Editorial: Australia Post needs to lift its game

Editorial: Australia Post needs to lift its game

EDITORIAL, Mercury

December 29, 2016 12:00am



http://www.themercury.com.au/news/opinion/editorial-australia-post-needs-to-lift-its-game/news-story/


CHRISTMAS is traditionally a busy time for the nation’s postal service, so it’s perhaps not surprising that there is a surge of complaints about deliveries at this time of year.

Cards and gifts sent and expected from places near and far are tracked to ensure their arrival before Christmas, and disappointment is keenly felt when they don’t. 

But this Christmas seems to have been accompanied by an unusual number of complaints from Mercury readers about items not having made it to their ultimate destination.

Nobody can doubt the astonishing logistical challenge Australia Post faces at this time of year. An additional 1500 staff are drafted in to help with parcel volumes increasing from the already unprecedented million parcels per day volumes being experienced by late October.

The boom in internet shopping has created an interesting set of challenges for Australia Post. While parcel volumes are at record levels as online store purchases zip to and fro, traditional letters volumes are crashing.

The Government Business Enterprise managed to make a $36 million profit last financial year, turning around a $222 million loss the previous year, on revenues of $6.6 billion. Delivering letters incurred a $138 million loss last year and is projected to contribute further losses of $5 billion over the next five years.

The company’s decision to switch to a two-speed letter service may itself help to hasten the decline of the traditional letter, something made inevitable by the near ubiquity of email.

No turnaround of such magnitude comes without cost — and the perception that Australia’s postal service is becoming worse is borne out not just by the anecdotal evidence of the letters page and online complaints.

A survey by the consumer magazine Choice earlier this year found that more than one in four Australians had experienced problems with parcel deliveries in the previous 12 months in a market dominated by Australia Post.

Although his salary details are now a closely guarded secret, the corporation’s CEO Ahmed Farhour remains the nation’s highest-paid public servant, earning $4.6 million in 2014.

While it is good to see that the management team has managed to turn around the epic losses of the letters division, there is a need for a continued focus on improvements with parcel delivery.

Too common are the stories of the “knock-and-run” from harried drivers, whose attempts at delivery are desultory at best. And in the era of online tracking of parcels, the agonising wait for those which have sped from overseas points of origin only to languish for days in local distribution centres is completely unacceptable.

There are many who would regard postal services as one of the functions governments are best placed to deliver at a reasonable standard and price. It may be an old-fashioned notion that service, rather than the sole pursuit of profit, should be the goal of such endeavours.

In the era of corporatisation and the endless wait on hold to outsourced overseas call centres and of customer complaints that disappear into the ether of an online form of the internet, perhaps the expectation of better is itself a forlorn and fading hope that has gone the way of the handwritten correspondence of yesteryear.