Sunday 17 May, Your IDAHOBIT Can Actually Shape Government Policy
Private Lives 4 is open. La Trobe University runs it, Meridian is one of the community orgs pushing it, and your answers feed straight into federal LGBTQIA+ health policy through 2035.
Sunday 17 May is IDAHOBIT, the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism and Transphobia (the Australian formulation), and this year the date arrives with something practical you can actually do.
Private Lives 4, run by La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS), is open right now to every LGBTQIA+ person in Australia aged 18 and over. It’s anonymous, online, and the data goes straight into the federal LGBTQIA+ health roadmap through 2035.
What is Private Lives 4?
It’s the fourth iteration of Australia’s longest-running national survey of LGBTQIA+ health and wellbeing.
ARCSHS has been documenting the lives of queer Aussies for more than two decades, with the first Private Lives survey published in 2005, the second in 2011 and the third in 2020. PL4 picks up from there, with a wider lens and questions designed to capture more of the diversity inside the community.
The survey asks about mental and physical health, identity, healthcare access, employment, relationships and family, ageing, alcohol and drug use, community connection, and experiences of discrimination and intimate partner violence.
There are also dedicated questions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQIA+ people, so the data isn’t flattened the way too many studies still flatten it.
“The information we gather from the study will help to inform better policies, programs and services for the LGBTQIA+ community,” said Professor Adam Bourne, Director of ARCSHS at La Trobe and the survey’s principal investigator.
The findings feed directly into the federal government’s National Action Plan for the Health and Wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ People 2025-2035. That’s the document state and federal governments will reach for when they decide where money goes, what gets funded, and what gets cut.
So yes, the survey form on your phone is doing some heavy lifting.
Why IDAHOBIT 17 May matters
The date isn’t random. On 17 May 1990, the World Health Assembly adopted ICD-10, which removed homosexuality from the WHO’s list of mental disorders. The anniversary is now marked in more than 130 countries, according to may17.org, the international IDAHOBIT secretariat.
Meanwhile, ILGA World’s May 2025 dataset records 64 UN member states that still criminalise consensual same-sex acts.
The 2026 theme is “At the Heart of Democracy,” which lands with extra weight given how much queer and trans rights have been treated as political ammunition in the last few years.
Meridian wants Canberra on board
In the ACT, Meridian, Canberra’s largest HIV and LGBTQIA+ community-controlled organisation, is among the groups asking locals to fill the survey in.
The reason is local and specific. Meridian CEO Joshua Anlezark has previously flagged that “the ACT has some of the highest rates of late diagnosis of HIV in Australia and low HIV testing rates, especially among gay, bisexual and queer men.”
Those gaps are exactly the kind of thing PL4 is built to surface in detail, broken down by location, age, identity and access barriers, so services can be designed for the actual community rather than the imagined version of it.
National data with a Canberra slice is more useful to Meridian than another guesswork briefing.
How to take it
The survey is anonymous and online. You can complete it on your phone, your laptop, or your tea break. It’s open through 1 July 2026 to anyone aged 18 and over who lives in Australia and identifies as LGBTQIA+. Find it through the ARCSHS page at La Trobe University, or via Meridian’s site at meridianact.org.au.
Queer Australians have spent decades being studied as case files or talking points. PL4 is the one where the community gets to write its own brief. It’s a paperwork move with policy consequences, which, frustratingly, is often how change actually happens.
