If you want to understand how autism is talked about in this country right now, look at a single Crikey headline from last Monday.
“NDIS headlines are turning autistic people into the new dole bludgers.” That was the title the cultural critic Dr Clem Bastow put on her column on 13 April. A week later, it still feels uncomfortably accurate. In the countdown to the May federal budget, Health Minister Mark Butler is preparing further changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The Thriving Kids program is roughly six months away from its first rollout, due to move tens of thousands of children with so-called “mild to moderate” autism off the Scheme from 1 October. And a decade’s worth of media suspicion is coalescing into one loud question: are autistic Australians actually deserving?
It is the wrong question.
Here is what makes this debate feel so off to anyone who lives with autism and ADHD together. The numbers that drive the headlines — one in twenty-three Australian children now diagnosed with autism, NDIS spending above $50 billion a year, roughly 760,000 participants — are real. But the story being told about those numbers is not the story the evidence supports. And the people supposedly at the centre of the “cost crisis” — AuDHD Australians — are in many cases not even on the Scheme.
The measurement problem the headlines keep calling fraud
In March, Professor Andrew Whitehouse of the University of Western Australia and the Kids Research Institute Australia published the strongest evidence yet on why autism diagnoses are up. His team used the staggered rollout of the NDIS across states as a natural experiment, combining data from Medicare, the NDIS and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Their finding: the introduction of the Scheme drove an estimated 32 per cent increase in overall autism prevalence. The increases were largest among boys, children in metropolitan areas, and those from non–culturally diverse backgrounds — which, as the researchers note, is the opposite pattern you would expect if newly diagnosed families were a long-excluded group finally getting through the door. The most plausible explanation, they argue, is that clinicians lowered the threshold for an autism diagnosis because a diagnosis became the only reliable pathway to meaningful supports.
That is a measurement problem. It is not a fraud problem. And the distinction matters, because when you collapse them, you end up where we are now: a media cycle that, as Meera Chinnappa’s 2025 analysis in the Australian Journal of Social Issues documented, routinely frames NDIS participants through the language of “welfare-queen” and “dole-bludger” stereotypes. Chinnappa examined ninety Australian newspaper articles about the Scheme and found the dominant theme was cost-as-problem, not participants-as-people. The drift from “how do we fund support” to “who is rorting this” is a choice reporters and politicians make — and it is a choice the evidence does not earn.
The adults nobody in this debate is talking about
The second thing the debate erases is that the overwhelming majority of the roughly 650,000 AuDHD Australians were never on the NDIS to begin with.
ADHD on its own rarely meets the NDIS test of a permanent and significant impairment. Autism meets it more often, but for adults — especially women and later-diagnosed adults — the “substantially reduced functional capacity” bar can be almost impossible to clear on paper, because the masking, compensating and burnout cycle that defines adult autistic life tends to read as coping. What the Thriving Kids program targets is children aged eight and under with “low to moderate” support needs. It does not fund adults. It does not fund parents of AuDHD children. It does not fund the tens of thousands of Australians with ADHD and autistic traits who would qualify for support in almost any other high-income country’s health system, but who in Australia fall into the gap between Medicare, the NDIS and private practice.
When a headline says the NDIS has “expanded beyond its original purpose”, what follows is often a list that points squarely at autism. But when a Senate inquiry looked at ADHD services in 2023 — still the most comprehensive audit we have — the dominant theme across submissions was affordable access to services, nominated by 71 per cent of submitters. Another 40 per cent raised ADHD’s exclusion from the NDIS. That is not a community of overclaimers. That is a community sitting outside the safety net, paying privately, and watching a political fight about who deserves a scheme most of them can’t get into.
What the neuroscience actually shows
There is one more layer the dole-bludger framing flattens entirely: the biology.
On 8 April, ScienceDaily highlighted a new Molecular Psychiatry study using brain connectome mapping and gene-expression analysis in children with autism, ADHD, or both. The authors reported that autism and ADHD sit on a continuum of brain connectivity rather than as cleanly separable diagnoses. More severe autistic traits correlated with increased connectivity between the frontoparietal and default-mode networks — the same circuits responsible for social cognition and executive function — regardless of whether the child carried an autism diagnosis, an ADHD diagnosis, or both. The pattern overlapped with expression maps of genes previously implicated in both conditions. Translated out of the technical language: the brains of the children we are arguing about do not care which clinician labelled them. They sit on a shared biological gradient. AuDHD is where that gradient is most visible.
That matters for the budget debate in a specific way. It means the question “is this child really autistic, or just a bit delayed?” — the question Thriving Kids is implicitly built around — is much harder to answer than the policy suggests. The symptom profile the Scheme is trying to adjudicate is not a fixed line. It is a spectrum. And the community that sits most clearly in the middle of that spectrum is the AuDHD population — the children, and eventually adults, whose autism and ADHD traits amplify each other in ways the neat categories of “mild” and “moderate” cannot cleanly describe.
A less cruel version of this debate
So what would the honest version of this conversation sound like?
It would start by separating measurement from morals. Whitehouse’s finding that threshold drift drove most of the diagnostic increase is a research fact, not an indictment. The honest follow-up is that Australia has been using diagnosis as the rationing system for support, and that system stopped working as the spectrum got bigger. The answer is not to demonise families who stepped through the door Australia’s own health system built. It is to build other doors — foundational supports, school-based accommodations, adult mental-health funding, ADHD services under Medicare — so that diagnosis is no longer the only pass.
It would also stop pretending the cost problem is an autism problem. The Shadow Minister for the NDIS, Melissa McIntosh, noted on 14 April that the Scheme is losing roughly 75 per cent of its Administrative Review Tribunal cases and spending around $60 million a year to run them. Internal review completion has fallen sharply in a single quarter. Ninety-four per cent of providers remain unregistered. These are administration failures. They are not fixed by shrinking the list of eligible children.
And it would finally include AuDHD adults in the picture. The National Autism Strategy 2025–2031 has commenced work on 81 per cent of its First Action Plan items, and the NAS Reference Group held its first meeting on 23 February. The strategy text acknowledges adult autism and co-occurring ADHD. But very little of that shows up in the dominant framing of the Scheme debate — because the people it names are the people the debate has written out.
If you are AuDHD, there is something quietly destabilising about watching a political fight in which you are both the scapegoat and the excluded. The headlines accuse you of costing too much; the Scheme has rarely let you in. The rhetoric says “mild” like it is a moral judgment; the neuroscience says there is no line to draw.
Before the May budget lands, the thing worth holding onto is this. A diagnosis is not a claim of entitlement. It is a description of a brain. The fight over who deserves support is a fight Australia chose to have, and it is a fight the evidence does not actually want us to have. AuDHD Australians have been asking for something simpler all along: pathways that match the biology, language that respects the people, and a country that can tell the difference between an administrative problem and a community of cheats.
We are not the new dole bludgers. Most of us were never on the Scheme.
Sources
Bastow, C. (2026, April 13). NDIS headlines are turning autistic people into the new dole bludgers. Crikey.
Whitehouse, A. (2026, March 15). Autism diagnoses are up, largely fuelled by the NDIS. What happens next isn’t entirely clear. The Conversation / University of Western Australia.
Chinnappa, M. (2025). The Cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme: Australia’s Print-Media Discourse. Australian Journal of Social Issues.
ScienceDaily. (2026, April 8). Brain study reveals hidden link between autism and ADHD.
Senate Community Affairs References Committee analysis. Unmet Needs and Service Priorities for ADHD in Australia: AI-Assisted Analysis of Senate Inquiry Submissions.
McIntosh, M. (2026, April 14). NDIS failing its own deadlines as review performance falls off a cliff. Shadow Minister for the NDIS.
Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. Thriving Kids program.
Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. National Autism Strategy 2025–2031 First Action Plan.
Australian Autism Alliance. Media Release: Response to “Thriving Kids” Program Announcement.
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