In late 2018, I graduated from my Bachelor of Youth Work. To the lead up to my graduation, I applied for the Young Workers Centre Union Summer Internship. The internship was a three-week paid placement with a union, and it required interns to submit a research paper about an issue concerning young workers, and to conduct a presentation reflecting on that research at the Victorian Trades Hall. As someone that was, and still is, interested in advocacy, the potential experience interested me.

After a group interview, I got in with my passion and knowledge of social justice. They placed me with the ANMF, otherwise known as the Australian Nurses & Midwifery Union.

“Nursing?! I’m a youth worker, what would I have with nursing?!” I thought when I was told where I would be placed. I thought maybe it would have been more appropriate to be with the ASU, the Australian Services Union, which do cover youth and community workers as part of their membership. But nonetheless, I accepted my place and commenced my internship.

As interns were required to shadow union workers, I did several things that required my observation and little else. One of the things I did was that I attended EBA meetings where union representatives battle it out with corporate health figureheads over matters like pay rates and conditions. One EBA meeting I attended was with a large elder care corporation that wanted to pay as little as possible to nurses in their retirement villages to maximise their profits. The union reps would fire back “pay peanuts and you would get monkeys”. They were right, the awful revelations about healthcare workers out of the nursing home Royal Commission and the covid pandemic proved them right in the worst possible way. But it was just before the wider public found out how bad all of it was.

Another thing I was required to do was join representatives to go to tertiary education institutions that taught nursing and midwifery students with their presentations about the unions. We went as far out as Ballarat and Geelong. The representatives went on about the campaigns at the time that the union was fighting for. Issues like occupational violence and pay rates were hot on the table (use the way back machine to be more accurate with this). They were presented as reasons to join the union. After the presentation was up, I was required to sit at a table with a queue of students to sign up as members.

The rides home from those presentations made me think. The campaigns were well and good for graduates and registered nurses, but was there something relevant to students then and now that can engage with them and make them sign up as enthusiastic members? What is the fight to have with them and for them, and not in a few short years when they are done with studying?

This inspired me what I researched on as a paper, student nurses and their concerns. I thought if a high number of students are young people themselves (16.5% under the age of 30 in 2019 according to the ANMF), then what better way for a youth worker to highlight their issues. So, I set out to do a 2000-word literature report and the presentation on student nurse mental health.

Writing the report led me to a deep dive into several issues that raised concerns. These concerns are that Australia was on track to have 16% of its population being over 65 which meant more demands on age care health, that climate change related disasters predicted for the 2020s would put a strain on emergency services (Sidenote: we were yet to see the disasters of the Black Summer Bushfires in less than 12 months at that stage), and about 44% of Australians would be living with a chronic condition that would put a demand on health services for ongoing care. It is a lot to consider that those things can lead to collateral damage to the mental health and wellbeing of student nurses and young nurses if not properly addressed early on and proactively by both health institutions and the union.

I gave a copy of my report findings to my shadowing supervisor at the ANMF. He said back to me “We didn’t consider this outlook before about addressing directly to student nurses, but what you have written is outstanding and persuasive. I’ll make it a priority of circling it around the union”. I was glad to hear that I made a positive contribution at the time, but it also concerned me that the issues around student nurses for the union was such an oversight of matters. Especially if part of their campaign

was to go into educational institutions to present to student nurses to persuade them to join their union. What followed in the next two years had me eerily reminded of that report. In less than six months from that internship, Australia experienced its worst environmental disaster with the Black Summer Bushfires that raged from July 2019 to March 2020. In March 2020, we had the first lockdowns for COVID start which highlighted the already strained issues around aged care and disability care. Healthcare workers reported the strains from both disasters were leading them to burnout and severe mental illness symptoms on their part. During this time, I thought about the term ‘Red Eye’ as a phenomenon that could happen to any of us in the workplace or in our day to day lives. I was told by someone that to have red eye means to be so hyper focused on a task that your eyes are red and dry from being able to see the glaring problems that might sabotage what you are doing. And the person to be said to have red eye is so focused that they are not paying attention that they might have red eye. The only cure for red eye from what I can tell is to have that outsider influence help with fresh eyes to correct the direction of attention. We can get so caught up in our long-term goals that we can forget to ask if they are still important or holds such an importance to achieve. And then we are caught unawares when overlooked mistakes lead to their consequences. All of this could be avoided if we were proactive to begin with to have people checking in that we are not developing red eye over a task to be completed. That seems easier said than done. I’ve seen people get caught up emotionally in a task that the other person checking in to prevent a ‘red eye’ mistake gets dismissed. Being the person that tries to highlight that someone has red eye might be a risk to challenge authoritative decision making. Should the royal advisor warn the emperor is naked before parading to his subjects in his supposed new clothes while he is still in his enclosed marquee? It is a tricky balance to figure out if speaking a needed truth to a situation is worthwhile.

I figured that it is even more tricker to admit red eye to yourself. Someone can be so sure of an idea and direction, that it takes a great deal of courage to admit having red eye over a situation. I figured that I had such red eye over my career, that I’d be in some institution working myself to a position of agency. But I am learning to pivot to have that agency in my own business over a long period of time. I can be hired to speak new ideas, lead new directions, and breathe new life to a platform.