PRESS RELEASE: Urgent: Australian Parliament must apply lessons from UK post office scandal to save Australia Post and licensees
The scandal that has rocked United Kingdom politics following ITV broadcasting the four-part drama Mr Bates vs. the Post Office on 1-4 January should concern Australian parliamentarians, as it has a parallel in Australia Post’s treatment of small business post office licensees.
Mr Bates vs. the Post Office is the true story of how the corporate management of UK Post Office terrorised thousands of individual post office operators, called sub-postmasters, over 20 years, to maintain corporate profits, bonuses and “reputation”.
Starting in 1999 UK Post Office rolled out Horizon, a faulty computerised accounting system designed by a subsidiary of Fujitsu, but instead of acknowledging the faults management blamed sub-postmasters for inexplicable accounting shortfalls, which the sub-postmasters were contractually obligated to make up out of their own pockets.
Whenever sub-postmasters called the Horizon helpline, they were always told that no other post offices were having any problems; meanwhile, proving this was a lie, between 1999 and 2015 Post Office management used archaic powers to prosecute more than 700 sub-postmasters for false accounting, fraud and theft, with the government prosecuting almost 300 more.
More than 400 innocent sub-postmasters went to jail, and thousands more suffered everything from loss of livelihoods and homes, bankruptcy, extreme stress, illness, divorce and even suicide.
Mr Bates vs. the Post Office dramatises the more than 20-year fight by sub-postmasters for justice led by Alan Bates (played by Toby Jones) who never had any doubts that the fault was in the Horizon software, not wrongdoing by sub-postmasters.
It shows the years of lobbying and investigations that eventually succeeded in having courts overturn convictions, but also the obfuscation, and obstruction of justice, by corporate Post Office management, who earned bonuses prosecuting and jailing people they knew were innocent.
The miniseries ends with the Courts overturning convictions in 2021, ruling they were an “affront” to justice, but with the victims left uncompensated; however, since airing in early January, the scandal has dominated British politics, with politicians tripping over themselves to finally ensure the victims receive justice.
It is being called “the widest miscarriage of justice in British history”, and the UK government has announced a billion pounds in compensation shared between more than 4,000 out of the UK’s 11,500 sub-postmasters.
In Australia, the Licensed Post office Group (LPO Group), which represents the interests of the small business post office licensees who run 2,850 of Australia’s 4,000 post offices, the equivalent of sub-postmasters, see parallels to their mistreatment by Australia Post.
On 11 January, @LPOGroup tweeted in response to the ITV drama:
“Your stories are resonating with Licensees of Australia Post outlets all across Australia. The similarities are chilling…”
The 2021 Senate inquiry into the removal of Christine Holgate as CEO of Australia Post revealed that, while not quite as extreme as sub-postmasters going to jail, Australia’s LPOs suffered not dissimilar mistreatment and bullying from Australia Post’s corporate management extracting profits and bonuses at the expense of LPOs, driving many into bankruptcy.
LPO’s despaired for years, ignored by the politicised Australia Post board and successive governments, until Christine Holgate became CEO in 2017 and implemented reforms that made them financially viable.
Since Scott Morrison removed Holgate in 2020, however, LPOs report Australia Post’s new corporate management has returned to policies of exploiting LPOs and reducing services, which is undermining postal services and the postal network, but the government is ignoring their complaints.
The UK scandal shows what happens when profit-driven, corporate managerialism is given power to exploit community-oriented essential services.
The Albanese government should listen to the concerns of LPOs and act with urgency to save essential postal services in Australia.
The Australian Citizens Party is an independent, federally-registered political party, founded in 1988. It is committed to policies that promote the economic development of Australia for the benefit of all its people, not just the vested corporate interests which have too much influence over the major political parties. It takes its inspiration from the "old Labor" party stalwarts including King O'Malley, who fought to establish Australia's national bank, the Commonwealth Bank, and John Curtin and Ben Chifley, who used the Commonwealth Bank to lead the economic mobilisation that saved Australia in WWII. The ACP fought against the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, which has concentrated financial power in Australia in the Big Four banking oligopoly that gouges short-term profits at the expence of Australians and the nation's economic development, and is campaigning to re-establish a national bank, modelled on the old Commonwealth Bank, as a government post office bank which would guarantee face-to-face banking services, and access to cash, for all communities, and break the Big Four banking oligopoly.
