COVID-19: ARITA event cancellations update

19/03/2020

You may have seen that the Prime Minister announced yesterday that all indoor events of 100 people or more are banned. The PM also indicated that this would likely be in place for at least 6 months.

We've been reviewing developments around COVID-19 daily and closely following the advice of the Chief Medical Officer throughout the last week. We also know many of our members and presenters have decided not to attend our events, and we’ve understood and respected their decisions to apply a high level of caution.

All conferences & forums are cancelled

With the health and safety of our members and staff as our overarching concern, we've decided that all conferences, forums and social activities will be cancelled for the next 6 months.

If you’ve booked ARITA events in that period, you’ll receive a 100% refund (see details below).

We’re reviewing what might happen to National Conference and Small Practice Conference, which are scheduled for later in the year.

We’ll be monitoring how the COVID-19 crisis evolves in the coming weeks and assess, for example, if National Conference may move to much later in the year and Small Practice can be brought onshore. We will keep you posted on changes but, in the interim, no further bookings will be taken for these events.

Education courses will continue

Our Advanced Certification course will be continuing as it is primarily delivered online by UTS. This semester all workshops will be online.

Our Introduction to Insolvency Program (IIP) courses will be held online until such time as we can hold them face-to-face again. (Class sizes may be limited to fewer than 25.)

Our Essential Skills program has been delivered 100% online for the last couple of years and it will continue unchanged. Right now, it provides a great alternative to keep your CPE hours up.

CPE alternatives

We understand that many of you were keen for the conferences and forums to go ahead, noting the importance of learning for the profession at a time when we expect insolvency activity to begin to rise markedly.

We are now working on a range of alternate online verifiable CPE activities to assist members and subscribers to meet their obligations. This is slightly more challenging as making online CPE verifiable requires some assessment processes.

Noting our critical role as the leading education provider to the profession, we are now completely focussed on how we deliver on this in such unexpected circumstances.

Refunds

You will receive a 100% refund of any registration fee you have already paid for a cancelled event.

Refunds will be issued as soon as we are able to process them. Please note that there is a significant amount of work for our team to manage in processing refunds, so we ask for your forbearance as we work through it.

If you have any questions, please email the Events Team.

Thanks to our sponsors

We acknowledge all our sponsors and, in particular, our Diamond National Partner, Litigation Lending, and our National Platinum Partners, Gallagher and Slattery, for their understanding in this situation.

They've been long-time friends of ARITA and their ongoing support is even more important to us now. As business picks up in the future, please keep them in mind.

Looking ahead

We continue to review our future events as this crisis unfolds, as we know that the time ahead will require opportunities for the profession to come together, to learn and to stay ahead of this rapidly changing environment.

You can also appreciate that rearranging our events calendar at short notice will have a significant financial impact on ARITA.

As we roll out alternate CPE programs we hope that you will take every opportunity to support ARITA offerings so that we can remain sustainable.

Thanks for your understanding.