Thriving Kids, Struggling Adults: The NSW Budget's Missing Billion

Today the NSW Government handed down its 2026–27 Budget. Over a billion dollars will flow into disability-adjacent programs across the state. It is, on the surface, a significant commitment.

If you are a working-age AuDHD Australian, almost none of it is for you.

What the budget funds

The centrepiece disability investment is Thriving Kids: $1.074 billion over five years for children aged eight and under with developmental delay or autism. It is a genuine and much needed program that we support. Children with low to moderate support needs deserve early intervention, and the AuDHD Council welcomes investment in that cohort.

But Thriving Kids is for children. The mental health package, $112.3 million across Lifeline crisis services, walk-in Medicare Mental Health Centres, and peak body funding, is focused on crisis response. The newly released Disability Inclusion Plan 2026–2029 does name employment as a priority area. It does not fund it.

This is not a budget for working-age people with AuDHD. It is barely a budget that acknowledges they exist.

Who is being left out

AuDHD refers to people who are both autistic and have ADHD. It is not a subcategory of either condition; it is a distinct experience, with its own cognitive profile, its own strengths, and its own compounding challenges.

In the workplace, those challenges are specific and significant. AuDHD people frequently describe careers that look, from the outside, like instability: jobs started with promise and abandoned; performance reviews that miss the point; burnout that arrives without warning and takes months to recover from. What is actually happening, in most cases, is that workplaces were not designed with them in mind, and no one told them they were allowed to say so.

Disclosure is its own obstacle. Many AuDHD people do not have a formal diagnosis. Many who do are not confident they will be supported, rather than managed out, if they disclose. Reasonable adjustments, which are a legal right, remain in practice a negotiation most people do not know how to have.

The working-age population contains tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Australians with AuDHD. Many are unemployed due to lack of support. Some are employed and struggling. Some are underemployed in roles that do not reflect their capability. Some have left the workforce altogether, not because they could not work, but because no workplace was built for how they work.

None of them appear in this budget.

The gaps

Three absences stand out.

Psychosocial foundational supports. The Mental Health Coordinating Council and National Disability Services had both flagged this as urgent ahead of the budget. These are the non-clinical supports that help people with psychosocial support needs, including many AuDHD people, remain connected to work, community, and daily life. They were absent from the budget entirely. Federal Minister Butler acknowledged at the National Press Club that psychosocial foundational supports are "next priority" for reform; NSW has not moved on them.

Employer capability investment. The Disability Inclusion Plan commits the NSW Government to increasing public sector employment of people with disability and encouraging disability-inclusive procurement. That is welcome. But there is no funded mechanism to build employer capability to actually hire, support, and retain AuDHD employees. Aspiration without investment is not a strategy.

Disability Royal Commission implementation. The DRC made substantive recommendations on employment for people with disability, including neurodivergent people. There is no visible allocation in this budget to implement them at the state level.

The pattern we keep seeing

Governments invest in disability at the beginning and the end of life. Children's early intervention programs. Aged care. Crisis mental health for when things have already broken down.

The middle — the decades when people are trying to build a career, earn an income, contribute to the economy, and stay well enough to keep doing it — is treated as someone else's problem. Usually the individual's.

This is not just an equity issue, though it is that. It is an economic one. Workforce participation rates for people with disability remain significantly below those of people without disability. AuDHD people, given appropriate support, adjustments, and environments designed for cognitive diversity, are often highly capable employees. The cost of not investing in their participation is not zero; it shows up in welfare expenditure, in lost productivity, in mental health system demand, in the endless downstream cost of a problem that was never addressed upstream.

What we are asking for

The AuDHD Council of Australia is calling on the NSW Government to take three concrete steps.

First, fund psychosocial foundational supports for working-age people. The policy intent exists. The need is documented. The missing piece is the money.

Second, invest in employer capability. That means funded programs to help NSW employers, starting with government agencies required to have Disability Inclusion Action Plans, build genuine AuDHD-inclusive hiring, retention, and career development practices.

Third, implement the Disability Royal Commission's employment recommendations with specific, time-bound commitments and allocated funding at the state level.

The Disability Inclusion Plan already names employment as a priority. The NSW Government has already committed to the principle. We are asking them to follow through.

If this is your experience

If you recognise the experiences described in this article, you are not alone, and you are not the problem.

We are building the evidence base, developing the employer tools, and pushing government to act. The more of us who are part of that effort, the stronger our voice becomes.

Join the AuDHD Council and be part of the effort.

The AuDHD Council of Australia is a national not-for-profit organisation focused on employment access, retention, and career sustainability for working-age Australians with AuDHD. We influence workforce policy, guide employer practice, and engage government to embed inclusive, evidence-based reform.