: First year Implementation update (opens in a new tab), Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing
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