Many ANMF Job Reps or Health and Safety Reps may recognise Maree Burgess. As Branch President, she has expertly chaired the annual delegates conference for almost 15 years, keeping a tight rein on debate to ensure smooth and inclusive proceedings.
‘I love the delegates conference,’ Maree says. ‘I love the opportunity to spend time together with Job Reps and HSRs from across the state as we debate motions that help to shape the direction of the Branch over the ensuing months and years. It’s always great to see first-time delegates move to the microphones and share their insights on motions before the delegates,’ she adds. ‘They are the future of the ANMF (Vic Branch).’
Maree’s role as ANMF (Vic Branch) President is, of course, much more than just chairing delegates conferences. Likewise, her professional life encompasses much more than Branch Council.
‘I have always loved a good debate.’
Like all councillors, Maree is an actively practising nurse or midwife. Or, in Maree’s case, both. A maternal and child health nurse in northern Melbourne, she began her career more than four decades ago when, at age 18, she began her general nurse training at St Vincent’s Hospital in Fitzroy. Learning on the job, she developed many lifelong friendships – and a lifelong passion for nursing.
A few years after completing her registered nursing qualification, Maree doubled down with on-the-job midwifery training at the Mercy in East Melbourne. It was here, she says, that she first discovered ‘the spark for family-centred care’ that still drives her. To this day, she says, there is no rival to the joy she gets from ‘working together with families and their newly arrived babies in a partnership model to build on their strengths and support them in their parenting roles’.
Following a few years working in domiciliary care, Maree realised that she could expand her love of ‘supporting women and their partners as they transition to parenthood’ to also ‘ensuring the health and wellbeing of their babies and children’ under Victoria’s gold star maternal and child health (MCH) system.
She completed a Diploma of Applied Science (Community Health) – now known as the Graduate Diploma in Child and Family Health Nursing – at RMIT, as well as a Bachelor of Education for good measure: a B.Ed was not an essential qualification to practice, she explains, but ‘there is a strong educational focus to MCH work that permeates much of our work with families, either at an individual level or with groups’.
ANMF career
In 2007, Maree became an ANMF (Vic Branch) Job Rep for her MCH team in local government. ‘I have always loved a good debate,’ she says of the decision, ‘and enterprise bargaining in local government provided a perfect opportunity to hone those skills, with the support and guidance of the ANMF industrial relations organisers and officers.’
Unsurprisingly, given where she is today, Maree lists becoming a Job Rep as one of her career highlights. It was her stepping stone to Branch Council the following year, and then to the role of president in 2010. (She also spent two years as ANMF’s federal vice president, ‘which provided a great opportunity to look at issues that affected nurses, midwives and carers at a national level,’ she says, ‘and to apply that knowledge to helping Victoria’s nurses, midwives and carers.’)
As a fledgling Branch president, a defining moment for Maree was the 2011/2012 Respect Our Work EBA campaign – the longest industrial and community campaign in Victorian nursing and midwifery history.
‘Our diversity is our strength.’
‘I think that campaign to protect nurse- and midwife-to-patient ratios was an incredibly inspiring and challenging experience,’ she says. ‘Lisa Fitzpatrick, our secretary, and our assistant secretaries, Paul Gilbert and Pip Carew, fearlessly lead members in a protracted campaign with record numbers attending rallies, stop-work meetings, door knocking and more.’
For Maree, one of the best things about that campaign was watching, and joining, ‘a new generation of activist nurses, midwives and carers who participated in that campaign. As a newly minted Branch President, standing on the back of a truck in Bourke Street Mall with a loud hailer in hand during one of our marches, I felt incredibly proud to be an ANMF (Vic Branch) member, knowing that together, we can achieve anything.’
Indeed, that victory ultimately led to ratios being removed from the EBA – where they had been up for renegotiation every four years – and instead enshrined into state law.
Building on that achievement, and the solidarity she experienced during the campaign, Maree’s key goal as Branch President has always been to ensure that members are well represented at a council level. ‘The broad nursing and midwifery representation provides for excellent discussion and decision making. We each bring a voice from our respective workplaces, and then work with the elected leadership team to review budgets, governance and at times difficult Branch policy decisions.’ She explains. ‘Our diversity is our strength.’
