Hansard 28 August 2008

Ms Burke ... (see www.hansard.act.gov.au/hansard/2008/pdfs/P080828.pdf)

Many families in the ACT have been left out in the cold by this hopeless Stanhope government’s neglect of a very major area in disability services, and that is autism. Therapy ACT is hopelessly underresourced. I heard Mrs Dunne talking about some aspects of this, and I thank her for that because she knows that, for seven or eight years, this has been a passion of mine within the ACT. I have watched frustratingly the services diminish; yet the need escalates to a level that none of us in this place fully understands. Therapy ACT is hopelessly underresourced and the people there try
to do their best. But the Chief Minister transferred half of the $1 million allocated by former health minister Michael Moore for therapy services into education. Autism Asperger ACT Inc has tried repeatedly to find any evidence that one dollar of the $1 million has been spent on autism services and has come up with nothing.

I have asked—and the minister and other people will know if they look at the notice paper—dozens of questions on notice to try to get the bottom of what is being spent. It is like a quagmire; it is a mishmash of part answers, a bit of funding here, not sure about the answer there. I have asked repeated questions of the health minister, Ms Gallagher, as to what is being done about autism services. The short answer is: in real terms, nothing.

The first Australian report on the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders was released in March 2007. The core finding of the report is that there is one child with an autism spectrum disorder in every 160 children in the six to 12-year-old age group. As such, autism spectrum disorders are now more prevalent than cerebral palsy, diabetes, deafness, blindness and leukaemia combined. When the minister was asked on notice by the opposition about the progress of the government in implementing the recommendations from the autism national best practice guidelines formulated by the
commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing she replied:

Current practice of Therapy ACT is aligned with the key elements of these guidelines.

What a fob off! One of the key elements of the commonwealth’s guidelines which inform the federal government’s $190 million autism initiative is that autistic children need 20 hours of intensive intervention a week. It is clear that the current practice of Therapy ACT is severely misaligned with this statement of best practice. There is no match at all. So badly off are autistic children in this jurisdiction that they get even less than average children get in preschool hours.

This government’s autism intervention unit gives two four-hour group sessions per week, involving no clinicians. For the rest, an autistic child gets, at best, six sessions in total. Each one is delivered at six-week intervals. That is hardly anything like best practice, minister. You have to call it worst practice as it is so close to nothing.

Indeed, Therapy ACT seem to be operating on the now outdated assumption that there is nothing much you can do about autism and families should have to cope as best they can on their own. We know where they get that catchcry from because we hear the Minister for Health all the time throw her hands up in the air, saying, “There is nothing we can do. It is not my fault. It is the commonwealth’s problem.” The lack of autism services really is a disgrace. This jurisdiction is the only one, apart from Tasmania, not to even fund the autism association. This is the capital city of Australia. I have just given members the statistics on how bad the prevalence of autism is and how bad Asperger’s syndrome disorder is.