Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to respond to the member for Canning’s query. It is well known in this place that the member for Canning has a particular interest in autism, and he has lobbied me on a number of occasions about autism. He will be very interested to know that the meeting I had immediately before coming to the Main Committee was with Bob Buckley from A4 and ASA, the national autism organisation. Bob Buckley is an extremely passionate advocate for parents, particularly, and children with autism spectrum disorder. I wish we could do all the things that Bob wants us to do but, of course, there are issues to do with state responsibilities and Commonwealth responsibilities and amounts of revenue available to spend on every problem that could be fixed.

Having said that, now that the mental health package is being bedded down and we have had a substantial injection of funds into mental health, I was happy to tell Bob this morning—and I am happy to tell the member for Canning now—that my goal in next year’s budget is to work on a substantial autism package to address what I think is a glaring difficulty in the community for parents of children with autism and the children themselves falling through cracks and not getting the early intervention that is needed, not getting the correct early diagnosis and therefore not being saved from a difficult life when they could have a very productive life. One of my goals in the next 12 months is to work on an autism package.

In this budget, though, I am pleased to tell the member for Canning that the mental health package item to do with accessing psychologists through the Medicare Benefits Schedule means that, after referral from a GP or psychiatrist, psychologists will be able to be accessed by children with autism spectrum disorder. This is an improvement for them and means that they will be able to see psychologists on the MBS when they have been referred by a GP or a psychiatrist. That is a substantial step forward, and Mr Buckley was very pleased to hear that.

In last year’s budget, the member for Canning may remember, we altered the requirements for access to the carers allowance and the carers payment. Many children with autism spectrum disorder were falling through the cracks in the various definitions in the criteria and we enabled the carer of any child with autism spectrum disorder to have access to carers allowance and carers payment, so that was an improvement for them last year. We are making gradual steps forward in each budget, but I would like to be able to do more for them in next year’s budget.

One of the difficulties with autism is that it falls between many stools. There is no one department in the Commonwealth government which is responsible for autism spectrum disorder. So FaCSIA has significant responsibilities, DEWR has responsibilities and the Department of Health and Ageing has responsibilities. We are trying to narrow that down so that one area has more responsibility and control. The member for Canning would remember that we had a conference here last year, which I initiated with the member for Casey, who is also a passionate advocate for services and support for families with children who have autism. That conference came up with a number of recommendations, one of which was a research project to drill down into what sorts of services would be useful for people with autism spectrum disorder. That has been funded and is nearing completion, and we will soon have the response from the research that arose from that conference we held last year.

So we are making steps forward. We could do a great deal more in terms of respite. One problem with respite, of course, is that the services are largely provided by the states under the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement. Unfortunately, because of that, the Commonwealth have little control over how that money is spent. We would like to have a lot more control. I think there is a chink of light for us in that area, because the mental health package also contains support for 650 new respite places for people with mentally ill children. Therefore, I guess we have broken the dam wall a bit through this mental health package, and we might look to see how we could do that further in areas that affect families with children affected by autism.

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