Growing success
I am sure that many members of the APS are now aware that our Society is the largest professional organisation for psychologists in Australia, representing over 20,000 members, with a sustained growth in membership of more than 1,000 members per year for each of the past five years. The success underpinning this growth is due to us effectively fulfilling our mission to represent, promote and advance psychology within the context of improving community wellbeing and psychological knowledge. As well as our large membership, the APS now represents an organisation with more than 111 staff, at least 30 of whom are psychologists, and an annual turnover of more than $19 million.
Being bigger of itself, however, does not necessarily mean that we are better, but being such a large Society does allows us to do many things that other, less well resourced and supported organisations cannot. Whilst the Society continues to strongly advocate for important initiatives in psychological service provision and the inequities associated with community access to psychological services, this is most certainly not the only thing that we do. While some of our competitor organisations focus on only a single or a small number of issues, the maturity and breadth of our Society allows us to contribute across a broad landscape of issues of relevance to the practice, education, science, social justice agenda and community conscience of our diverse membership.
Being an organisation of 20,000 members does, however, create situations on which a variety of voices from within the Society can be heard. We are a diverse membership and each of us joins and continues to stay with the Society because we feel that many of our important needs are being met. The Board and the Society welcomes that diversity and embraces it, but of course there is an awareness that one Society cannot be everything for everyone all of the time, and that sometimes the competing needs of our diverse membership have to be reconciled. The one thing that I do know about all psychologists, irrespective of their focus, is of their intrinsic love and respect for our shared discipline and the value that they place on the psychological approach to understanding ourselves, our clients, our students and our world. It is this sharing of the discipline that I feel sure in the final analysis will allow each of us to maintain our respect, tolerance and support for our colleagues and the discipline that unifies us all, and will continue to be with us long after any short-term disputes have been settled. So a plea to all members of the Society as we celebrate the milestone of 20,000 members, that together we are a formidable and effective force but divided against ourselves we are not. Our major threats are not from our fellow psychologists but from the broader landscape of non-psychologists who do not share our vision, our values or our approach.
The Society continues to strive to improve the value and quality of service to members, and the central role that the scientist practitioner model plays is the principal means by which we achieve this. Over the last year we have undertaken a number of initiatives directed at strengthening the relationship between the science and practice of our discipline, including hosting the hugely successful International Congress of Applied Psychology, undertaking the major revamp of our core psychology journals, and providing access for all members to the EBSCO psychological literature database.
Related to this is a strengthened focus on providing high quality conferences for our members. The 2011 conference cycle was launched on June 24th in Brisbane with the 9th Industrial and Organisational Psychology Conference, which was attended by over 600 delegates from Australia and ten other nations, and attracted huge media interest. The APS Clinical College held its conference at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast from July 15th-17th with a program of workshops and master classes for over 400 registrants, presented by the country’s leading practitioners. I attended both of these conferences and they were a marvellous demonstration of the rich diversity, strength and enthusiasm of the various groups within the Society. The conference of the APS Forensic College occurred in early August at Noosa, and presented a rich program on the theme of diversity and specialism in forensic psychology. In November the APS College of Clinical Neuropsychologists will present their conference in Sydney around the theme of the challenges of evidence-based neuropsychology, while the APS College of Educational and Developmental Psychologists Conference in Melbourne will focus on the theory and practice of positive development and wellbeing.
The highlight of such a rich conference year will of course be the Annual APS Conference to be held in the nation’s capital in early October. As well as presentations from eminent keynote speakers, we are pleased to announce that the Federal Minister for Mental Health, The Hon. Mark Butler, will attend the Conference and present an address. If you haven’t yet done so, please arrange to make it to Canberra for a great event.
With 20,000 members, a surfeit of riches with regard to continuing education, and the resolve of us all to work together with respect and good will, 2011 is sure to be counted as another bumper year for our discipline and our practice.