The federal government has announced plans to roll out its new ‘Thriving Kids’ program - replacing the NDIS for Autistic kids and kids with developmental delay with block funded programs. This includes expanding and championing harmful behaviour change programs, such as Inklings.

This change rips away individualised supports, including therapies, aids, and flexible help that families rely on, and replaces them with one-size-fits-all programs designed by government and large providers. Families will be left with no real choice or control.

Programs like Inklings have no long-term evidence of safety or effectiveness. In reality, Inklings is an experimental intervention on babies without informed consent. It also risks encouraging Autistic children to hide their natural traits through “masking,” something research links to burnout, poor mental health, and tragically, suicidality. Calling this “evidence-based” is misleading. In reality, it is an experimental intervention on babies without informed consent. Families are being misled, Disability advocates are being excluded, and the Autistic communities' cries are being blatantly ignored.

The economic impact is also clear: when children lose supports, parents (especially mothers) are forced to leave work. This widens the gender pay gap, reduces workforce participation, and weakens the economy. At the same time, block-funded programs funnel money into large providers, undermining local disability workers and small community services. Jobs will be lost, wages driven down, and skilled staff pushed out of the sector — eroding the diverse, flexible workforce that families rely on. Every dollar invested in the NDIS generates more than double in returns -  but that investment is now being cut away from children who need it most.

Years of work from advocates have been thrown aside in favour of holding the budgetary line. The promises made in the landmark National Autism Strategy (NAS) are being rendered redundant. Disabled People’s Representative Organisations (DPROs) have not endorsed this program.This undermines Australia’s obligations under both the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which require governments to respect self-determination, free prior and informed consent, and co-design with affected communities.

This is not co-design.

This is not evidence-based. 

This is not safe. 

We call on Minister Mark Butler and the Australian Government to: 

1. Halt the rollout of Thriving Kids until independent safety evaluations are complete, and guarantee no children will be removed from the scheme or have their funding significantly cut in the meantime.
2. Engage meaningfully with advocates and DPRO’s and work with national advocates to install a DPRO led review panel to provide independent review of programs prior to implementation.   
3. Ensure suggested programs comply with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). 
4. Resume genuine engagement with community and advocates and review of previous engagement and feedback which seems to have been disregarded in the case of Inklings.