PRESS RELEASE: Will Anika Wells save post offices?
Anthony Albanese’s new Communications Minister Anika Wells is now the minister responsible for Australia Post.
Will she allow Australia Post CEO Paul Graham to push ahead with closing as many post offices as he can, robbing communities all over Australia of an essential service?
Or will she do what her predecessors didn’t, and intervene to save post offices and the communities they serve?
That’s the question all Aussies should be asking the new minister and the Albanese government as she takes up her new role.
Post offices are in the category of things Joni Mitchell sang about in Big Yellow Taxi: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
We all take them for granted, but we all need them at one time or another, some of us quite regularly, especially to withdraw money from our accounts at the banks that have closed their branches.
The local post office is Australia’s front counter, providing many essential services, including banking.
Two thirds of Australia’s 4,200 post offices are small businesses, run under license to Australia Post.
For years the licensed post offices have warned that Australia Post management is driving them into bankruptcy.
Except for the five years of Christine Holgate, whom licensees called “the best CEO Australia Post ever had”, Australia Post CEOs have pushed the postal service away from its core responsibility for delivering the mail, into competing for the growing parcels business driven by e-commerce.
Current CEO Paul Graham has made it clear he wants to reduce the number of post offices to the bare minimum of 4,000 required by law, which means another few hundred communities are going to lose their local post offices.
He has also lobbied the previous minister to ditch the legislated community service obligation so he can close many more.
Ex-Woolworths logistics manager Paul Graham doesn’t want post offices serving every town; he wants parcels depots on back streets staffed by teenagers.
The Albanese government has not agreed to this, and no politician in their right mind would ever agree to stripping thousands of towns and suburbs of such an essential service, but the problem is so far Albanese and previous minister Michelle Rowland have done nothing to stop him.
They have ignored the pleas of the Licensed Post Office Group (LPOG), which represents the interests of licensees, and which has warned that Graham and his management team are driving their businesses into financial disaster, by removing more and more of the services they provide which keep customers coming in the door.
LPOG fear that Australia Post will achieve its goals of closing post offices by pushing many licensees to close their businesses and simply not replacing them.
LPOG support the win-win policy solution proposed by the Australian Citizens Party: establishing an Aussie Post Bank, a government bank operating in post offices.
The Aussie Post Bank would take on the Big Four private banking behemoths, injecting much-needed competition in the banking system, and serve all the towns those banks have abandoned by closing branches.
The revenue from banking would keep Australia Post profitable and make individual post offices financially viable.
Ex-CEO Christine Holgate was pursuing this solution when Scott Morrison brutally removed her in 2020 for the Cartier watches scandal, which was a Labor Party beat-up led by Michelle Rowland and Anthony Albanese.
Albanese has since apologised to Christine Holgate for his role, but he has done nothing to avert the looming disaster at Australia Post that he helped to set in train.
It now falls to Anika Wells to save this essential service—will she do her job?
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.
