HIV/AIDS impacts on groups that have traditionally been viewed as marginal and diffuse, including gay men, injecting drug users (IDUs), sex workers and people with haemophilia. According to the traditional medical-based approach to health policy, such marginalized groups would have had minimal success in gaining access to adequate care and humane treatment. Yet in Australia the groups in society most affected by the disease have achieved considerable success in obtaining health care and access to education and prevention, as well as social support in the form of positive government-funded publicity and legal sanctions outlawing discrimination on the grounds of actual or assumed HIV infection. That this has occurred in a climate of fiscal constraint makes the success of HIV/AIDS communities even more striking.