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Argument, Think Autism Sydney 2025
Counting eye contact is not success, Rebecca McCash told Think Autism Sydney
In short
Asked what failure would look like for the National Autism Strategy, Sharon Zivkovic and Rebecca McCash both pointed to measurement, from opposite ends of the system.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Rebecca McCash had a test for whether a program works for autistic people, and on her account much of the research evidence would fail it. Research, she told the opening panel of Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, too often judges success by behaviour that matters to neurotypical observers, measuring “how many times someone makes eye contact and calling that a successful program”. That, she said, is not success for autistic people.
The question that drew her answer came from Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session. He had taken part in some of the workshops that wrote the National Autism Strategy, where he and others spent their time choosing the best word for the vision and for each paragraph. Everyone talks about what success will look like, Gold told the panel, so he wanted to know what failure would look like. The strategy would control where the money went, whatever the movement did alongside it.
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Sources the story draws on
- National Autism Strategy 2025-2031 (opens in a new tab), Australian Government (health.gov.au)
- Listening to the autistic voice: Mental health priorities to guide research and practice in autism from a stakeholder-driven project (opens in a new tab), Autism (SAGE), vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 822-833; Benevides, Shore, Palmer and others
- National Autism Strategy 2025-31: First year Implementation update (opens in a new tab), Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing
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