Guardian Australia has launched a new five-part podcast series exploring the economic challenges faced by Australian millennials and Gen Z, who are reportedly worse off than their parents.

Titled 'Who Screwed Millennials?', the podcast is hosted by Full Story co-host Jane Lee and reporter Matilda Boseley, with topics covered including housing, education, and work, with a particular focus on the generational wealth divide. The series also explores the economic conditions that have led to high house prices in Australia, the cost of university degrees, and the job market for young Australians. The podcast is hosted and distributed by Acast.

Guests on the podcast include former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, US journalist Malcolm Harris, and several Australian academics and union leaders. The Full Story podcast, which will host the series, boasts over 271,000 unique listeners a month and over 663,000 episode downloads each month. The 'Who Screwed Millennials?' podcast is hosted and distributed by Acast.

"Many young people are experiencing a kind of malaise about our economic circumstances and when we try to talk about it we’re told we have nothing to complain about. But millennials and gen Z have legitimate reasons to be worried. Younger generations are far more likely to be renters than their parents were at the same age; incomes have not kept up with rising housing prices," said Lee. "Despite being more highly educated than previous generations, we’re also more likely to be in casual jobs or working short-term contracts, making it hard to save or plan for the future. All of this is making young people’s lives far more uncertain, despite our best efforts to get ahead. On Who Screwed Millennials? we try to understand what’s driving this generational divide. We want to open up a conversation about how things could be different, if not for us then for the next generation of young people."

Boseley said the podcast was ultimately about hope, with the aim of helping young people to understand the mistakes of the past to ensure their struggles are not passed onto future generations.

"When I finished uni, moved out of home and, just generally, entered the 'adult' world, I found it incredibly overwhelming. From housing costs, to finding a stable job, to realising just how ridiculously expensive a block of cheese was. When things are tough it’s easy to feel hopeless and that these issues with society were inevitable and immovable. But that isn’t the case. Many of the struggles young people are facing today are knock-on effects of specific decisions made by leaders – and voters – in decades past. By tracing it back and understanding the, often utterly fascinating, history surrounding these decisions, it helped me realise that the world we live in today isn’t set in stone," said Boseley.

Guardian Australia is a free digital news site launched in May 2013, with a focus on politics, the environment, and social inequality.