Australian Dictionary of Biography

Portrait of Netta Burns, by Heide Smith, 1994

Supplied by Heide Smith, LCB007

Netta Patricia Burns (1924–1996), ministerial adviser, activist, and welfare reformer, was born on 26 December 1924 at Essendon, Melbourne, elder child of Thomas Russell Cox, public servant, and his wife Grace Louise, née Whitaker. Some of Netta’s childhood was spent in Queensland. After finishing secondary school with first-class honours in languages, in 1942 she matriculated to study languages, economics, and philosophy at the University of Melbourne part time while working as stenographer and secretary to the academic registrar—she did not complete the degree. During this time she became involved with both the university Labor Club and the Communist Party of Australia.

On 1 February 1946 Cox married Arthur Lee Burns, a university tutor and Presbyterian minister, at Littlejohn Memorial Chapel, Scotch College, Hawthorn. The couple was posted briefly to a parish in the Mallee in north-western Victoria. While there, she kept abreast of political matters by reading communist newspapers and British weeklies. This was useful preparation for her impending move to England, where her husband had been accepted into postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Burns arrived in London at the beginning of 1947 brimming with postwar optimism; she later recalled that ‘we wanted a new world … we wanted absolutely everything to change’ (Burns 1993). When the job she had arranged fell through, she found employment with the British Labour Party at Transport House. Her role was varied but she contributed mostly to the research department, preparing leaflets about the Attlee government’s major reforms including the nationalisation of health care. While there she started to develop the political skills and networks that would characterise her future career in Australia.

At the end of January 1949 Burns and her husband returned to Melbourne. She cut ties with the Communist Party, which she felt ‘had become rigid and slightly sinister’ (Burns 1993), and resumed her involvement with the Australian Labor Party (ALP), whose members were interested to hear about the Attlee government’s grand, radical reform program. That August the couple welcomed their first child, Jonathan, followed by Michael (b. 1951), Timothy (b. 1953), Sarah (b. 1955), and Rupert (b. 1958).

On Arthur’s appointment as a research fellow in international relations at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1955, the Burnses relocated to Canberra, moving into a university-owned house in Deakin. The family spent periods overseas during Arthur’s sabbaticals in the United States of America and Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1967 Burns resumed her career, joining the ALP Federal secretariat, which had been established three years earlier under the leadership of the reformer Cyril Wyndham. Burns had first known Wyndham twenty years earlier when he was an office boy in the British Labour Party headquarters and worked effectively with him back in Australia despite the bitter factional disputes that eventually led to his forced resignation and the temporary closure of the Canberra secretariat.

In 1970 Burns spent five months in Cambridge, England, as secretary to the academic Hugh Sockett, a former school history teacher and philosopher of education. The same year, on returning to Canberra, she began working for Lance Barnard, the deputy leader of the parliamentary ALP and shadow defence minister. Having participated in the campaign that led to the election of the Whitlam government in December 1972, she became office manager and secretary for the minister for social security, Bill Hayden, resuming the work she had begun in the Federal secretariat on the Medibank health scheme. She worked long hours, frequently staying at the office until midnight and working on Sundays. When Hayden was appointed treasurer in June 1975, she found herself without the authority to make substantial contributions to his new work. She moved to the office of Joe Berinson, the new minister for the environment, in July that year. Pessimistic about Labor’s chances at the next election, she nevertheless remained committed to the government.

After Whitlam’s dismissal in November and Labor’s emphatic election loss in December 1975, Burns worked with the shadow social security minister, Senator Don Grimes, travelling every second weekend to Sydney to care for her ailing mother. In early 1977 she separated from her husband, who was later controversially dismissed from his position at the ANU, deemed ‘permanently incapacitated’ (G.E. Dicker to Arthur Burns, 13 November 1981, Burns Papers, AU ANUA 758) from fulfilling the role. He predeceased her in 1995, shortly after they formally divorced.

Burns took a leading role in developing the welfare policies the party took to the 1980 and 1983 elections. She worked for Grimes following the ALP’s 1983 election victory, and then for his successor as social services minister from December 1984, Brian Howe. As Howe’s chief of staff, she was a loud voice of resistance against pressures, coming from both within and outside the government, to reduce social welfare provision. In 1987 she was awarded an OAM for her contributions to the public service. She retired from full time work that year, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke took the unusual step of adjourning cabinet so ministers could attend her farewell. Maintaining her interest in welfare matters, she served as a part time senior member of the Social Security Appeals Tribunal in retirement.

With cropped wavy hair and dark eyebrows, Burns was a familiar face in Canberra. She was a lover of the arts, enjoyed jazz, and was well read. She died of cancer at her home in Canberra on 30 April 1996, survived by her five children. At a memorial service in the Members’ Dining Room at Old Parliament House there was standing room only. The Labor parliamentarian Barry Jones paid tribute to her as ‘one of those rare blithe spirits who helped shape and confirm the greatest values of human life—compassion, energy, fortitude, enthusiasm, integrity and devotion’ (Aust. HOR 1996, 311). While most of her work was behind the scenes, Burns was a skilled manager and a consummate networker who was devoted to the Labor cause. A shrewd and tough negotiator, she was driven by a desire to improve the lives of ordinary Australians.