My wife and I have a son Riley who is a little over three years of age.  He was diagnosed with ASD from moderate to severe when he was 18 months of age.  Yet we are still on waiting lists after all of this time for him to receive early intervention.  The gross lack of funding for people with ASD is apparent as in QLD there are the same number of people with disabilities yet there budget grew 62% and SA's only grew 4.5%, Mr Rann has never attended a Disability event of any kind and this states clearly that he is not interested in Disabilities full stop (I could say much more but this is about our son).

We have decided to take our superannuation out on Compassionate Medical grounds to provide our son with the Early Intervention he requires for him to have hope of one day recovering from the disorder to a point where he could be in a mainstream school.  In doing this our funds becomes income considered from the ATO, this would also mean that we would lose all of our Family assistance which now is only just enough to survive let alone pay for any therapies.  What do we do, we are crying out to save our son yet the hand that feeds us, bites us also not to make it possible.  We are taking this on ourselves and not asking for a handout but we have the power to save the government many thousands of dollars in the long run but we cannot survive without our family assistance.

APRA only release our super based on paying for therapies only, yet the ATO call this "general Income" how is this so.

Its very obvious how the NDIS scheme would help but we need help to have an exemption to be able to use our super for the purpose it was intended for, for Riley's therapies and to have our super not classed as general income because in now way will it be used for anything else.  At best with the amount of super we have we would only get 9 months worth of very expensive treatments yet he really needs two years worth.....please we are begging you or someone to have the general income ruling changed or exempted in our case to save our son.

With Many thanks, Mathew and Renee Dexter