I’m an autistic entrepreneur from Brisbane that has recently exited his company and now wants to devote his life to empowering autistic people, specifically I want to do this through employment programs.
In America there exists a number of highly successful autism employment programs, such as the JPMorgan autism pilot which took 85 autistic people and after 1 year found them to be 140% more effective than a team of experts with decades of experience.
The result of the JPMorgan pilot is a literal business plan which can be copied in other organisations such as here in Australia.
I want to help create the conditions for this program to be run inside Australia, as well as others which have been proven to be highly effective at an even bigger scale.
Another good example of a fully built and functional program which is ready to go right now today is the Israeli military and its unit 9900 experiment, in Israel they have mandatory military service, which means they have to be innovative with disabled service people, they designed an autistic only branch of the military that plays to the strengths of autistic people and by controlling the environment they successfully made a supportive environment which gets the best out of autistic people, the result of this is that there simply is no widespread issue of autistic unemployment at the scale we have in Australia.
What we have today in Australia is a group of 80,000 unemployed autistic people, roughly a third of which are above average intelligence and possess all the qualities you want in a worker, but have never been given a chance to work in a truly supportive environment designed for them such as unit 9900.
I am a tech entrepreneur, I have run a 250 software developer group in Brisbane, one of the largest in the entire country, I understand well employment pathways and to me what I see happening is a crying shame.
The Israelis refused to write people off, and as a result they have solved autistic unemployment, in Australia we have highly intelligent autistic people that want to work on welfare for 30 years, that is not in the governments best interest, and it is not in the individuals best interest.
I’m here to highlight 2 value propositions today, the first is that the NDIS was created to increase employment, it has failed to do that in any meaningful way, and the candid discussions I have had with very senior executives indicate that there is no sign of that happening at any point.
The federal government funds the cyber security innovation centre named AustCyber, I love this organisation, one of its reports is called the cyber security sector competitiveness plan, in that research it tells us that we have skills shortage of 17,600 Cyber workers by 2026 backed by a UNSW study.
At the same time we have enough unemployed highly intelligent highly functional autistics that want to do that job and have an interest in IT to completely solve that skills shortage, the only missing puzzle piece is a supported on the job training program which tests them on merit instead of 30 year old unscientific interview techniques, it’s very obvious to anyone who spends a few moments thinking about it that watching someone do the job is more effective than talking about doing the job, but for some reason we don’t do that, and autistic people are unfairly written off despite being the best candidates for the job, we have demonstrated that with the JPMorgan study which saw
long term unemployed high school educated candidates being 140% more effective than PhD educated experts.
So we have skills shortage 17,600 cyber jobs, and the existing initiatives the federal government has funded only produce 500 new candidates per year nationally, which does not even cover the interest let alone the backlog.
At the same we have more than 17,600 highly intelligent and interested in IT unemployed autistics that we have scientifically proven to be the best possible choice for this role and similar roles requiring the enhanced attention to detail, and other autistic qualities, and we have proven that the only barrier to entry is an inexpensive controlled supportive office environment to be created, which we literally have business plans for that can be copied 1:1.
The NDIS is getting more expensive, and we have the opportunity here to reduce that liability and act in the best interests of the autistic individuals, which make up 40% of all NDIS participants.
I know a very large number of adult autistics that want to work and have NDIS packages well over 250k per year, if we copied the unit 9900 model we would spend nowhere near that amount and be acting in the best interests of the individuals.
We need to copy the Israeli military and make an Australian cyber security autistic military base.
What are the benefits of doing that? Well it pays for itself and saves money, because employed people produce taxes and will rely on less NDIS support going forward.
It also solves the biggest issue we have of national security, we are 17,600 cyber jobs short, we are risking cyber attacks that could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage, when fixing the skills shortage and giving ourselves the best chances of protection costs less than 10% of that amount.
Services Australia alone administers 180 billion dollars of payments each year, a single cyber attack could disrupt the entire operation and cause that amount of damage by halting payments, paying people more or less than they should, deleting records, corrupting records, etc.
We also must consider things like hospitals losing access to software, or infrastructure like power plants being sabotaged, these are all easy to do and we are not protected.
So where does that leave us?
We can spend 5 billion to make a cyber only military base that will solve the cyber skills shortage and massively reduce future welfare liabilities, which protects us directly from hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage and pays for itself because it’s cheaper than having tens of thousands of autistics on the NDIS for no reason when they can and indeed want to work, and we know it already works because we have a blueprint that has worked at scale from Israel.
This might sound ambitious, but we are a team of world leading experts with PhD’s in fields like finance, economics, education and other areas.