ONE of the stalwarts of small regional communities is having access to the post office and the services they offer.
However, post offices are in trouble due to the transition from the use of mail to keep in touch with each other to online communications such as email and social media. Over the years, post offices been gradually been taken out of service as a public utility moving to operate as a small business that if it is not profitable may eventually cease to exist.
A saving graces as we tend to move more online and away from mail is that parcel delivery has increased immeasurably, now being a dominant source of Australia Post’s income at 73 percent and increasing.
In its most recent report, Australia Post declared revenue at $7.5B which makes it a target for investors to fully privatise the entity. But with privatisation as we have seen with other utilities such as power, telecommunications and gas delivery if providing a service to a particular area become unprofitable then it may cease to exist.
For the hundreds of thousands of people living in remote locations, the loss of these services puts extra hardship on them and a reduction in the viability of regional living.
One of the other features of regional post offices is their agency with banking services that offer off-line transactional banking services in regions where the number of banks in country towns is contracting year by year.
But therein lay the problem. In an effort to ensure the banks paid an agency fee commensurate with the service provided, the option was to form as a public bank which would have had great impact on the bank’s bottom line and that posed a threat.
While the government has supposedly shelved plans to privatise the post office, the moves taken in the recent past tend to suggest that it is still very much a proposition and if that happens, the people to suffer the most will be those living in regional Australia and that’s a problem.
