Mr. Adam Harris:

I will make a few points in response to Senator Flynn's questions. There is lots of goodwill happening on the ground in the context of removing some of these practical barriers. The biggest problem we are seeing is a lack of joined-up thinking. Even in some areas where there is joined-up thinking within individual Departments, it is not happening between the NGO sector and the Government as a whole. For example, there may be steering committees within individual Departments but there is not enough interdepartmental collaboration. Very often there are not enough formal pathways for NGOs to take when we get a query from a Ukrainian family that has just arrived here. We are often calling up contacts who may or may not be the right ones. They try to help but it is all done on a goodwill basis instead of having formal pathways to go through, and particularly in respect of education and health.

On housing, two things are important. The first is accessibility. We need to respect and understand that settings such as hotels are not accessible for autistic people. Those barriers are as significant for people with hidden disabilities as physical barriers may be for people with physical disabilities. Training is also important. Obviously, we do not know how long this conflict will last. Very often, when autistic people are not understood in settings, school places can break down and people can frequently get kicked out of clubs and sporting organisations because of their needs. I would be very concerned about what would happen with a family supporting an autistic person or family to live with them, but not having the understanding around what their needs are. That arrangement might not be successful in the long term. We also know that our community is very open to exploitation and that it disproportionately experiences things like mate crime. Training and safeguarding are very important.

I will elaborate a little further on the cultural piece. For families within the disability community, very often the greatest support they have when they start their journey is the other families who have been on the journey a few years ahead of them. Families learn from each other. We should be trying to harness what we already have in that infrastructure to integrate Ukrainian people into this disability community, so we have that chance to learn from one another. That is very important.

With regard to co-occuring experiences, and we have alluded a little to this already, when we talk about culture we know that a disproportionate percentage of autistic people are also members of the LGBT community. When autistic people are members of ethnic minorities, very often their diagnoses get overlooked. It is important to remember that in disability-proofing our supports we need to be thinking about it in an intersectional way also.