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On the back of prior discussions about forced 'voluntary' reporting of sleep apnea diagnoses in the State of Maryland in order to qualify for a drivers license, I'd like to draw attention to something similar happening with autism diagnoses in Queensland, Australia. Last year there was an update to the Assessing Fitness to Drive standards to list autism as a medical condition deemed to have an impact on driving.
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There's a fair bit more in the article that goes on about a few individual cases, but the gist of it seems to be that in the state of Queensland you need to provide medical clearance to drive from your doctor to the TMR (DMV) if you wish to apply/maintain your license once you are dignosed with autism. Most other Australian states seem to have a more reasonable 'you are legally required to report any ongoing condition that effects your ability to drive' standard.
In Queensland it seems like the above stated “Jet's Law” came about when someone with epilepsy had a fit resulting in a car crash that killed a baby and left his brother in a wheelchair for life. So this law was created To Do Something that then through bureaucratic ignorance has expanded to include other conditions such as autism as the Assessing Fitness to Drive standards were used as a list to determine what these conditions were. And then people have possibly decided to stop being diagnosed rather than deal with the hassle/stigma of reporting.
This is just so banal and unjust that someone diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum would then have to report that straight to the government or risk being fined thousands of dollars and stripped of their ability to drive. Luckily there is some pushback with a guy in the above link apparently filing a case with Queensland's Human Rights Commission, but still, it shouldn't have gotten this far.
Edit: fixed formatting
It's trivially true that some people are too severely autistic to be able to drive safely (e.g. my brother) but it's also the case that those people are too autistic to pass a driving test and get a license. Just make that argument to the transport minister and ask him to get the standards changed. Filing a case with the human rights commission is a waste of everyone's time.
Ash, you are among the tiny minority of Australians who work in a situation where some fraction of politicians actually listen to the words you say some fraction of the time. The rest of us have to figure out various wheezes for creating a ruckus that will draw the attention of the Powers. Judicial and quasi-judicial processes like the HRC are one example.
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The transport minister has presumably already made that decision, which is how autism got added to the list in the first place.
Nah. It would have been ticked off by the minister, but as @CertainlyWorse says, this policy reeks of public service safetyism. He probably signed off on it with half a dozen other minor things that he doesn't remember either. I'd be shocked if he actually had a considered policy view on the issue.
At the risk of Godwinning where the comparison is genuinely hyperbolic, “if only the Fuher knew”?
I’m not intimately familiar with Aussie politics, but I’m familiar enough to give a list of recent cases where stupid bullshit safetyism ended up with friends in high enough places for politicians to happily stand by them, whether that be the various recent fishing bans (ban shark fishing to prevent shark attacks!), the Adler shotgun, or the obnoxiously early ADS-B mandate.
I mean, it might be worth a shot, but the assumption no one has taken that try simply because it hasn’t changed already is hilariously naive.
The Adler shotgun issue is the only one of those I've been actively involved in, and while it was absolutely stupid, I do think it was a structurally different kind of stupid.
On the object level of course it was ridiculous to ban the Adler. But Aussies genuinely are very pro-gun-control, while at the same time mostly being profoundly ignorant about the particulars of specific guns. So there's a very real political danger to doing the sensible thing in that situation. Popular-but-stupid policies are a problem!
But they are a different kind of problem to stupid policies that don't have a constituency supporting them. With issues where the public doesn't care one way or the other (which is most issues) you really can get policy change by winning over the elites to your side.
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Do you expect bureaucratic policymakers to actually listen to that? I seriously don’t, I expect them to declare it misinformation and refuse to admit they made a mistake until forced to by the human rights commission.
My plan in such case would be to interact with human rights commission until they do such thing (if I would care about this law enough to do something).
Probably start from doing their work for them and write something so they would only sign off on what I wrote (and maybe rephrase it) and forward it to bureaucratic policymakers.
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If you send one email and then go away, no, that's not likely to go anywhere. But it's not as if there's any constituency or interest group invested in making life annoying for autists. The only resistance you're going to face is inertia. And yeah that's not nothing, but it's hardly insurmountable either.
My expectation is that the minor amount of attention the issue has already received will be enough to compel a change.
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Having the issue blow up in the media would probably be the most effective thing in getting the rules changed around this. Politicians are otherwise slow to act and hide behind statements like 'following the best medical advice' rather than using common sense.
The generally high risk aversion of the public service is one of the root causes behind this. The above problem is just a symptom of banal bureaucracy where the chain of public servants presented with this issue decided to take the safe 'just following orders' route of following standards without any risky personal interpretation up to the point of injustice.
I agree that there are people with autism who shouldn't be driving, but the lack of nuance in the legislation doesn't differentiate between someone mildly on the spectrum with a few social quirks and someone who is completely non-verbal. From the public servant's point of view, its best to classify them the same just to be sure.
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