THE Canberra Liberals are calling for the ACT Government to improve access to public autism assessments.
According to the Liberals, assessments are currently only available to Canberra children who have been referred before the age of 12, whereas other jurisdictions provide free or subsidised public assessments up to the age of 16, 18 or even older.
Once again, the ACT Government has failed autistic people in the ACT. They created a secret "disability health strategy" without mentioning autism.
Late last week, SOfASD's chair, who happens to also be A4's Convenor, was invited to a disability health "roundtable" and provided with a secret strategy paper. The only mention of autism in the 83 page paper is in a quote from a European document that suggests autism is a sub-diagnosis of intellectual disability. Autism is not mentioned at all in the Australian (or ACT) context.
I write to you as a systemic advocate for autistic people. Systemically, the ACT Government's former "no wrong door" policy has become a "no right door" policy. Note: the "no wrong door" policy was missing its punctuation, while the "no right door" has none.The letter below asks that a person who lodged multiple complaints with the ACT Police complaints department some time ago is asked "to contact them herself" apparently to lodge another complaint about complaints not being processed. This suggested course of action is:
The police in the ACT made various statements to our Legislative Assembly and to the media. SOfASD wanted more detail.
The first request was ...
... for any information held by the AFP showing that autism is a mental health issue, or that ACT police or other parts of the ACT Government regard autism as a mental health issue.
This response shows training material about Intellectual Disability that fails to properly represent issues relevent to autism spectrum disorder (ASD).