The Informer: Robodebt royal commission, mental health costs

Former chief justice of the Queensland Supreme Court, Catherine Holmes, will head the inquiry, which will hand down its final report in April 2023.

But Coalition leader Peter Dutton has warned the royal commission will be a "witch hunt" and a "political get square" with former prime minister Scott Morrison.

Meanwhile, higher rates of anxiety and depression caused by COVID-19 lockdowns could cost as much as $7.4 billion to the NSW economy by 2025, a report suggests.

An estimated 171,615 more people in NSW reported mental health issues consistent with depression and anxiety in 2021 that were linked to lockdowns.

The research series commissioned by the NSW Council of Social Service and published on Thursday, found evidence of growing emotional distress in recent years, including a 46 per cent increase in 12- to 17-year-old girls arriving at emergency departments for self-harm or suicidal thoughts between 2018 and 2021.

And in lighter news, new show The Bridge Australia is using its small platform to say something about the big stuff.

The beautiful-looking series filmed around the gloomy waters of Tasmania's Lake Pieman does a neat job of showing us what happens when one demographic is usurped by another.

In it, the millennials are firmly in charge and meek Gen-X has been made redundant.

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