John McRobert is a Queensland-born civil engineer who lived his early life in the coal fields of Oakey on the Darling Downs. He attended Toowoomba State High School from 1953 to 1956. Winning a government scholarship, he studied civil engineering at the University of Queensland. His mentors were the last of Bradfield team who had built Sydney Harbour Bridge and had moved to Brisbane to build another iconic structure, the Story Bridge. During university, he completed National Service. Excelling in rifle shooting he won all marksman prizes and awarded a Full Blue after winning the Australian Intervarsity competition.

In the 1960s, McRobert worked on major Queensland infrastructure projects for government departments and private firms, including the Collinsville Power Station water supply, Captain Cook Bridge, and rail developments in Cloncurry, and Gladstone. From 1971 to 1987, he held senior positions at Utah Development Company (later part of BHP), overseeing construction and design of Hay Point Port berths, and later as Chief Civil Engineer. He left the company amid voluntary retrenchments triggered by falling coal prices, soaring costs, and heavy taxation—including a federal export levy and threats of nationalisation—which he believes severely distorted engineering decisions and contributed to the company's eventual sale.

Deeply concerned by the destructive impact of Australia's complex tax system, McRobert collaborated with a brilliant accountant, Derek Smith CA, to develop ideas for fundamental reform. In 1985, he published A Diet of 2% – can prevent harder tax, proposing the replacement of income and profit-based taxes with a simple, low, universal tax on all exchanges of goods, services, property, and labour. These concepts were later supported by economic modelling from QUT's Unisearch unit (covering 1988–1995) and endorsed by groups such as the Gold Mining Industry Council and small business associations. He followed with a second book on tax reform, Your Future in Your Hands summarising these models.

Beyond engineering, McRobert was Queensland President of the Concrete Institute of Australia (1977–78) and founded the Minerals and Energy Club of Australia in 1979, a prominent inner-city Brisbane business club with restaurant/bar and meeting rooms that fostered industry dialogue with leading guest speakers until it collapsed under the Fringe Benefits and Capital Gains taxes and the resulting late 1980s recession. After leaving BHP/Utah in 1987, he established CopyRight Publishing, to give him the wherewithal to re-engineer a suffocating taxation system and has since produced over 200 publications (including his own works on tax reform and a poetry anthology), and The Brisbane Line Inc serviced offices to support professionals seeking work—the latter ultimately succumbed to tax and regulatory burdens, but CopyRight Publishing survived and still publishes first-class books, primarily on history. Another association he co-founded in 1987, ICs International (Individual Consultants), still meets monthly over informative lunches. Mainly geologists, not one of whom believe in the anthropogenic climate change hysteria.

Throughout his career, McRobert has actively defended the coal industry against anti-mining propaganda from unions, academics, and media. He began giving public talks and writing letters in his spare time, continuing this advocacy today. Having experienced several close encounters with extreme weather events and extensively studied cause/effect relationships between natural and man-made events and ability of structures to withstand them, he strongly rejects the classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, viewing the scare campaign against CO₂ as a costly distraction. In his view, genuine economic recovery—through fundamental tax reform rather than superficial band-aids like the GST/VAT, and abandonment of disastrous ‘renewables’ energy policies—remains the key to solving Australia's social and economic challenges, equipping a remotivated nation to address real environmental issues effectively.

Now based in Indooroopilly, Brisbane, he remains active in writing, publishing, and public commentary.