Australia’s young people deserve to have their interests considered in Australian policy-making. In the Covid era, many policies were defended on the basis that they would help those vulnerable to Covid, mainly the elderly. In this report, the author attempts to put a price tag on Covid-era policies, from the perspective of Australia’s youth.

The estimates in this report are based largely on the author's cost-benefit analysis of Australia’s Covid-era lockdowns, published in 2022 with Sanjeev Sabhlok. The author also briefly considers the impact of other Covid-era policies, such as mass Covid vaccination, and the work of other analysts attempting to reckon with the total impact of Australia’s Covid lockdowns. The currency used to estimate both the costs and the benefits of Australia’s Covid lockdowns is the recently invented WELLBY, or wellbeing year, which is also introduced, justified, and briefly explained in this report. The WELLBY is built from self-reported data on life satisfaction, and hence is particularly well-suited to capturing costs that affect people’s overall lives, rather than merely their health or their wallet.

The author estimates in this report that the Covid policies Australia pursued have cost the nation’s youth at least 116 times the value of any benefit that they could have received from those policies. This figure draws on conservative estimates of known costs, and excludes estimates of likely direct damage from the Covid vaccine rollout, future negative fertility effects, or negative impacts on intangibles like social habits, trust and motivation.

Covid-era lockdowns created huge damage to the lives of our young people. These costs are theoretically likely, and have already been shown in some studies, to afflict disproportionately those young people who were already disadvantaged at the start of the Covid era — meaning that our response to Covid has served to exacerbate existing social, economic and health inequalities.

An enormous amount of additional government debt, relative to pre-Covid levels, will now ultimately be repaid by Australians aged 25 years or younger, a cohort that had the least to gain from the lockdowns imposed upon them.