Zoe said that adults don’t always know best. Mark Latham savaged her

Daftar Isi

The story is about a white lawyer who stands up to the hostile residents of a southern American town to defend a black man who has been falsely accused of rape.

Although the events are seen through the eyes of a young girl, it's not the sort of stuff you'd think would inspire a 7-year-old. But for Robinson, it sparked the idea of becoming a lawyer, just like the book's hero, Atticus Finch.

In year 9, she came across Lee's novel on her school study list. Her marked-up copy became a sort of good luck charm, which she took with her through a series of work placements until it ended up on her desk at the office of the NSW Advocate for Children and Young People. It's a constant reminder, she says, of "what I was motivated by".

Robinson has been in this role for five years, and 2025 will be her last year in the job. As an independent government official, her main goal is to make sure kids and young people – which includes anyone under 25 years old, according to the law – have their own special representative in the government. Looking out for babies, toddlers, kids in preschool, primary school students, teenagers and young adults is a big task, she admits, especially with a budget of $4.4 million and a team of 23. “I'd love more,” she says. “We're stretched.”

She was initially worried about how well her own comfortable, secure upbringing – 13 years of schooling at Pymble Ladies' College on Sydney's "leafy north shore" – would prepare her for the tough realities of working with some of the state's most vulnerable kids.

“Ah, I had a chat with a pretty fantastic elder, and she told me, 'get used to feeling a bit uneasy'."

“Me first year, I was at every youth justice centre every month ... I really pushed hard for lived experience to be a real deal in our setup; [these days] we've got a young bloke who spent five years in the lock-up who works for us, and there are people who've been in the care system too. That's a pretty amazing thing.”

“The toughest part about [the role] is that people – and I'm being very upfront – people don't always take kids and young people seriously enough ... And I get to sit down with kids and young people and I'm struck by the maturity and the thoughtfulness they bring to issues that affect them.”

That attitude – that adults don't always know what's best – got her into a stoush with Mark Latham in 2021, when he was trying to push a bill through state parliament, aimed at banning talks about gender fluidity in the classroom. When Robinson said that young people themselves didn't want such bans, Latham had a go at the quality and amount of her research. "He's been calling for my office to shut down, for me to go, more than once," she says, sounding pretty unfazed. (The disagreement did prompt her, though, to make sure future reports would stand up to scrutiny, even from someone as tough as Latham.)

We catch up at midday near her office, at the Good Ways corner deli in Redfern, where she swears the sandwiches are top-notch. A few simple tables are set up on the footpath outside. She's gone for the deceptively straightforward-sounding salad sandwich, which comes loaded with pickled beetroot, carrot, sprouts, mayo, mushroom pâté and Tilsit cheese. Mine is the deli special, with kangaroo mortadella, salami cotto, lettuce, white onion, provolone and mayo.

Robbo, a 41-year-old with a no-nonsense attitude, reckons her first job straight out of law school was a far cry from the sort of work her fictional idol would've been involved in. She ended up doing mortgagee recoveries, which basically means she worked for the banks, not for the everyday blokes and sheilas being squeezed.

She'd also seen how patronage operates subtly in the legal field. After graduating from Macquarie University with a degree in law and communications, she'd applied for a job at a law firm, been interviewed, but then told she wasn't successful. "And a friend's dad, who was a partner, said to me 'why didn't you mention you knew me?' I said I'd wanted to get a job on my own merit. He worked some magic – I'm sure you're not supposed to share these stories – but that's the way things really work in getting my first job."

At 27, a disillusioned Robinson changed direction and enrolled in a masters of human rights. This took her to Houston, Texas, for five months, where she worked on appeals from prisoners who had been stuck on death row for years in some cases. It was a real eye-opener for the girl from St Ives. "My mother [a metallurgist] visited me a month into it and said, 'Alright, we get your point, you can come home now,' " she says, with a bit of sarcasm. But Robinson wasn't keen on heading back early. "To this day," she says, "it's still the heaviest work I've ever done. I worked sometimes 20 hours a day, slept very little. But you were dealing with incredibly high stakes."

Back in Australia, Robinson landed another job where she felt she was helping the wrong kind of people, this time bosses of companies that had gone broke. "I found that tough – mostly those bosses still had cash, and it was the shareholders who got done over," she remembers. So she gave recruitment a go, then moved into consulting with Deloitte. Eventually, a senior partner there sussed she'd be a good fit for a gig running the national peak body for kids in crisis.

“She sent a straight-out email to them, saying ‘I don't have personal experience of this, I went to school on the north shore ... but if you're willing to have someone who might think a bit differently, I'll give it a go’,” she says. She got the job.

She had a brief stint in the premier's department before being encouraged in 2020 by the then NSW Nationals minister for mental health and regional youth, Bronnie Taylor, to take on the role of young people's advocate, initially in an acting capacity.

After the Black Summer bushfires, Robinson wanted to know how young people were being looked after in the recovery process. Her report found out that no special programs for young people were included in the disaster recovery plan. When the area got hit by massive flooding in 2022, she was dead set on pushing the state and federal governments to set up a team of support workers who only helped the over 300 kids and teenagers living in the temporary "pod" villages that had been set up after the disaster.

had a similar effect. That highlighted the lives of children who'd been living in tough situations (some as young as 10) who'd been stuck in places like hotels, motels and caravan parks, often being looked after by adults from labour hire firms that weren't qualified for the job.

It sparked a quick change to the state government's policies, which revealed on 3 September that kids in foster care who needed protection would no longer be sent to live with unapproved carers, and this practice would stop altogether within 12 months.

was the work that we did

Robinson has been working to give young people a say at government summits on social media and drug use more lately.

Based on the feedback she's received, Aussie kids aren't as keen on blocking social media accounts for younger age groups as the politicians are. (Since our meeting, the Albanese government's gone ahead with a ban on social media use for under-16 year-olds).

“Fair dinkum, this is one of those situations where the unintended outcomes are gonna be huge,” she warns. “We're going to see kids and young blokes lose out on community, miss out on access to the health resources they need, versus being given the tools to understand and navigate the world we're living in.”

“You can't just slap a blanket ban on something and expect it to work”, she says. “Kids and young people have said, give us education, give us the tools but also do the right thing and ... put the onus on social media companies to do the right thing.”

Mental health is a major concern, and she's concerned that school stress is affecting kids at increasingly younger ages.

How about catching up with our mates? And we said, wouldn’t that be a ripper of an idea? Instead, the testing and ranking just kept going ... because the system is set up like that.”

Robinson reckons providing structured training to young people to give them the skills to deliver mental health support to their mates, maybe even in schools, could help tackle the current mental health crisis. "If we can equip this generation with the tools they need to look out for themselves and their mates, that'd be a ripper, though you'd still need to invest in proper crisis care," she says.

She'd like to see a younger person take over when she finishes up at the end of the year. I ask if she feels she's successfully embodied the spirit of Atticus Finch.

“ I reckon I did the thing that I saw in him, which was to stand up for what's right when it wasn't popular. I reckon I've done that in this job, in places where those kids weren't often considered.”

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