The Australian coalition government has recently announced a new national standard for the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Australia with the goal of improving consistency across the country. Developed by the Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism (Autism CRC), this effort (well documented with considerable supplementary material) can be viewed in the context of what are now many efforts, and importantly a few governmental efforts, to improve early detection of autism and its treatment. Both issues appear to be important in improving ultimate outcome (Koegel et al.
2014). In the two decades following the official recognition of autism in DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association
1980) the growing body of work on the effectiveness of treatments and the more general body of work in evidence-based medicine led to some of the first attempts to provide specific guidelines for early screening (e.g., Filipek et al.
2000) and more comprehensive guidelines for care (Volkmar et al.
1999). The pioneering report from the National Research Council on educating young children with autism (National Research Council
2001) was a further impetus to these efforts. A substantial body of research on evidence-based treatments has now accumulated (Reichow and Volkmar
2011; Reichow et al.
2014; Vivanti et al.
2018), and has been reflected in the development of new comprehensive guidelines (e.g., Volkmar et al.
2014; Wilson et al.
2014; see; McClure
2014 for a review). …
