Parents of autistic children have converged on Parliament House in Canberra in a plea for better services for sufferers.
New data shows the number of people with autism has more thandoubled in the last five years and services are not meeting the demand. The photographs of 1,000 autism sufferers have been set up on white chairs on the lawns of Parliament House.
Bob Buckley from Autism Aspergers Advocacy Australia says they are hoping to give a clear message to politicians.
“We can have significantly better outcomes by attending to this and that we don’t really need to spend very much money at all to do that,” he said.
“If we use the resources that we’re expending at the moment toprovide an appropriate and autism specific service then we’d almost certainly get better outcomes.”