She taught English part-time and commenced an MA thesis on the poet Shaw Neilson but this was interrupted when she suffered a severe whiplash injury in a car accident.

[2] Haines became the assistant of Robin Millhouse, an important player in the South Australian conservative party the Liberal and Country League.

She was appointed to fill a casual vacancy in the Senate by the Parliament of South Australia, on the nomination of Labor premier Don Dunstan, on 14 December 1977.

After leaving parliament Haines worked in a number of public positions including being president of the Australia Privacy Charter Council and deputy chancellor of the University of Adelaide.

She wrote a book Suffrage to Sufferance: One Hundred Years of Women in Politics (Allen and Unwin, North Sydney, 1992, ISBN 1-86373-365-5) which has been a prescribed text in universities and schools.