Welcome to the Annual Report for 2018. We hope you take the time to read through our considerable achievements this past year and take pride in all we have accomplished for our members and the broader community. It has also been a year moving towards change, with the retirement of the Executive Director and the appointment of a new CEO in July.

This year we reached a total of over 24,000 members. This growth in our membership demonstrates that members continue to value the work undertaken by the APS and the benefits that they receive. The inaugural meeting of the Advisory Council was held in May, which brought together the leaders from Member Groups and Committees across the Organisation – greater representation via the initiation of this Council was a recommendation of last year’s Governance Review. This provided an opportunity for voices from across the Society to be heard, and to provide input into the future direction of the APS.

We have demonstrated our ongoing commitment to the community over the past year through a number of major advocacy activities and accomplishments. The passing of the Marriage Equality postal survey in November 2017 and the eventual passing of legislation was met with celebration, as we have long advocated for the full legal and social inclusion of LGBTQI+ people.

During Mental Health Week in October, we hosted a free public event, Why I Believe in Change, featuring leading Australians sharing their stories of change. The event and its messages generated national coverage across print, radio and online reaching a national audience of millions.

In May, the Federal Budget announced funding for improvements to aged care and addressing the mental health needs of older Australians. We were delighted as we had been advocating for inclusion of this item for many years.

To assist with dying legislation being proposed in several state parliaments, we hosted a roundtable discussing end of life care in Melbourne. The event identified implications for the psychology profession with respect to prospective changes in the law, and discussed possible resources to prepare psychologists to work in this space.

We continued to advocate on a range of social issues and completed nearly 60 submissions. One of the most prominent of these submissions was to the Royal Commission Inquiry into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In addition to providing input into the Royal Commission, we were successful in winning the tender to undertake a number of activities to support the implementation of the Commonwealth Redress Scheme.

Other notable submissions included the introduction of telehealth services to be provided under Medicare for individuals in rural and remote areas, developing recommendations for an agreed accreditation process for the delivery of Low Intensity Services (LIS), and providing recommendations to inform the Australian Law Reform Commission’s Review of the Family Law System.

The President took an outward-looking and philanthropic direction for the President’s Initiative, and this year launched a lecture series titled ‘Bringing Psychology to the People’. The first of several free lectures was delivered by Dr Michael Yapko and focused on the topic of depression and the over-reliance on medication for treatment. It was a major success, booking out within three hours of going live.

Looking forward, we encourage you to keep an eye out for exciting changes and developments that are anticipated to occur at the APS, into which many of you will be invited to have input. We look forward to embarking on this journey with our members.

We hope you enjoy reading about some of the highlights in this year’s Annual Report.