Autism

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:14): My question is to the Premier. How many South Australian children are NDIS participants with an autism diagnosis, and will the Premier guarantee that none of those children will be worse off due to recent federal government announcements?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:15): The Leader of the Opposition will appreciate that we are happy to go away and examine what numbers we have available to this state. The state, obviously not being the regulator of the NDIS, would not be able to do that. We don't have that information ourselves, but I would have thought that we can certainly get some decent figures around the number of people who we understand are in the community who have been diagnosed with ASD.

This is an area of public policy where I am really proud that the South Australian government is a genuine leader in. We identified it as a policy priority, not just another policy but a genuine priority before we came to office and, having come to office since then, we have been able to institute a number of genuine national or global firsts, not the least of which is having the appointment of a minister who is responsible for precisely this.

Since then we have done a lot of things. We have put autism lead teachers in our schools across the state, which has been a really important program, and other parts of the world and other parts of the country are increasingly paying attention to it because it is making a difference, particularly those people who have been trained up and rolled out. It's exceptionally expensive but really important.

South Australia has been the first place in the country to work with our universities to establish universities teaching our future teachers and educators the skills that would better enable them to accommodate people diagnosed with ASD being in the classroom. We know it is more than common, it is rare for there to be a classroom without a young person diagnosed with ASD.

The South Australian government is working on a program—and people might have seen the ads around the place 'Autism Works'—to promote to the private sector the value of employing people with autism. Tragically, too many people with autism might miss out on a job interview, not because they lack the skills or the capability, but because they might not have been looking someone in the eye while they were doing a job interview.

We think that is desperately unfortunate and we are seeking to educate the community accordingly. More than that, the South Australian government, as a major employer in the state, regardless of the agency, is having training in place to make sure that we don't make that same mistake too. That's a cultural change and it will take time.

On top of that, we have been working with a range of other organisations in government and not-for-profit organisations, funding them to go out there and do more work in the community for people with ASD, amongst other measures. This is something I am really proud of in that we are a genuine leader. We have the Autism Strategy now in place—again, not many other places in the country have that, and that is why we are going to monitor what the federal government announced yesterday very closely indeed.

The South Australian government accepts and, indeed, endorses the commonwealth making an effort to reform the NDIS. The NDIS is something we should all be very proud of. It's a fundamentally important piece of not just policy but now social infrastructure, but it does need reform because we are learning a lot about it as time goes on. We acknowledge that the growth of the number of people on the NDIS with autism is huge and is, in many ways, unsustainable and we understand why Minister Butler and his team would be seeking to address that, but what we will be running an eye over, independently of the commonwealth, is making sure that people who are currently getting access to the NDIS who no longer will into the future aren't left behind without appropriate levels of services.

That is something that we would want to be rather rigorous about as a state to make sure there are not people who are simply cut loose, and we will be forming our own independent view about that, and if we have a point of difference with the commonwealth we will certainly be making it known.