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

When Zoe Robinson was seven, her mother would tell her a story from one of her favourite books. It was Harper Lee’s famous novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, about a white lawyer who faces down the hostile citizens of his southern American town to defend a black man falsely accused of rape.

Although the events unfold through the perspective of a young girl, it’s not the kind of fare you’d think would inspire a seven-year-old. But for Robinson, it planted the seeds of an ambition – to become a lawyer, like the book’s hero, Atticus Finch.

NSW Advocate for Children and Young People Zoe Robinson Credit: Kate Geraghty

In year 9, she found Lee’s novel on her school study list. Her marked-up copy became a kind of talisman, which she carried through a succession of jobs until it ended up where it is today: 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 held the job of advocate for five years, and 2025 will be her last year in the role. As an independent statutory officer, her chief mission is to make sure children and young people – defined in the legislation as anyone under the age of 25 – have their own dedicated champion in the halls of government. Monitoring the interests of babies, toddlers, preschoolers, primary students, teenagers and young adults is quite the gamut, she concedes, and a daunting task on a budget of $4.4 million and a staff of 23. “I’d love more,” she says. “We are stretched.”

She was initially nervous about how well her own safe, stable upbringing – 13 years of schooling at Pymble Ladies’ College on Sydney’s “leafy north shore” – would equip her for entering the darker world of some of the state’s most vulnerable children.

“I had a conversation with a really great elder, and she said to me, ‘get comfortable with being uncomfortable’,” Robinson recalls.

“That first year I was in every youth justice centre every month … I really fought for lived experience to be a meaningful thing in our space; [these days] we have a young person who spent five years in custody who works for us, there are people who have been in the care system too. That’s an incredible thing.

“The hardest thing about [the role] is that people – and this is being very frank – people don’t take children and young people seriously all the time … And I get to sit with children and young people and I realise the sensibility and the thoughtfulness that they bring to issues affecting them.”

That attitude – that adults don’t always know best – earned her the ire of Mark Latham in 2021, when he was trying to push a so-called “parental rights bill” through state parliament, aimed among other things at banning discussions about gender fluidity in classrooms. When Robinson testified that young people themselves did not want such bans, Latham tore into the adequacy and quantum of her research. “He has called for my office to go, for me to go, more than once,” she says, seemingly unbothered. (The clash did prompt her, though, to ensure that future reports would comfortably weather even Lathamesque scrutiny.)

Mark Latham had Robinson in his sights.Credit: Janie Barrett

We meet at noon close to her office, at the Good Ways Deli in Redfern, where she assures me the sandwiches are next level. Simple trestle tables are set up on the pavement outside. She’s opted for the deceptively simple-sounding salad sandwich, packed with pickled beetroot, carrot, sprouts, mayo, mushroom pate and Tilsit cheese. Mine is the deli special, with kangaroo mortadella, salami cotto, lettuce, white onion, provolone and mayo.

Robinson, a 41-year-old with a straight-talking manner, says her first job out of law school couldn’t have been further from the crusading work of her fictional hero. She found herself doing mortgagee collections – in other words, working for the banks, not for the little people being squeezed.

She’d also seen how patronage exerts its subtle influence in the legal world. After graduating from Macquarie University in law and communications, she had applied for a job in a law firm, been interviewed, but was then told she hadn’t been successful. “And a friend’s dad, who was a partner, said to me, ‘Why didn’t you tell them you knew me?’ I said I’d wanted to try and get a law job on my own. He worked some magic – I’m sure you are not meant to tell these stories – but that’s the reality of how I got my [first] job,” she says candidly.

At 27, a disillusioned Robinson corrected course and enrolled in a masters of human rights. That took her to Houston, Texas, for five months, working on appeals from prisoners who’d been languishing on death row, in some cases for decades. It was a stark eye-opener for the girl from St Ives. “My mother [a metallurgist] visited me a month into it and said, ‘OK we get your point, you can come home now’,” she says wryly. But Robinson wasn’t for returning early. “To this day,” she says “it’s still the hardest work I have ever done. 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 directors of companies that had tanked. “I found that difficult – mostly those people [the directors] still had money, and it was the shareholders that lost out,” she recalls. So she tried her hand at recruitment, then moved into consulting with Deloitte. Eventually, a senior partner there encouraged her to apply for a position running the national peak body for youth homelessness.

“I sent a blunt email to them, saying ‘I have no lived experience of this, I went to school on the north shore … but if you are prepared to have someone who probably thinks a bit differently, I’ll have a crack’,” she recalls. She won that position.

A brief stint in the Premier’s Department followed, before she was encouraged in 2020 by the then-NSW Nationals minister for mental health and regional youth, Bronnie Taylor, to take up the young people’s advocate’s position, initially in an acting capacity.

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and and Mary Badham as his daughter Scout in a scene from the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird.

In the aftermath of the Black Summer bushfires, Robinson wanted to see how young people were being catered for in the recovery effort. Her subsequent report revealed that no specific programs targeted at the young were built into disaster recovery planning and response. So when massive flooding hit the Northern Rivers area in 2022, she was determined to lobby state and federal governments to establish a team of recovery support officers focused solely on the needs of the more than 300 children and youngsters who landed in the temporary “pod” villages erected in the wake of the disaster.

Another report she released last year, titled Moving Cage to Cage, has had equally direct impact. That shone a light on the lives of displaced children (some as young as 10) who’d been languishing in what were euphemistically called “alternative care arrangements” after family life broke down – parked in places such as hotels, motels and caravan parks, frequently under the supervision of adults from labour-hire firms who had no accreditation for the work.

It prompted a rapid policy change on the part of the state government, which announced on September 3 that vulnerable children in the foster care system would no longer be placed in temporary care arrangements with unaccredited providers, and that it would have to come to a complete end in a year.

Since that inquiry, the number of kids in hotel emergency accommodation has already dropped. “There are days when you think, I am not sure I made anything better today,” she says. “And then there are days where the government makes an announcement like that and you think, that was the work that we did.”

More recently, Robinson has tried to ensure that young people had some voice at government summits on social media and drug use.

Based on the feedback she’s received, the state’s young people are not nearly as keen on bans on social media accounts for younger age groups as the politicians are. (Since our meeting the Albanese government has announced its forging ahead with a ban on social media use for people under 16 years old).

“This is one of those ones where the unintended consequences are going to be big,” she warns. “We are going to see children and young people lose community, lose access to the health resources they need, versus giving them tools to understand, and to navigate the world that we are in.”

“You can’t just blanket ban something and expect that to work”, she adds. “Children 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 remains an area of huge need, and she warns of school stress showing up in younger and younger children.

“We did a massive poll with kids when we came back to school from COVID, and the one thing they said was, can you not do any assessments, can we just reconnect with our friends? And we said, wouldn’t that be great? Instead, the testing and ranking resumed … because the system is so geared to it.”

The Bill

1 x salad sandwich $15

1 x deli sandwich $18

1 x hot chocolate $5

1 x chai latte $6

Total: $44

Robinson believes giving structured training to young people to deliver peer-to-peer mental health support, perhaps through schools, would be one way to ease the current mental health crisis. “If we can arm this generation with the tools they need to support themselves and each other, that would be great, [though] obviously you still have to invest in acute care,” she says.

She’d like to see a younger person succeed her when she finishes up this year. I ask if she feels she has successfully channelled Atticus Finch.

“I think I did the thing that I saw in him, which was to stand up against things that weren’t right. I think I have done that in this job, in spaces where those kids weren’t often thought about.”

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