Page 5 - AUCSO Newsletter - Winter 2023

Chairman’s Address

As we are racing towards our next Conference in April and preparations are going well to make it AUCSO’s
best yet. Registration for the conference is open now, advertised via Jiscmail and on AUCSO website, with
embedded links to the registration page, but will close on the 17 March. We have detailed in this newsletter
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the speakers’ programme for the Conference with an exciting line up of top-level speakers from government
agencies and global perspectives, including a keynote speech from a Government Cabinet Minister – which
is a first in AUCSO Conference history.

Following on from the huge success of our Australasia Regional Group Conference in Sydney at the end of
May 2022, we are delighted to announce that we will facilitate the event again in Sydney in June of this year.
We are very grateful to our Global Partner CriticalArc for their generosity in sponsoring this event for the
second time. I’m hoping that we will have a record attendance at the conference in Sydney – get your luggage
packed now.

Behind the scenes our Executive Committee Members have been revising our sponsorship packages, with a
high demand not only to sponsor AUCSO but also to attend our Conference as exhibitors. Our revised
packages bring additional revenue streams for us to re-invest in our membership. We have faced some
challenges during 2022 to consolidate our financial structure, including focus on our tax liabilities now that
we have fairly significantly increased our revenues, I will report on this aspect at our AGM in April.

We also continue to explore suitable ways to promote AUCSO as a world leading Association and extend
our interaction with the wider security industry. Several members of the Executive Committee have been
enhancing AUCSO’s profile, engaging with high level consultations and discussions with government
agencies and the wider security community.

One exciting prospect to announce is that we have committed to invest some of our new income to rollout e-
learning training courses to provide more benefits for all of our members. To support resilience and
management of serious crisis incidents in our sector we have two new e-learning courses which will be free
to members and relevant worldwide. First course is an ‘Introduction to Business Continuity in Higher
Education’ and a level 2 course focussing on ‘Incident Management’.

These courses will be live for members very soon and we will notify everyone of further details and access
routes etc. There is a third course we are committing to, modelled around ‘Exercise Design and Delivery’
which will support member institutions facilitating their own major incident exercises.

Finally, it was with great sadness that we received the news of our colleague Shed Coulthard’s death
following a long illness. Shed was Head of Security at University of Newcastle, AUCSO Northern Group
Regional Chair and a long serving and valuable stalwart of our Association. Our condolences are extended
to his family and friends, RIP Shed you will be sorely missed.

Les Allan
AUCSO Chairman

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