PRESS RELEASE: Citizens Party: Albanese rewards the saboteurs of Australia Post. Australians must demand the government post office bank solution before the network is gutted beyond recognition

*The following can be attributed as quotes to Citizens Party chairman Robert Barwick.*
Since taking office in May 2022, Anthony Albanese has done nothing to stop the gang of saboteurs managing Australia Post from running it into the ground as an essential service; in fact, he has rewarded them lavishly with massive bonuses.
Australia Post is owned by the public, to whom it is an essential service, yet it is being systematically dismantled.
The ex-Woolworths, McDonalds and Subway executives led by CEO Paul Graham who have hijacked it are sabotaging its essential mail delivery service, its core responsibility on which it has a monopoly, to use its mail infrastructure to give it an advantage in the parcels business, on which it competes with dozens of other companies.
The public and politicians need to ask the question: what is the purpose of Australia Post—to provide an essential, secure, reliable postal service, even if that isn’t super-profitable; or to maximise profit to pay the government huge dividends?
It’s supposed to be the former, which, while not being super-profitable, should be able to at least cover its costs; instead, it has become the latter, and management doesn’t care how many communities they devastate in pursuit of profit.
Australia Post has closed over a hundred post offices, and is driving to close at least 200 more, to take the number of total post offices to the regulated minimum of 4,000 it is obligated to maintain.
On top of that, they are changing the nature of post offices, from the familiar shops where we access all kinds of services and products, to glorified parcel lockers with barely any services.
By this means they are effectively taking away hundreds if not thousands more genuine post offices but still counting them as post offices.
For example, in Narrandera in NSW, AusPost has closed the post office in the main street, using the condition of the building as the excuse, and re-opened a parcels-focused building in a back street which is inconveniently out of the way from local businesses.
Also, as two thirds of post offices are operated under license as small businesses, Paul Graham is now pushing the licensees to move from perpetual to fixed term licenses, so he can discontinue licenses and close even more post offices.
But while senior Labor Party politicians like Peter Khalil are making Facebook posts decrying the devastating closure of their local post offices, their own government is doing worse than nothing to address the crisis Australia Post is causing—they are rewarding the perpetrators!
The government owns Australia Post, which has only two shareholders—the Finance Minister, Katy Gallagher, and the Communications Minister, Anika Wells—who approve the remuneration and bonuses paid to executives.
This year they approved a $1.6 million bonus for Paul Graham, taking his pay to $3.3 million, the highest-paid government employee in Australia, and further approved bonuses ranging from $600,000 to $800,000 for all eight executives in his team, who each took home around $1.6 million.
Labor politicians, including Albanese, ambushed Christine Holgate and gave Scott Morrison the pretext to bully her out of Australia Post for spending a total of $20,000 to reward executives. For what? Helping her to save post offices!
Albanese later apologised for that but he is now complicit in a greater travesty.
The Citizens Party’s solution—a new government bank operating in post offices—will make all post offices viable, make Australia Post profitable, and save both essential postal services and the banking services. Australians must demand the government adopt it before the postal network is gutted beyond recognition.