(Australia) 'Explosion' in autism due to parents 'incentivized' to seek false diagnosis

Dec 1, 2025, Sky News: Alarming new figures show an ‘explosion’ in number of children being diagnosed with autism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCwnfUo-Hic

Alarming new figures about the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the number of Australians receiving funding for autism.

As we’ve told you before, the NDIS costs taxpayers a whopping $50 billion dollars a year, and that’s expected to double within a decade. That’s not hard to see why.

The [National Telegram] reports, the number of Australians receiving NDIS funding for autism has more than doubled over the past five years to more than 200,000 and the cost to taxpayers is just over $9 billion [$5.9B] last financial year.

Child psychologist Clare Rowe:

 If we take it at face value, that is an explosion in our first world country of Australia of our children being diagnosed with a life-long developmental disorder, and that’s what we really have to stand back and take stock of.

We could posit different reasons for that. We can say, are autism rates increasing? Maybe we should look at why. Are we just using more sensitive tools? They were always there and now we’re better at picking it up.

We have to have the conversation, a very uncomfortable , I think, conversation, that the diagnostic criteria has significantly widened and that we have linked financial incentives to getting a diagnosis.

I don’t blame parents for that. We have created a system whereby parents feel they must pursue an autism diagnosis just to get some basic help.

Some of these kids do need help. They need some speech therapy intervention or some basic behavioral support—very short term things.

So that’s not a reflection of more children becoming impaired. It’s a reflection of a system that only funds support once a medical label is attached.

This is what happens when we financially incentivize not just the attainment of a medical diagnosis, but we financially incentivize people of staying unwell. . . .

Rowe suggested reducing autism diagnoses.

The loudest voices are the much more mild cases because we have a system that financially rewards it and it blurs the line between genuine disability . . . and developmental variation, some mild social difficulties that with a little bit of intervention and support may improve and in fact go away altogether.

Clinicians feel squeezed and pressured and have readily admitted to me that they have diagnosed autism for what they described to me as gray cases that may not have fulfilled traditional autism criteria, but they don’t want to turn parents away with no support at all.