The Hon. Mark Butler MP
Minister for Disability
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Dear Minister Butler
Subject: Government response to disability-related filicide
Autism Aspergers Advocacy Australia (A4) notes the question and your response below.
JOURNALIST: Can I ask on the Mosman Park suspected double murder suicide? It's been described as a tragedy. It's also raised questions about whether that family was failed by the NDIS. Firstly, what's your reaction to that case? And also, will that case in any way influence your reforms here with Thriving Kids?
BUTLER: First of all, this is just the most awful tragedy. …
All I want to say is that this is just an awful tragedy, just an unspeakable tragedy for this family, but for the broader community. And I know the NDIA will do everything it can to assist the police in its inquiries.
These events are much more than “just an awful tragedy, just an unspeakable tragedy”. Rather than just a tragedy, these disability-related filicides and suicides are eight avoidable failures. Autism-related filicides and associated suicides are serious and repeated tragedies related to unsatisfactory disability services. They cannot be dismissed and diminished – they must provoke preventative responses.
These are not isolated incidents. Some previous examples are documented here.
Government does everything in its power to avoid appearing accountable for these outcomes. Where are the coroner’s reports and what do they say?
Even worse, NDIS policies require families of children, especially severely/profoundly autistic children with high support needs due to their autism, to fight very hard for the supports their children need. And with only limited success.
The NDIS keeps most of its relevant policies secret but one has escaped into the public domain: see https://a4.org.au/node/2792. Too often, NDIS planners ignore the evidence of disability and impairment that participants provide; the write dangerously inadequate plans for many participants whose treating clinicians advise need very substantial support.
The Minister needs to get the NDIS to do so much more than “everything it can to assist the police in its inquiries”. Government and the NDIS need to recognise and develop a proper response to the ongoing issue of disability-related filicide.
To get the support they need, many NDIS participants with high or complex support needs (and their families/careers) must make their case in the increasingly adversarial, legalistic, biased, and dysfunctional Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) against practiced teams of lawyers and barristers. That is not “a fair go”.
The NDIS division on the ART has the highest rate by far (68%) for “varying” the NDIS’s original planning decisions. Even with the Tribunal’s strong pro-government bias, the data shows the NDIS got most of its contested decisions wrong: support decisions that had to be “varied” (mostly – if not all - favouring the NDIS participant).
These issues are not even mentioned in either the National Autism Strategy or Australia’s Disability Strategy.
Your press Club speech referred to the NDIS’s “purpose of providing choice and control, dignity and opportunity to Australians with a permanent and significant disability”. But the NDIS fails many autistic Australians with severe or profound autism spectrum disorder, “a permanent and significant disability”. The NDIS is not meeting its purpose … and the proposed legislation makes it far far worse.
Government needs to do much better for severely and profoundly autistic children and their families/carers.
Yours sincerely
\
Bob Buckley
A4 Co-convenor.
Email: convenor@a4.org.au
Mobile: +61 XXX XXX XXX
29/06/2026