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The new National Children’s Commissioner cites among her top concerns an increasingly draconian criminal justice system and improvements to the youth social media ban. By Gina McColl.
Youth crime is ‘not in a crisis’
When Deb Tsorbaris stepped into the role of National Children’s Commissioner, she inherited a childcare sexual abuse crisis, a wave of new laws imposing adult sentences on children, and a coroner’s call for a ban on youth solitary confinement following the suicide of Yamatji boy Cleveland Dodd.
For Tsorbaris, these are not isolated developments but symptoms of a deeper erosion of children’s rights that demands immediate action.
“Civil societies are about treating children fairly and justly and kindly, and for some children, that’s not the case,” Tsorbaris says. “I’m on the start line, and some of these matters need to be addressed urgently.”
As she begins her five-year term at the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), Tsorbaris says her priorities are clear. Listen to children and their families. Act on what they say. Advocate fiercely for those caught in the machinery of the criminal justice system.
Yet, as political rhetoric around youth crime intensifies and legislative responses grow more reactive and punitive, the task ahead is as much about working with others to change the national conversation as it is about policy reform.
Tsorbaris is already working closely with other commissioners, including those focused on race and human rights in the aftermath of the “terrifying targeting of our Jewish citizens” at Bondi Beach last weekend.
Tsorbaris laments that progress on raising the age of criminal responsibility has stalled everywhere outside the ACT and heated political and media commentary around youth crime has led to the hasty introduction of “adult time for violent crime” laws in Queensland and Victoria.
While victims of crime are understandably frightened, she says, the number of youth offenders is not rising.
“The nature of what young people are engaging in, in terms of crime, has changed, with more chronic, repeat offending, but … we’re not in a crisis,” she says.
“We know that from my predecessor’s work, [the report titled] ‘Help way earlier!’, there are lots of ways to address these issues that are about early intervention, about working with children and their families.”
Youth crime data varies across regions, which is why responses must be place-based, and include individual, community and systemic strategies, Tsorbaris says. She points to successes in a partnership initiated in 2016 between Dharriwaa Elders Group and University of New South Wales researchers in Walgett. A program of community empowerment in that regional area led to increased use of diversionary options by police, better support for families and young people to return to school, and steps to address the overpolicing of Aboriginal children, including stopping the use of predictive AI to identify likely offenders.
“[G]overnments need to get back to the agenda of investing in things that work for children rather than locking them up,” the commissioner says.
Alongside urgent advocacy, Tsorbaris’s first-year agenda includes collaboration with state and territory counterparts and local advocates, as well as with MPs and officials concerned with child protection, “to work out where I can be most usefully working,” she says.
She is encouraged that several ministers have already indicated they are keen to meet.
“A National Children’s Commissioner can’t work alone.”
The top priority, she says repeatedly, is listening to children themselves – building on a three-year federally funded consultation project that was led by her predecessor, Anne Hollonds. The aim is to find the best ways to connect with young people and their families about the policies and services that directly affect them.
The “nothing about us without us” refrain that has transformed social, institutional and political organisations and their governance over the past two decades is yet to catch up in relation to children. Tsorbaris says this is ripe for change.
“Kids do want to have a say [and] they’re quite sophisticated in their views, [such as] wanting programs that are for them and their parents at the same time,” Tsorbaris says. “But it’s more complex than it looks – it’s much harder to find ways to talk to children under five than it is to young people.”
The project’s third and final report is due in 2026. “Not too many organisations have spoken to 1000 children,” she says. “I’m exploring how we can continue that work on an ongoing basis.”
This will allow the commission to track the opinions of children as their ideas change, including in response to particular social problems, and help form better policies and programs.
Tsorbaris points to the Albanese government’s rushed laws banning under 16s from social media, which came into force on December 10, as an early opportunity. The laws are popular with a majority of Australian adults, according to a Monash University survey, but critics, including teenagers themselves, say the bans are harmful to teens’ social lives and ways of exploring their identity, as well as unrealistic and ineffective, given some platforms are not proscribed and workarounds such as VPNs are widely accessible. The admission by eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant that her own daughter thinks the ban will ruin her life highlights the opportunity for better consultation.
It’s a complex policy problem, Tsorbaris says, and particularly challenging for those who have grown up using social media and now have had it taken away.
“For my grandchildren, I think that this is something they won’t even know about, as social media before they’re 16 won’t be an option. [For those] who are harmed online, the ban is well and truly overdue.
“But if you’re a 16-year-old and you run a business online or you are living in isolated communities, the media ban is problematic,” Tsorbaris says. “My job is to point out every vantage point.
“I am very hopeful that working with the eSafety Commissioner, we can monitor the implementation [and] make sure that children get a say in how it’s rolling out, what the benefits are, but also where there are some really big problems, [so] that we can feed that into government to ensure we can make the appropriate modifications where possible.”
Prior to taking on the role as commissioner, Tsorbaris worked for almost 13 years leading the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare, so has a good perspective on what’s working and what is not.
She says she is pleased governments responded quickly to the sexual abuse crisis in childcare centres, by aligning Working with Children Checks across jurisdictions, and providing supplementary training for early-years workers, led by the Australian Centre for Child Protection’s Professor Leah Bromfield.
New details of abuse by childcare workers emerged in Tsorbaris’s first weeks in office, with alleged paedophile Joshua Dale Brown facing 83 additional charges of harming children in his care in Melbourne, and a former after-school carer pleading guilty to taking explicit images of children in Sydney.
Shocking events such as these “mobilise us to do better”, Tsorbaris says. “I feel for the families impacted in [that] awfulness.”
A focus on families will be another hallmark of her time in office, she says.
“Children don’t live in isolation. They love family, they love tradition, they love the food their family cooks, they love the celebrations their families have. Even if they can’t live with them, they want to be connected to them. So, I am very interested [in] how we make sure that families are supported to care for their children, and I say that because kids say that.”
Tsorbaris started her working life as a nurse, and was in senior roles with the Department of Human Services in Victoria, and led the Council to Homeless Persons for six years. Her “very working-class” migrant heritage is a testament to what an Australian childhood can mean in terms of equality of opportunity, she says.
The commissioner describes the through line of her career as upholding the rights of “people who would otherwise find it difficult to get … justice”.
“I’m a strong rights-based advocate because rights equals safety, equals civil society, and when those are not upheld, we do have problems. I’ll be making sure that people are aware of where those problems are and where the solutions are … So, my five years will be about making some inroads in that.”
Of course, it’s never enough, she says. There is no “end point”, as new problems will always emerge that need to be solved.
“The job is to keep on going. That’s the thing about advocacy.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 20, 2025 as "Youth crime is ‘not in a crisis’".
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