Protecting participants – especially the vulnerable and/or young – is essential to respecting individuals and doing so upholds the merit and integrity of research. Research is a way of improving the lives of the vulnerable as research informs policy and service provision. Research participants need to be protected, but as their right, they also need to be able to participate in research as a way of being heard on matters which affect them. This article argues that ethical review of research is so heavily focused on minimising risk that young people’s right to participate in discussion is often overlooked. I use my own research with young people who have experienced problematic substance use as a running case study to discuss the tension between balancing protection and participation in research design and offer strategies for balancing the two when designing research.

The COVID‐19 pandemic is both a health and an economic crisis. Economically, lockdowns across Australia have devastated business and industry, creating immediate spikes in under‐ and unemployment. These impacts intersect with the precarious labour market of casualised and "gig" economy work, where young workers constitute an established and substantial group. While negatively impacting upon many young people’s lives, in recent decades precarious employment has also been normalised for young people as they are encouraged to understand themselves as self‐reliant and entrepreneurial in their working lives. Yet, these workers have been largely abandoned in the government’s economic response to COVID‐19. The economic impact and government response to the pandemic substantially disadvantage young people. This article analyses the impact of new government initiatives: the "JobKeeper" wage subsidy scheme, "JobSeeker" payments and early access to superannuation, "JobMaker" economic recovery plan and the redesign of university fees. These initiatives compound preexisting youth policy of low welfare levels, youth wages and high university fees to economically burden young people. Contrasting the repeated expression of anything pandemic related as "unprecedented", we argue that the economic abandonment of young people in the immediate COVID‐19 crisis continues a decades‐long precedent in Australia of economically disadvantaging young people.

Over the last three decades, overseas researchers have utilised administrative data to identify distinct patterns in shelter use. In Australia, the use of administrative data to understand service utilisation patterns among people ‘at risk’ of homelessness and experiencing homelessness is limited. A small number of Australian studies suggest that there are different patterns of service use. However, these studies are either drawn from single sites or utilise limited timeframes, and they are not strictly comparable with international studies as there is no equivalent to shelters in Australia. What remains unclear is whether service use patterns are agency‐specific or exist at a systems level, and the relationship between household characteristics and service utilisation. This paper fills this gap using a novel subset of an administrative dataset of 70,000 unique households that presented to six Initial Assessment and Planning services in metropolitan Melbourne between 2014 and 2020. Our findings suggest three distinct patterns of service use (light, periodic, and regular) and while we find no gender differences between the three clusters, regular users are younger and more likely to have a range of disabling conditions than light and periodic users. The paper concludes with implications for policy and practice.

In Australia, the incidence of covid infection throughout 2020 and 2021 was relatively low, with most States and Territories able to maintain a state of ‘covid-zero’. Melbourne, the country’s second most populous city, went through six lockdowns with a cumulative total of 262 days. Schools were closed, face to face social interaction was restricted and activities such as sport ceased. Given that children generally only experienced mild disease, the question debated was whether the impacts of them being kept away from school, friends and sport for so long was justified? Capitalising on the anxiety of parents, the ‘what about the young people?’ rhetoric manifested through mainstream and social medias, largely focused on mental health risks and vulnerabilities for young people. But children and young people were largely left out of this debate about their lockdown experiences, perceptions, actions and their best interests (Bessant, Collin & Gordon 2021). In this chapter we argue that the experiences of young people were diverse and nuanced, and the homogenisation of their experiences meant that the needs of both those who were troubled, and those were thriving were neither acknowledged nor addressed. We use Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) model (Bacchi 2009) to analyse media narratives around the pandemic, to how study the youth mental health ‘problem’ came to be. We conclude that the moral panic about youth mental health was not actually aimed at improving the mental health and wellbeing of young people, was ideologically driven and largely silenced young people.