Suppose a friend of yours was out of work and wasn't in study or training. Suppose they confide in you that they have no close friends other than you, their mental health is bad, they haven't had sex for more than 12 months and are less engaged in their community than ever.

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Would you be worried? If your answer is yes, then you should be worried about Australia's young people.

We all know that Aussie households have had a rough decade. Among plenty of other challenges, the last decade saw the slowest growth in real household income in more than half a century.

What is less known is that, while incomes grew slowly for everyone else, they went backwards for people aged 15 to 24.

We all similarly know that the 'aggregate labour share' - the share of national income that goes to workers rather than businesses - has declined in recent decades.

What you might not know is that this decline is almost entirely accounted for by the more pronounced slowdown in real wage growth for younger workers.

And it gets worse. The rate of young men who are not in employment, education or training rose by more than a third during the global financial crisis and never came back down.

COVID-19 saw that rate double again. Even with a super strong labour market we have struggled to get it back down to pre-GFC levels.........

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