WAAC CEO Daniel Vujcich and Chairperson Conrad Liveris provide an update following the organisation’s recent Special General Meeting.
“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” – W. Edwards Deming.
For WAAC, survival has never been optional. Not because an organisation must survive for its own sake. Rather, WAAC has needed to survive because the world that made it necessary has not yet changed enough.
Our communities established WAAC at a time when people in power were slow to listen, hesitant to act, or willing to look away. The HIV/AIDS movement was built by people who cared for the dying, fought for the living, challenged prejudice, created services, educated the community and insisted that public health begins with human dignity. That history frames our decisions every day.
WAAC’s work must continue as long as HIV remains, as long as anyone faces stigma for who they are, who they love or how they live, and as long as some groups of people are told their health and dignity matter less than others.
Since its formation in 1985, WAAC has endured many threats to its organisational survival.
In 1987, we survived a fiscal crisis with the Treasurer’s Board report noting, “we have just enough money to pay the week’s wages, but not enough for the rent.”
In 1989, we survived a wrongful police raid of our needle and syringe exchange program because we had the audacity to show dignity to people who inject drugs.
In the 1990s, we survived waves of moral panic, calls to strip us of our funding, and the deaths of too many leaders, organisers, clients, partners, and friends.
In 2020, we survived the end of our Inclusive Education (Safe Schools) Program following campaigns from anti-LGBTIQA+ activists.
In 2025, we survived a letter from the newly inaugurated Trump administration advising us that a grant to celebrate our HIV and LGBTIQA+ communities was being terminated “pursuant to a directive from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for alignment with Agency priorities and national interest.”
The key to WAAC’s survival has been a dogged refusal to lie down and die and an inexhaustible willingness to adapt to community needs and contemporary circumstances.
With the advent of highly active antiretrovirals in the mid-1990s, our focus shifted from palliation to living well.
With further scientific advancements, our prevention messaging evolved beyond condom use to include PrEP and U=U (Undetectable = Untransmissible).
As the epidemiology changed, we expanded our focus beyond Australian-born gay and bisexual men to heterosexual people and overseas-born people.
As new public health issues such as mpox and rising rates of syphilis emerged, we responded to them.
Whenever our communities have identified a gap, we have moved to fill it, whether through clinical outreach at sex-on-premises venues, regional LGBTIQA+ community development, gender affirming care, First Nations LGBTIQA+ community-building initiatives, or LGBTIQA+ intimate partner violence campaigns.
This is the pattern of WAAC’s history. We have survived by changing, and we have changed to keep faith with the people who built us and who rely on us.
In 2026, we continue this proud history.
At a Special General Meeting on 4 June 2026, almost 70 per cent of WAAC members unanimously resolved to convert from an incorporated association to a company limited by guarantee to give effect to a merger with HepatitisWA. The legal name of the organisation will be Health for All WA Ltd, though a consultative branding process is currently underway to determine a public-facing trading name and brand.
Change is rarely easy, and this decision has not been made lightly. We have done so with a clear eye on our ability to better serve our communities.
We are not the first to walk this path. The Victorian AIDS Council Inc became Thorne Harbour Health Ltd. The ACT AIDS Action Council became Meridian. The Queensland AIDS Council Inc became the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities, and then the Queensland Council for LGBTI Health. The Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations Inc became Health Equity Matters Ltd.
Each organisation has had to answer the same question in its own way: how do you honour a history born in crisis while building the capacity to meet what the present demands and the future will require?
This chapter in our story takes place in a unique context. We have a new generation of political leaders, many of whom did not live through the HIV crisis. As political memories fade, there is a risk that political support for our work will diminish. The responsibility falls on us to diversify today so we can sustain this work on our own terms should others turn away in the future.
In Western Australia, 35 per cent of not-for-profit organisations are contemplating or actively merging with another organisation; this reflects the difficulty of sustaining community services in a small population against a backdrop of rising operational costs and increased competition.
The merger with HepatitisWA makes sense. There is considerable overlap between the work of our two organisations. Both offer needle and syringe programs and deliver clinical services. Both educate about sexual health and blood-borne viruses. Both advocate for addressing stigma and structural inequities. The examples of the Northern Territory AIDS and Hepatitis Council and the Tasmanian Council on AIDS, Hepatitis and Related Diseases show that this coupling can work.
More importantly, WAAC and HepatitisWA share a belief that health services work best when grounded in the lives of their communities. The needs of our communities do not fit neatly into the administrative boxes of funding contracts or disease categories; they are experienced in the complexity of daily life. This step in WAAC’s story ensures that we can better respond to that reality.
WAAC’s longstanding commitment to LGBTIQA+ communities will not be lost in this merger; it will be deepened. For the first time, our Constitution will explicitly enshrine LGBTIQA+ health and social support as a core organisational purpose. Both of us are members of the queer community and will remain in place as CEO and Chair. An LGBTIQA+ Advisory Group will continue to guide our work, and we will continue to actively recruit LGBTIQA+ people to our staff.
Through this merger, we become a community of communities. More than 70 combined years of organisational expertise in navigating the intersection of stigma and health will now serve a broader range of people.
While our name and corporate structure may change, our mission will not. The task before us is to carry the story of our communities forward in the knowledge that we are, and always have been, stronger together.
