Twelve Thousand Nine Hundred Homeless Australians example essay topic

Homelessness in our society. The existence of homeless people in our society is still evident today. Everywhere you look around our cities, parks and streets it is likely that you will witness a homeless person struggling to survive. This is most certainly a social justice issue, every Australian deserves a secure and comfortable place to dwell, not left on the streets to perish.

In society the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. People today are far to driven by work and money to see the problem of homelessness surrounding them. Those very reasons explain why I chose this topic to create an advertising campaign. On the 23rd of June, 1987 the Hawke government promised us this. "For our next term, we are setting achievable goals for Australia's future in the world... So we set ourselves this goal: By 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty".

If only this goal was achievable. Between the years of 1991 and 1994, the number of young Australians between the ages of twelve and eighteen living in poverty had doubled to twenty one thousand. The government does not do enough to help the homeless, although some people are homeless due to their own wishes, there are many people on the streets that do not choose to live as they do. People are homeless because they may have lost their jobs, evicted from their homes, teenagers that run away from families and teenagers that are 'thrown away' by families who no longer want them. Every year, nearly twenty seven thousand Australians are reported missing, sixty per cent of these people are under the age of eighteen. The majority of these children end up homeless and live in poverty.

There are many aged Australians living in poverty. Homelessness is also a problem in Australia's aged community. Statistics prove that over twenty thousand elderly Australians are at risk of becoming homeless, or already are homeless. War Veterans are also included in this number, and that equates to approximately two thousand, five hundred homeless War Veterans.

Agencies such as the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) are set up to help get homeless people off the streets. Derived from the 1996 census, there was an estimated one hundred and five thousand homeless people across Australia. Twelve per cent or twelve thousand nine hundred homeless Australians use the SAAP. It is estimated that one hundred and sixteen thousand requests for SAAP could not be met by the organization alone. Indigenous people in the SAAP program made up fourteen per cent. This is a high rate, as Aboriginals make up two per cent of the Australian population.

The target audience for my campaign is Australian adults living the high life. I am trying to appeal to these people, with the hope that they may begin to donate to organizations such as SAAP. It is a campaign to open the eyes of Australians to the reality of homelessness in our societies and communities. The full severity is not known to the Australian population. As you can see, more needs to be done about the prevalence of homelessness in our society. I hope to make a difference with my advertising campaign, see improvement in our society, a decrease in poverty and get teenagers off the street and back in to the safety of our communities.