Here is something really quite charming about the Chief Children’s Commissioner, Claire Achmad: at 41, she loves “a good playground”.
She is particularly fond of having a go on a flying fox, which gives rise to a happy image. You can easily imagine her whizzing gleefully through the air wearing one of her brightly coloured frocks and a pair of the flamboyantly large earrings she has a fondness for, her bouncy hair streaming nicely behind her.
She looks like a much-loved, endlessly enthusiastic kindy teacher. You can imagine her getting down on the mat with the kids. Which is kind of what she does, really. Although, obviously, at a much higher and more serious level.
Loving a good playground is almost certainly not a qualification for being the kiddos’ commissioner but maybe it should be. Some of her qualifications: a doctorate in international children’s rights law from the Netherlands’ Leiden University. Art and law degrees from the University of Auckland. Roles in various NGOs here and overseas and a senior role with our Human Rights Commission. That is not an exhaustive list.
Children should not be worrying about things like poverty.
That she’s brainy goes without saying. Except that she protested, if mildly, at this description. I had asked, when did she know she was brainy?
“I’m being completely honest, Michele, I would not characterise myself as brainy.”
Too bad. I’m characterising her as brainy. “I’ve always loved learning. You know, I was always a really hard worker. I would really apply myself in my studies and my schooling.”
She was Avondale College’s head girl in her final year of school. She managed to avoid those teenage traps of playing up and experimenting with those substances deleterious to one’s chances of becoming head girl. She was, for one thing, a good and hard-working teenager. And for another thing: “I was sick as a teenager. So that probably meant I had a bit of a different teenagehood.”
At 15, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “I was very fortunate that my school supported me through that time, as well as my family, obviously. But the school supported me to be able to continue to be in education, and that was really all I wanted: just to maintain as much of a normal teenagehood as I could.”
She kept going to school through a year of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. “So that probably gives a sense of my determination.”
Determination might be another qualification for her job. Achmad has been the Chief Children’s Commissioner for almost a year. Her job is to advocate on behalf of children and children’s rights. Mana Mokopuna – Children and Young People’s Commission has no powers to do anything but advocate. You’d think that would make her job a frustrating one. You’d think wrong. Another required qualification: eternal optimism.
She’s a born optimist. You can see that she would have to be. “I love life,” she says, because she is also a born Pollyanna. “And I love people. I love being with people, building those relationships. That’s what gives me joy.”
Those earrings notwithstanding, she wouldn’t call herself a flamboyant person. “But I am outgoing.”
We were – or I was – muddling our way through a slightly frustrating conversation. I said: “You can’t actually do anything. You can only advocate.”
She said: “I can advocate. That’s right … I can listen to the voices of children and young people and I can continue to bring those forward to the government, which I will continue to do.”
Did I mention that she is, and has to be, a Pollyanna? She wouldn’t be able to do her job if she wasn’t. So, no, she doesn’t think hers is a frustrating job. “I don’t, because I remain focused on the fact that it’s a unique job. There’s no one else who really gets to take the lead on that independent advocacy for, and with, children and young people.” Which comes back to the point I keep making and she keeps rejecting: that advocacy is well and good but not being able to do anything beyond advocating sounds like the definition of frustrating to me.
This might be the difference between being a cynic and being an idealist. I concede it would be nicer to be an idealist, and we need idealists. She’s a good person and we need good people and we need people doing good work.
It helps that she’s immensely likeable. She says one thing she thinks she’s good at is engaging with people. She works at getting to know the politicians she engages with from all sides of politics. They don’t have to agree, she says, but they do have to get on. She is a diplomat, really.
Sense of connection
Achmad grew up in the Waitākere Ranges in West Auckland. Her mother, Robin, was a lecturer in Indonesian language at the University of Auckland and later became a high school library manager. Her father, Bambang, is from central Java, in Indonesia, and came to New Zealand in the 1970s. He was a quality assurance manager in the plastics industry. He grew up a Muslim but is now not a practising one. She wasn’t raised in any religious faith and doesn’t identify with any religion. But, “I guess there’s ways I live my life that I think you could see aligned with many … different world religions, those core kind of aspects of them.” Her brother, Andrew, who is six years younger, does something complicated in web and app design.
She adored her maternal grandparents who were “two of my absolute best friends. I miss them every day.” She believes she got her sense of “community mindedness” from them. Her grandmother was involved in something called a Friendship Club. “She was a great baker. She’d always be baking shortbread or biscuits to take to friends who were unwell or, you know, in need. And so I guess I saw that example of service and just of that community connectedness. I guess that probably did have a real influence on me.”
So her own childhood was solidly middle class and, with the obvious exception of the cancer diagnosis and treatment, a happy one. “I had the things around me that, ideally, every child should have in this country.” Which is just the luck of the draw, isn’t it?
“Yeah, and I think we need to remember that no child has control or choice over the circumstances that they’re born into. But every child should be able to grow up loved, safe, well, and, you know, flourishing to that full potential. And there are decisions that as adults – and as a society there are systems – we can make that can either support that boundless potential to be realised or, unfortunately, can dim some of that boundless potential.”
She has said she was a kid with a “very strong sense of social justice and social conscience. The 40-hour famine was an activity that really resonated with me. It was a way that, even as a child myself, I could do something that might even make a small bit of difference for children in different countries who are living in poverty.”
She must have been a very earnest child. She laughs and says: “It’s probably true! It’s probably true, Michele … Yeah, I guess I had that curiosity about the world around me, you know, and I was a voracious learner.”
So, she was a terribly earnest child and now she’s a terribly earnest adult. She thinks that is both very funny and that it sounds about right.
Speaking out
Children definitely should “not be worrying about things like poverty”, Achmad says. “Ideally, they shouldn’t even know about something like poverty”. But she obviously worried about people who were living in poverty. “Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess it’s that care for others, for people in the world around me.” She was also involved in “environmental issues in our community in West Auckland. And those are things that have stayed with me, and I think they have shaped me.”
You can guess at her politics all you like, and I certainly did. Whatever her politics are, they are irrelevant. “You know I can’t be drawn on my political views, Michele. That’s so important for the independence of the role.”
She did speak out about the proposed military-style academies, otherwise known as boot camps, for repeat young serious offenders. “I think that’s what a good advocate should do, you know: bring forward the evidence and the research. And certainly on the military-style academies, there’s no sound evidence or research that I’ve seen, here or internationally, that shows military-style approaches to youth get good outcomes.”
When she expressed her concerns on 1News in June and they were put to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, he responded: “I don’t care what you say about whether it does or doesn’t work. We can have that intellectual conversation all day long, but we are, damn it, going to try something different because we cannot carry on getting the results that we’ve been getting.” In other words, tough luck – we’re doing it. Well, tough luck back at the PM. She’s hardly likely to stop advocating for or against things. She is good at being dogged.
Actually, she seems to me to be one of those people who is annoyingly good at everything. She protests, again mildly, about the idea that she might be good at everything. And I can’t say I blame her. Who would want to be portrayed as a good-at-everything goody-goody girl? She says she really struggled at law school. She found it a grind; contemplated dropping out. But when she signs up to a thing, she sticks it out. She’s determined, remember.
She felt she didn’t really fit in and that most of her peers came from families with backgrounds in law. Also, she wanted to concentrate on human rights law, which, she says, was regarded as slightly peculiar at the time. Somehow, though, she ended up being named young corporate lawyer of the year at the 2007 in-house lawyers awards. She landed on the University of Auckland’s 40 Under 40 list, which celebrates young alumni who shine in their fields. She was Barnardos’ advocacy manager at the time.
Connecting over issues
She lives just behind Cuba St in Wellington, in an apartment with husband Peter. He, too – surprise! – is a public servant, working in the health sector. I asked, jokingly, whether they had met at a party for public servants. Here’s the punchline, for which I can take no credit: “We met at a conference, actually, for young public servants.” They were seated next to each other at the after-conference dinner. Did she think, “Oh, he’s nice”? “It was a very engaging conversation.” About? “Oh, about all sorts of issues of the day. We’re both very interested in the world around us.” There was pretty much an instant connection. They both loved libraries, and books. For her last birthday, he gave her a cookbook by the chef and actor Matty Matheson, who plays the tattooed fat guy Neil Fak in The Bear, and a book by poet and GP Glenn Colquhoun. The poems are in te reo and English. She speaks te reo, but not fluently. She speaks some Indonesian, again not fluently.
She likes to go out dancing. The last live gig she went to was Troy Kingi. Is she a good dancer? She says she doesn’t know that she’s a good dancer but “I love to dance”. She doesn’t dance like Elaine in Seinfeld, who thinks she’s a good dancer but whose dancing more resembles somebody having a fit. “Gosh, I hope not. Ha, ha.”
She might be the best fun terribly earnest person I’ve encountered. She has, which is also charming, a real sense of play. I sent her a message to say that I loved playgrounds, too. And that I had a swing, and children weren’t allowed on it. The Chief Children’s Commissioner responded with a laugh-until-you-cry emoji.
