Shortcut: Still Missing, Still Searching

**Meshel Laurie** (0:04)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie, and we're joined by Nicole Morris, who's the founder of the Australian Missing Persons Register. She joins us to talk about her new book, Lost. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
I use the stat, I don't know if it's still correct. It might be outdated. I always say to people, yes, roughly 30,000 people a year in Australia reported missing. Is that incorrect now?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:45)
Yeah. Oh yeah.

**Nicole Morris** (0:47)
The new stats are out and it's 49,000.

**Meshel Laurie** (0:51)
My God.

**Nicole Morris** (0:51)
And the shocking figure is actually the long-term missing person. So that's anyone missing longer than 90 days is 2,800.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:01)
Also in the book, you do a really interesting chapter on, you say, you call it runaways, but you make the point very early on that you don't like that term because we know in the past that sometimes police haven't perhaps jumped on an investigation early enough because they have said, it's a teenager, they've run away, they'll come back. Even though families say, please believe me, I know this child, that is not what's happening.

**Nicole Morris** (1:24)
The reason I don't like the term also is, people accuse them of being naughty. Yes.
It trivializes the seriousness of a kid making a decision to maybe go and sleep in a park rather than where they're supposed to be living. You have to think, what is going on? That's not naughty, that's desperation. I think calling them a runaway is-

**Meshel Laurie** (1:48)
It's dismissive.

**Nicole Morris** (1:49)
Yeah, it is, it really is.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:51)
And you make the point in here too that it doesn't mean that there's nothing wrong if young people pop up again in two days. It's still problematic that we didn't know where they were for a couple of days. And you talk to a couple of young people who were listed as missing, and they'll say things like, I didn't realize I was listed as missing, or this is what happened, the chain of events, and I've lost my phone, and so, you know, all of the reasons that this can happen.
Nearly a quarter of Australia's homeless population are aged between 12 and 24 years. That's a lot.

**Nicole Morris** (2:24)
Isn't that awful?

**Meshel Laurie** (2:25)
Of people who should be at home with their parents, frankly.

**Nicole Morris** (2:28)
They should have a home. Yeah.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:30)
Young people presenting a loan that is unaccompanied by a parent or a guardian, accounted for 14% of people seeking support from specialist homelessness services.

**Nicole Morris** (2:40)
That no one is keeping them safe.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:42)
Fifteen percent of people seeking support for homelessness are teenagers, young people.

**Nicole Morris** (2:48)
Yeah.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:49)
On their own. Of the 122,000, roughly, people experiencing homelessness in 2021, 14% of them were aged under 12

**Nicole Morris** (2:59)
It breaks my heart. Our kids are home safe where every child in Australia should be. They should have a bed, they should have a roof, and it's not happening.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:09)
There are a lot of Australian children living in cars, living in all of these temporary situations. Yeah. Oh, this is a terrible one. In 2023, 8,450 children and young people seeking homelessness support had to be turned away.

**Nicole Morris** (3:25)
Yeah. There's not enough beds. And I think one of the stories in the book, the girl said that if they even present at the shelter, there's a time limit on how long they're allowed to be there for. And then they're shuffled back out into the street and they're doing whatever they have to do to survive. And how can we be this amazing, great, wealthy country that we are and allow this to happen?

**Meshel Laurie** (3:54)
Yeah. And obviously, there's a correlation between homelessness and missing people who go missing. Because if we don't have an address, if we don't know where you live, it's hard to keep tabs on people. And sometimes people have been missing longer than we realize.

**Nicole Morris** (4:07)
Absolutely. Absolutely. And a park is not an address. And if they're choosing to run away and live in a park, if they're choosing to run away and couch surf, then how do we keep a track of them? How do we help them? How do we find them?

**Meshel Laurie** (4:23)
There's a lot of conversation, especially young people who are vulnerable if they're homeless. So that leaves them open to all sorts of problems. There's a lot of conversation around Australia at the moment about the cost of living. Have you seen, do you think anecdotally there has been an increase in homelessness and in home insecurity in Australia? I think so.