Corrected 25 August 2026, shortly after publication. This story first said 55 submissions are published. It is 56: 51 pdfs and five in Word format. Our count had matched only .pdf and .docx and missed a single submission filed as .doc. The figure the Department gives for submissions RECEIVED, 60, is unchanged, so the gap between received and published is four rather than five. Nothing else in the story changes.

What is being decided

Supported employment is the part of disability policy that decides where a person with high support needs works, on what terms, and for how much. It is also the area the Disability Royal Commission split on. The Department is explicit that this consultation feeds that: the findings, it says, will also help us consider the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability in relation to employment.

The process began with a discussion paper in March 2025. Written submissions closed on 22 June 2025, however the Department accommodated extensions for many respondents to capture their contributions, and In total 60 submissions were received. Fifty-six of those are published as individual documents, 51 of them PDFs and five in Word format, from named organisations including the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations, Australian Business Industrial and a long list of providers and advocacy bodies.

The eight themes, in the Department's words

These are the Department's summary of what it heard, not ours, and not a set of decisions. They are worth reading closely because the wording of a theme is usually the first sign of where a policy is heading.

  • Lived experienceEmpower people with disability to make informed choices and co-design policies and services
  • Pathways to open workMaximise access to open, mainstream employment through redesigned school-to-work supports and career development supports, and government leadership
  • An integrated systemA seamless system linking employment options, income support, and services like the NDIS, Job Access and Services Australia
  • Employer viabilityADEs and other employers would benefit from support to become commercially robust and remain financially viable while they evolve to offer increasingly inclusive job settings
  • Employer demandEncourage mainstream employers to adopt inclusive practices and set public sector employment targets
  • Workplace cultureFoster work environments that support people with disability to maintain work
  • WagesOpportunities for higher wages across all job settings, ensuring fair and equitable pay wherever possible
  • LanguageDevelop shared language consistent with international usage and new guidance for the sector

Two of those repay attention. The fourth is about Australian Disability Enterprises, the supported employment providers at the centre of the argument about segregated work and pay, and its framing is that they should be helped to stay viable while they evolve rather than be wound down or left alone. That is a position, stated as a theme.

The eighth is that the sector cannot yet agree what to call any of this. A consultation whose eighth finding is that shared language still needs developing is telling you the definitional work is unfinished eighteen months in, and definitions here are not cosmetic: what counts as supported employment determines who is covered by whatever follows.

The timetable, and where it stops

The Department says it has extended the Supported Employment consultation period to allow for further meaningful engagement into 2026. The published schedule for that extension has two stages, and both are now in the past.

First, Between 24 October 2025 and 26 November 2025, the Department held seven online workshops with supported employment providers, disability service providers, peak bodies, disability representative organisations, advocacy organisations and people with lived experience. Then, Between December 2025 and 27 February 2026, there will be direct consultation with people with disability and people with lived experience.

That second window closed six months ago. The page nonetheless still reads The second stage of focused consultation workshops and discussions with people with disability and their family representatives is currently underway, and still invites people who want to engage in 2026 to write to the policy team.

We are not reading that as a stalled process. A page whose text has not caught up with its own dates is an extremely common thing, and consultation timetables move for ordinary reasons. What it does mean is that a person with disability arriving at that page today cannot tell from it whether the door is still open, which is a real problem for a process whose first theme is empowering people with disability to make informed choices.

What we have not read

The fifty-six published submissions. They are individual PDFs on the Department's own site and they are the substance behind the eight themes, including whatever the Human Rights Commission and the disability peaks said about wages and about ADEs. The themes above are the Department's characterisation of that material, and a characterisation is not the same thing as the material. We intend to read the submissions and report what they actually say.

Until then the honest position is this: the Department has published a fair and specific account of what it heard, the submissions that would let anyone check that account are published too, and nobody appears to have gone through them.

What to watch

Three things. Whether a report or decision follows the February stage, and when. Whether the promised shared language and sector guidance appear, since that is the piece everything else rests on. And whether the government's response to the Disability Royal Commission's employment recommendations lands separately from this process or through it, because the Department has tied the two together in its own description and only one of them has a public timetable.

Primary sources

  1. Department of Social Services, Next Steps in Supported Employment: Consultation on the way forward (read 25 August 2026): the consultation period of 25 March 2025 to 22 June 2025; that the consultation was extended into 2026; that 60 submissions were received and that extensions were accommodated; the eight emerging themes quoted and summarised above; the seven online workshops between 24 October and 26 November 2025 and who attended them; the direct consultation scheduled between December 2025 and 27 February 2026; the statement that the second stage is currently underway; the invitation to engage in 2026 via the policy team; and that the findings will help the Department consider the Disability Royal Commission's employment recommendations.
  2. Department of Social Services, Next Steps in Supported Employment: Public Submissions (read 25 August 2026): the 56 published submissions, 51 as PDFs and 5 as Word documents, and the organisations named above.
  3. engage.dss.gov.au (read 25 August 2026): the Department's consultation hub and its index of current and previous consultations, from which this consultation was located.

Methodology

Everything above comes from the Department's own consultation pages, read in full on 25 August 2026, rather than from any summary of them. The eight themes are quoted or closely paraphrased from the Department's published list and are labelled throughout as the Department's characterisation of the submissions, not as findings of ours or as decisions of government. We counted the published submission PDFs on the public submissions page and make it 56 against the 60 the Department says it received; the difference is not explained on the page and we have not assumed a reason. We have not read the submissions themselves and say so above. The observation that the published timetable ended on 27 February 2026 is ours, from the Department's own dates against today's; we have not asserted that the process has stalled, only that the page does not say where it is up to. We have not sought comment from the Department.