BY EMMA MACDONALD, 07 Dec, 2011 04:00 AM

Opposition disabilities spokesman Mitch Fifield yesterday abandoned his "bipartisan" support of the Government's National Disability Insurance Scheme to warn that Labor rhetoric is far outweighing its financial commitment to the policy.

Disabilities Minister Jenny Macklin yesterday visited the Pegasus Farm - a horse riding school in Holt for children with disabilities - after Labor adopted the National Disability Insurance Scheme into its party platform at its national conference last weekend.

BY STEPHANIE ANDERSON
05 Dec, 2011 04:00 AM

A severely disabled Canberra woman has been left without any means of communicating after thieves stole specialised equipment worth thousands of dollars last month.

Twenty-one-year-old Perrin Tucker was at a medical appointment with her mother Katrina when thieves broke into their Flynn home, causing thousands of dollars' worth of damage and taking everything electronic in sight.

"The laptop is gone, all our computing equipment is gone," Mrs Tucker said. "They even opened Christmas cards looking for money."

Scientists are testing the theory that intelligent parents are fuelling the rise in the number of autistic children.

A team of researchers at Cambridge University is exploring the link between high-achieving parents, such as engineers, scientists and computer programmers, and the development of their children.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the university, said there were signs that adults who work in science and maths-based jobs were more likely to have autistic children.

PricewaterhouseCoopers released Disability expectations; Investing in a better life, a stronger Australia; a report on disability (see http://www.pwc.com.au/industry/government/publications/disability-in-au…) and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). It says Australia does especially poorly on disability issues when compared with other OECD countries ...

A just-released report (see PriceWaterhouseCoopers) presents a range of information supporting the proposed National Disability Insurance Scheme. The paper 'Disability expectations: Investing in a better life, a stronger Australia' is "developed in collaboration with key leaders in the disability care and support field, this PwC report considers: what needs to change if the NDIS is to make a meaningful difference?" The report indicates that:

• Australia ranks 21st out of 29 OECD countries in employment participation rates for those with a disability … People with a disability in Australia are only half (50%) as likely to be employed as people without a disability.
• Almost one in two people with a disability in Australia live in or near poverty (45%). This is more than 2.5 times the rate of poverty experienced in the general population and more than double the OECD average of 22%. The OECD average for relative poverty risk is approximately 1.6, which indicates that people with a disability tend to have a poverty risk about 1.6 times higher than people without a disability. Australia is by far the worst performer on this indicator, ranking 27th out of 27 OECD countries, with a relative poverty risk of 2.7.