Inclusive employment means everyone gets a fair chance to find and keep a job. 

Inclusive employment means that everyone has the opportunity to work in regular workplaces, regardless of disability or background. It ensures everyone feels welcomed, is treated fairly, earns proper wages, and has access to supports to succeed.  

An inclusive workplace supports people to contribute their skills, feel valued and grow in their role. 

Inclusion Australia Policy Officer, Brooke Canham spoke with her colleague Liam Doyle about why inclusion at work matters.  

Liam said that for him, inclusion at work is a place where everyone is included and listened to. It is a place where everyone’s needs are considered and respected. Liam feels included when he can talk openly and other people’s needs are also considered and listen to. 

Liam shared that there are different kinds of environments at work that help him feel included, like having friendly people around and having clear instructions in his workplan. He values having access to inclusion support officers who are there to provide support during work, “having a mentor or someone to check in with regularly is really important, it makes me feel included.”  

Liam said that technical support, particularly with integrated AI (Artificial Intelligence) and project management programs help him to stay on top of his work.  

Liam reflected on some difficult experiences with his first job in retail, where he found the communication hard and sometimes insulting. “Direct communication and respect must be given to individuals living with a disability.” 

An inclusive workplace should make you feel welcomed. You should feel understood, your concerns should be accepted, acknowledged and respected. 

We made two Easy Read resources about Inclusive Employment: 

• Inclusive Employment Resource Guide

• About Inclusive Practice factsheet

Find out more about employment pathways for people with an intellectual disability on our Everyone can Work website. 

The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing is currently consulting on the New Framework Planning Rules and asking the public to provide submissions on the reform architecture while specifics of critical components remain unavailable or lacking detail. This prevents Disability Representative Organisations (DROs) and the broader disability community from providing fully informed feedback and undermines the integrity of the consultation process.

Key elements necessary to properly assess the proposed reforms have not yet been released or explained. These include:

• Exposure drafts of relevant legislative instruments.
• How the Support Needs Assessment has been validated, including accessibility and cultural and linguistic bias testing.
• Sample reports and clarification of assumptions regarding informal supports.
• Clear explanation of how assessed need will translate into funding outcomes, including whether automated or algorithmic decision-making will be used.
• Details of review processes and appeal rights.
• Confirmation that full merits review through the Administrative Review Tribunal will remain accessible and effective.
• Safeguards to prevent inequity during transition.
• Clarity regarding the staged rollout cohorts and timelines.

The Government has articulated principles of transparency, meaningful engagement, consultation and co-design. These principles, and Australia’s human rights obligations, must now be reflected in action through cross‑agency coordination, open communication, and collaborative decision making with representatives of the disability community.

New Framework Planning must only proceed to rollout once complete information about the reform architecture has been released, and thorough, genuine, and complete consultation has occurred. Proceeding in the absence of this, risks undermining confidence in the reform and its legitimacy, as well as potentially jeopardising the lives, safety and dignity of people with disability on the Scheme.

To ensure consultation is genuine, informed and consistent with the Government’s stated principles of transparency, meaningful engagement and co-design, Disability Representative Organisations call on the Government to: 

• Confirm publicly which, if any, of the outstanding reform materials are still under development and commit to appropriate future consultation and direct engagement with DROs on these outstanding materials.
• Provide clear timelines for the release of outstanding information, including clear communications around what, when and how the disability community and representative organisations will have the opportunity to influence design and decision making.
• Release all outstanding reform materials, including exposure drafts of legislative instruments and operational policy documents.
• Publish the methodology and validation evidence for the Support Needs Assessment, including accessibility testing, cultural and linguistic bias testing, and sample outputs.
• Publish the outcomes of the various desktop reviews and evaluative processes used to design and test the process.
• Provide clear modelling of howassessment outcomes translate into funding decisions, including transparency regarding any automated or algorithmic decision-making processes.
• Clarify review and appeal mechanisms, including confirmation that accessible and effective merits review through the Administrative Review Tribunal will remain available.
• Publish safeguards for transition, including how inequitable outcomes will be prevented and addressed.
• Provide a clear and detailed rollout schedule, including cohorts, timelines, and risk mitigation strategies.
• Work collaboratively with DROs on a staged and incremental consultation.

Disability Representative Organisations stand ready to engage constructively in reforms that are transparent, accountable and are grounded in genuine consultation. Reform legitimacy depends on respecting people with disability as key partners that bring valuable lived expertise and experience to achieve transparent, fair, and rights‑consistent policy design.

About our organisations

This statement was developed by DROs with coordination support from Disability Advocacy Network Australia (DANA) in their role as the National Coordination Function. DROs are funded by the Australian Government to represent people with disability.

The following organisations have contributed to and/or expressed their support for this joint position statement:

• Australian Autism Alliance
• Australian Federation of Disability Organisations
• Children and Young People with Disability Australia
• Community Mental Health Australia
• Disability Advocacy Network Australia
• Down Syndrome Australia Consortium
• First Peoples Disability Network Australia
• Inclusion Australia
• National Ethnic Disability Alliance
• People with Disability Australia
• Physical Disability Australia
• Women With Disabilities Australia

We acknowledge the significant contributions made by People with Disability Australia to this statement’s development.

Peer learning is when people learn with each other and from each other.

A peer is someone that is similar to you.

Peer learning is very important because it demonstrates how people with an intellectual disability can gain trust from their peers. This can also help people speak up for themselves.

Peer learning can help to make sure that people with an intellectual disability are able to share their personal experiences and share their opinions in a safe space.

Inclusion Australia Policy Officer, Brooke Canham spoke with her colleagues Rebecca Biddle and Liam Doyle about their own experiences with peer learning.

Rebecca said that learning from peers has helped her when she has difficulty with technology and when she needs help understanding something. If Rebecca has something on her mind, forgets a meeting or feels worried, she feels like peers are there to help guide her and support her.

“We can learn from each other, build connections and learn through each other’s experiences.” 

Since working at Inclusion Australia, Rebecca has attended multiple peer learning meetings where she has enjoyed sharing her experiences and listening to the experiences of her colleagues. Rebecca said, ‘peer learning has helped me be more confident, learn more skills, and helped me to listen more.’

Brooke also talked to Liam who shared his insights about what peer learning means to him. Liam said that he feels comfortable to share his own stories and that it is good to get to know each other without the stress of everyone else being around. In Liam’s words, ‘peer learning is a big yes from me!’

Beck and Liam reflected that peer learning offers a lot, ‘We all help each other in different ways. Peers help me, and I help them too!’

Inclusion Australia joins other advocacy organisations in again calling on the Government to immediately stop all Centrelink payment penalties linked to compulsory activities. These are tasks you must do to get and keep a Centrelink payment. 

Today, the Ombudsman released its second report into how compulsory activities known as mutual obligations are being run. 

The findings show serious, ongoing problems across the system. It shows that many people are being penalised based on inaccurate information with poor oversight, and that a large number of decisions are later found to be wrong.

These failures have big impacts on many people with disability who have compulsory activities, including almost 13,000 people with an intellectual disability on JobSeeker. In just the first three months of this year, almost 30% of all Centrelink payment suspensions were issued to people who have told Centrelink about their disability. Every penalty can push someone into financial crisis, making it harder to buy food, pay bills and stay safe.

You can read the full statement from the Ombudsman’s first report here.

Organisations calling on the Government to stop all Centrelink payment suspensions and to remove the Targeted Compliance Framework include: 

• Anglicare Australia 
• Antipoverty Centre 
• Anti-Poverty Network South Australia 
• Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) 
• Disability Advocacy Network Australia 
• Economic Justice Australia 
• Inclusion Australia 
• People with Disability Australia
• Physical Disability Australia 
• Single Mother Families Australia 
• Sweltering Cities 
• Women with Disabilities Australia 

We urge the Government to take immediate action to prevent further harm to people who depend on Centrelink payments to meet their basic needs. 

The Guardian’s recent reporting on proposals to introduce computer-generated NDIS plans appears to signal a substantial change in the way participant budgets may be determined. Disability Representative Organisations (DROs) emphasise that reforms require the highest standards of scrutiny, transparency and safeguards to ensure they do not undermine the rights and experiences of people with disability.  

Our concerns about the use of automation in New Framework Planning are compounded by changes to review pathways, which appear to narrow the grounds on which decisions can be challenged and limit the scope of the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), which cannot vary a participant’s plan and can only trigger a reassessment by the original decision-maker. This would significantly limit participants’ ability to correct errors or challenge flawed assumptions. At the same time, there is currently no clear guarantee that written evidence provided by participants will be considered in these processes.

We are deeply concerned that these changes, combined with increasing automation, will create significant risks, particularly for people with the highest support needs. 

People with disability, their families, and advocates have long raised concerns about the lack of transparency and accountability in how the NDIS makes decisions. Reference to ‘Computer-generated’ NDIS plans indicates Automated decision-making (ADM) – the use of computer systems to automate all or part of an administrative decision-making process. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term referring to an engineered system that generates predictive outputs such as content, forecasts, recommendations or decisions for a given set of human-defined objectives or parameters without explicit programming.

ADM and AI systems are only as reliable as the information fed into them. If historical data has under-represented people with a psychosocial disability, intellectual disability, neurodevelopmental disability, complex communication needs, people with fluctuating, multiple or complex disabilities, First Nations people, and other intersectional and marginalised communities, ADM will reproduce and amplify those gaps. This is well-established across other sectors: algorithms built from “average” cases consistently fail those whose experiences sit at the margins – including women, First Nations people, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and people with disability.

Computer-generated decisions also cannot explain how they reached a conclusion, what assumptions were prioritised, or whether the model was designed to minimise cost or standardise prices across vastly different geographic, service contexts and thin markets. People cannot meaningfully challenge a decision if they cannot see or understand how it was made. When this opacity is combined with weaker review rights, participants face the real risk of being unable to contest flawed assumptions.

These risks are heightened for the many people who already face significant barriers in navigating the NDIS or the ART, including people with an intellectual disability or those without access to informal supports, advocacy or legal representation. 

This opacity is particularly concerning in Australia, which continues to lack a comprehensive legal framework regulating the use of AI and ADM in public administration. Without regulation, there is no requirement for algorithms to be transparent, reviewable, or accountable. Issues such as privacy, data integrity, system resilience, and the risks associated with commercial AI providers remain unresolved. 

The needs assessment and new planning framework needs to be meaningfully co-designed with the disability community and their representative organisations. This includes commitments to transparency, regular meetings and clarity about timelines and when feedback and ideas can influence legislation, Rule-making and implementation. 

DROs call on the NDIA to:

• Publicly disclose current Agency proposals on where ADM or AI will be used in New Framework Planning – including in the budget allocation process – how it operates, the datasets it relies on, the degree of human oversight and capacity for positive intervention. 
• Provide public information and dedicated community briefings on every stage of the Needs Assessment and New Planning Framework, including how the Support Needs Assessment will be used to develop a budget. 
• Publish any legal advice about the reviewability of new framework plans at the Tribunal, and ensure all aspects of the New Framework Planning rules are explainable, can incorporate all relevant information, and that the plan budget is capable of being meaningfully challenged at internal and external review. 
• Partner with DRO and DRCOs to jointly agree on a strategy for co-design of all aspects of New Framework Planning and Rules development – including any proposed use of automation – by end of 2025.  

About our organisations

This statement was developed by DROs with coordination support from Disability Advocacy Network Australia (DANA) in their role as the National Coordination. DROs are funded by the Department of Social Services (DSS) to represent people with disability. 

The following organisations have contributed to and/or expressed their support for this joint position statement: 

• Australian Autism Alliance  
• Australian Federation of Disability Organisations  
• Children and Young People with Disability Australia  
• Community Mental Health Australia  
• Disability Advocacy Network Australia  
• Down Syndrome Australia   
• Inclusion Australia 
• National Ethnic Disability Alliance
• National Mental Health Consumer Alliance 
• People with Disability Australia  
• Physical Disability Australia  
• Women With Disabilities Australia 

*Statement amended 8 December 2025 with addition of endorsing organisation, National Ethnic Disability Alliance. We apologise for this omission in initial publication.

Inclusion Australia Policy Officer, Luke Nelson recently went to The Conference of State Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) at the UN in New York.

Luke was 1 of 15 people with disability from around Australia invited to attend the Conference of State Parties. We talked to Luke about this incredible achievement.

“The Conference of State Parties is an international conference for people with disabilities. I went with Catherine, the CEO of Inclusion Australia.

Catherine and I went to lots of events together. I enjoyed hearing different countries talk about their own hot topics. We listened to people from UAE, Nepal, South Korea, Zimbabwe, and more, talk about inclusion. For example, India, talked about what they are doing to increase inclusive education. The South Korean government talked about how to best support people with disabilities in terms of funding.

I was lucky to be given the chance to talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it impacts people with an intellectual disability.

Artificial Intelligence can sometimes be helpful. It can make things faster or stop simple mistakes. But most AI systems are not designed for people with an intellectual disability in mind. This can cause harm.

No country is perfect. However, I did feel that Australia is very well placed. I am pleased to be a person with disability in Australia. I am pleased to be in our system after some of the things I have seen and heard.

So here I am. 35 years old. I started my career 18 years ago. I would have never thought I would speak at the UN. I have ticked a huge career moment off my bucket list!

I will encourage people to speak up for the rest of my life. That is my job. That is what I will always do”.

You can learn more about the CRPD here.