Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

By Peter Pohlman

The President of AACBT is Professor Ross G Menzies, University of Technology Sydney.

Overall, Australia has been slow to return to pre-COVID levels for face-to-face event attendance, particularly for locally organised events. Our national conference has returned to historic levels of participation, and we look forward to re-growing our broader community throughout 2024. We will continue to pursue our vision of improving the quality of practice of behavioural and cognitive therapies in Australasia, by providing high quality professional development in behavioural and cognitive therapies based on scientific evaluation.

Throughout 2023, we hosted a mixture of local and international presenters, plus webinar recordings continued to be made available for free to members. These recordings represent over 20 hours of high-quality content, plus associated readings, and materials. Examples of some of the topics added to our on-line catalogue include ADHD, OCD, alexithymia, iCBT and social anxiety disorder. The local, face-to-face events saw over 800 people booked to attend, covering a broad range of topics, including gender diversity, coercive control, BPD, grief, schema therapy, ACT, self-compassion, PTSD, digital mental health, and death anxiety.

Our 43rd National Conference featured a wide range of keynote and invited speakers for AACBT, all of whom were being featured in this role for the first time. We had strong bookings and attendance, and our feedback was very positive—an average star rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars. We had 93.86% respond with agree or strongly agree that the professional development provided was valuable to their needs, and 88.6% responded that they acquired new knowledge/skills. The National Board thanks our Branch Chairs for their on-going efforts and the National Conference Committee for their conference work.
We continued to offer three awards in our National Award program, and each recipient presented at the 2023 national conference, highlighting their scientific output and contemporary research. The 2023 award winners were Dr Jemma Todd (early career), Professor Angela Nickerson (mid-career), and Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor Tracey Wade (distinguished career).

Our 44th conference is scheduled for 17–19 October 2023 in Brisbane, Meeanjin, Qld. The Board thanks our National Conferences Director for their service in supervising our largest annual event, and we are excited to be featuring core presenters such as Emily Holmes, Tim Dalgleish, Mark Dadds, and others.
In the interests of promoting equity of access, the AACBT Board has continued the free 12-month trial for all AACBT student memberships—the initial period of offering saw a rise of over 400% on historic levels of membership.

Improvements to our web portal are a key goal for this year, with AACBT planning for a move to a new platform. Our members will enjoy easier access to exclusive areas of the website, which includes our annual reports, historic access to our journal (Behaviour Change), webinar recordings, and the growing e-library (with over 40 titles). Visitors to the web page will also enjoy a smoother experience. The Board recognises and thanks the outstanding efforts of our editor (Professor Genevieve Dingle), her editorial team, and the overall editorial board for our journal
Behaviour Change. Our journal began in 1984 and the final edition was published in December 2023.

AACBT would like to acknowledge our Fellows: Professor Peter Lovibond, Professor Michael Kyrios, Professor Matthew Sanders, Professor Colin MacLeod, Professor Tracey Wade, Professor Ross Young, Professor Mark Dadds, Professor Mark Creamer, Professor Kim Halford, Professor Nicole Lee, Associate Professor Sarah Egan, Professor Louise Sharpe, Associate Professor Neville King, Professor Leanne Hides, and Professor Ross G Menzies. We thank them for their continuing contributions to the CBT community in Australia, and assisting AACBT throughout the year. The Board would especially like to thank Professor Matthew Sanders for participating as our World CBT Ambassador for 2023 with his presentation on evidence-based parenting support.