Autism Aspergers Advocacy Australia

The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission is conducting research into the experiences of students with disability in Victorian schools.

This follows an increase in complaints to the Commission relating to disability discrimination in education, and concerns raised by parents of children with disability, disability advocacy groups and members of the Commission’s Disability Reference Group about the provision of education services to students with disability.

The Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs omitted a submission from A4 to its Inquiry into Commonwealth funding and administration of mental health services. The Committee's final report does not mention autism at all ... it does not acknowledge that it received a submission from A4.

An edition of the science journal, Nature, focuses on autism (click here).

The edition includes ...

Editorial

The mind’s tangled web.

Efforts to elucidate how genes and the environment shape the development of autism, although making progress, still fall far short of their goal.

Michelle Griffin, August 26, 2011

VICTORIAN education authorities insist they have the right to restrict the number of integration aides and other specialists that they hire - even if it means discriminating against students with disabilities.

And the state says it would cost almost $1 billion if it had to to hire an integration aide for every student with an IQ of 75 or less, which it could not afford.

the inaugural meeting of the Australasian Society for Autism Research (ASfAR) will be held next week at APAC in Perth on Saturday 10th. See the attached flyer for details.

Media Release

Autism Asperger Advocacy Australia (A4) calls on the Treasurer, Mr Swan, to ignore the Business Council of Australia’s simplistic and morally bankrupt advice on Disability Support Pensions. The Business Council of Australia (BCA) is calling for cuts to disability support.

In a letter to the Treasurer, Bob Buckley, A4’s Convenor, says “the views of the BCA on this issue are not based on facts and are economically unsound. BCA members, Australia’s top 100 companies, should be embarrassed.”

The A4 Management Group approved A4 sending the letter (link below) to the United Nations periodic review of human rights.

A 1998 STUDY that unleashed a major health scare by linking childhood autism to a triple vaccine was "an elaborate fraud", the British Medical Journal has charged.

Blamed for a disastrous boycott of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in Britain, the study was retracted by The Lancet last year and its senior author disgraced, after the country's longest-running hearing, for conflict of interest and unethical treatment of patients.

The New Zealand High Court has knocked back the Ministry of Health, ruling in favour of nine parents of disabled adults, saying they are eligible for financial support from the ministry.

A group of nine parents of disabled adult children took the Government to the Human Rights Tribunal last year, arguing that it was unfair the Ministry paid carers only if they were not related to the patient.

The tribunal found the ministry had discriminated against the parents, but the ministry appealed the decision to the High Court.

As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism.