NableU Advocacy
Advocacy & Submissions
We don’t just work around broken systems. We work to change them. NableU isn't just building systems. We also challenge existing systems and help shape new systems for our people. Many of the barriers experienced by disabled and neurodivergent people are not inevitable consequences of disability. They are consequences of systems that were designed around assumptions about how people communicate, organise themselves, access services, make decisions and ask for help. We want to change that.
Advocacy, research, consultation and policy engagement are part of NableU’s formal purpose, alongside building practical tools and community infrastructure. Our constitution explicitly commits us to advancing agency, autonomy, cognitive equity, accessibility, inclusion and meaningful participation.
From lived problems to system change
NableU is being built close to the problems it is trying to solve.
That gives us a useful perspective: we can see where policy intent, service design and lived reality stop lining up.
When we find those gaps, we do more than point at them.
We examine how the system works, identify where the failure occurs, gather evidence and lived experience, and propose practical ways to make it work better.
Our advocacy is therefore not separate from our product work. The same problems that lead us to build better tools often reveal where wider structural change is needed.
What we advocate for
Our work is centred on a few consistent principles:
Agency and autonomy People should have meaningful control over their own support, relationships, information and decisions.
Cognitive equity Systems should not quietly privilege people who can navigate bureaucracy, communicate in expected ways, remember complex processes or tolerate high executive-function demands.
Accessible systems by default Accessibility should not depend on someone repeatedly proving why they need an alternative pathway.
Lived experience as system evidence When the same failures keep happening to people, those experiences are not merely anecdotes. They can reveal defects in the design of the system itself.
Clear authority and accountability People should be able to understand who is making a decision, what authority they are using, what evidence it is based on and how that decision can be challenged.
Technology that strengthens human agency AI and digital systems should help people understand, decide and act. They should not quietly acquire authority over people because an algorithm produced a confident answer.
Practical reform Criticism matters when something is wrong. But wherever possible, we want to go further and show what a better system could actually look like.
Our submissions
NableU contributes to government consultations, parliamentary inquiries, standards development and other reform processes where our experience and work can add something useful.
Current work includes submissions concerning:
Artificial intelligence
How Australia can benefit from AI while protecting human agency, accessibility and accountable decision-making.
Our position is that AI can significantly reduce cognitive and administrative barriers, but cognition must remain separate from authority. AI should assist human judgement and agency rather than silently becoming a decision-maker.
NDIS Support Coordination and Connection
How support coordination and connection functions can help participants build genuine capability and relationships without creating unnecessary dependency or another layer of gatekeeping.
We are particularly interested in participant choice, continuity, cognitive accessibility and preserving direct relationships between participants and the people who support them.
Foundational and disability supports for children and young people
How disability support outside individual NDIS plans can be designed around real families, real communities and the practical gaps people encounter between systems.
We advocate for supports that are navigable, accessible and connected rather than requiring families to become experts in fragmented service systems.
Supported Independent Living commissioning
How changes to commissioning and market structures can improve quality without reducing participant choice or concentrating too much power in organisations around the person.
Our concern is not simply whether a market is regulated, but whether the resulting structure preserves the participant's ability to choose, understand and change their supports.
These workstreams are already being developed in NableU's advocacy programme.
We are not interested in advocacy theatre
A submission is not useful merely because it says the right things.
We want our advocacy to be specific enough to influence design.
That means asking questions such as:
Where does the system actually fail?
Who carries the cognitive or administrative burden when it does?
What incentives are producing the behaviour?
What information or authority is missing?
What unintended consequences will a proposed reform create?
And what could reasonably be changed?
Sometimes the answer is policy.
Sometimes it is regulation.
Sometimes it is technology.
Sometimes it is simply redesigning a process around the humans who actually have to use it.
Building the alternative matters too
NableU has an unusual position because we are not only advocating for better systems.
We are building one.
That means ideas such as participant agency, explicit consent, accessible communication, clear authority, cognitive equity and accountable AI have to survive contact with actual software, actual workflows and actual people.
That constraint is valuable.
It forces us to turn principles into mechanisms.
Our aim is to demonstrate that systems can be both more humane and more rigorous — and that accessibility, autonomy and accountability do not have to be competing goals.
Contribute to our advocacy
The strongest advocacy is rarely produced by one organisation speaking for everyone.
We want to hear from disabled and neurodivergent people, families, support workers, coordinators, researchers, practitioners, community organisations and others who have direct knowledge of the systems we are examining.
You might have:
lived experience that exposes a recurring system problem; evidence or research relevant to one of our submissions; professional experience that helps explain why a system behaves the way it does; a proposal for how something could work better; or an opportunity for NableU to contribute to a consultation, inquiry or reform process.
We are particularly interested in patterns — problems that appear individual until enough people compare notes and discover that the same system is producing the same outcome repeatedly.
Have something we should look at? Get in touch.