The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia: How the Federation model contributes to the field

The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) is a self-regulating professional peak body, comprising more than 40 professional associations for counselling and psychotherapy in Australia. It represents over 3000 individual practitioners from a range of counselling and psychotherapy backgrounds. This paper describes the decade-long national consultative processes among practitioners, educators, and professional associations, which has resulted in a unique umbrella structure for member associations. This umbrella structure, the federation, has the potential to embrace and unite the field of psychotherapy and counselling, while maintaining the individual identity and purposes of member associations, in Australia. After describing the development, structures, and goals of PACFA, the paper outlines its major achievements. It then describes an important project on Self-Regulation in Counselling and Psychotherapy. The objectives of this project are to investigate and further develop an Australian professional self-regulation model, building on the community consultation processes initiated by PACFA in the mid-1990s. This paper provides a review of key issues for self-regulation, explores the options available in the Australian context, the model development to date, and outlines the national consultative processes currently under way to address the challenges facing the profession in Australia. We also discuss the importance of the dialogic and consensual processes adopted by PACFA in establishing a legitimate and credible voice for the profession as a whole in Australia. The paper ends with an overview of some challenges to the future of counselling and psychotherapy in Australia.