Steve Taylor and Paul Kelly have written an open letter to Federal MP Kevin Hogan about the frustrations of running a country post office under Aus Post rules. It’s a long letter and worth reading through to understand what makes it so difficult for our small post offices in country towns to offer a service their community needs.
Dear Mr Hogan,
We are the licensees of the Coraki Post Office.
This means as an independent family owned small business we passed all Australia Post established benchmarks and criteria and significantly invested in Australia Post to purchase the license to sell Australia Post products and services in 2017.
We have operated this outlet for almost nine years, serving a community that includes elderly residents, families, farmers, small businesses, First Nations customers, vulnerable community members, and people in rural surrounding areas.
Coraki Post Office does much more than a daily sort of mail and parcels.
We are one of the last locally accessible points for banking, bill payment, parcel collection, identity services, and government-linked functions. Our community understands this.
People regularly tell us they would rather transact their business here than travel to larger regional centres such as Casino, Lismore, Ballina or Grafton. With the escalating cost of living rising, including the recent spike in fuel prices, this is less about sentiment and more about practical economics.
Our customers have worked out that keeping their transactions local is more cost effective, and they recognise that keeping a service in Coraki does not just affect them directly. It supports every other local business.
The two income streams that currently keep this privately owned family business commercially viable are banking and parcels. Both are under pressure in ways that are becoming very difficult to manage.
Banking
Our customers regularly ask whether we can do more. At Coraki Post Office they want to be able to:
- complete BPAY transactions
- deposit funds into someone else’s accounts
- activate PINs
- cardless banking, and open or close accounts.
We cannot offer those things.
The gap between what customers need and what Bank@Post currently allows is ever increasing.
When enquiring about these functions from their financial institution, our customers request and concern are dismissed with a glib “you can do it online” response.
Many of our customers are reluctant to engage with online banking.
This is because of:
- low digital literacy,
- concerns about security – everyone has a story to tell about a family member/friend/acquaintance who was scammed online,
- unreliable local internet connections – the strength of the internet signal in Coraki is
- haphazard at best, further out in more rural areas it borders on being non-existent, or
- simply not owning a connected device – not everyone owns, or wants to own, a smartphone.
Travelling to a regional centre is not straightforward either:
- branches have closed,
- branches that still exist have reduced operating hours forcing the customer to present
- during the hours of the financial institutions choosing regardless of how inconvenient
this may be,
- if they are not a customer of that financial institution, they are placed in a non-priority queue, with the explanatory comment that only customers of that institution get served first,
- when customers arrive, a regularly recounted experience is they are directed to a self-service machine away from a human teller, and particularly during extreme weather events customers are cut off / unable to travel to these regional centres.
This was clearly demonstrated in the aftermath of the 2022 flood where Coraki Post Office was one of the few places locally that was able to dispense cash – all other ATMs were inoperable due to a flooded telephone exchange that took weeks to repair.
This outlet is, in practical terms, the banking option for many people in this community.
Parcels – the issues are significant, and they are felt by customers directly.
- tracking is inconsistent,
- parcels repeatedly loop through sorting facilities for days without explanation, and
- parcels pause at the local Casino sorting centre who will not release parcels to customers when they specifically drive to Casino to collect them.
Deliveries from other courier networks cannot be received at our counter, even though our customers trust us to hold their goods securely. They are confused as to why that is not possible.
The absence of an open, interoperable parcel platform in a regional area where other delivery networks have limited or no presence is a real gap that Australia Post is well positioned to fill, but chooses not to.
There are also inconsistencies affecting small businesses that are an integral part of this community.
Collection from businesses located on farms/rural properties outside of Coraki – StarTrack, the freight division of Australia Post, frequently refuse to collect from businesses located on farms/rural properties outside of Coraki, whereas competing freight companies servicing this area will.
Post Office Box Plus – businesses that lease a PO Box here at Coraki Post Office cannot access the paid service called ‘Post Office Box Plus’. This paid service upgrade is available to residential customers only.
The value of this service is that it allows a maximum of 50 courier parcels per year to be received and stored at a post office. The alternative is these parcels are either left at the courier depot, meaning the customer must drive 30 – 45 minutes to the depot to collect, or deposited at alternative venue which the courier tracking does not indicate such as a service station.
The customer is left wondering where their parcel is, and required to search around to locate it. Making Post Office Box Plus available to business customers means we can receive and store the parcel at Coraki Post Office, and when it is scanned out to the customer, Coraki Post Office is paid a scanning commission which helps contribute to our ongoing commercial viability.
Depositing money/paying invoices – businesses can deposit into their own account at the counter but cannot deposit/pay into another account they hold details for.
This makes it impossible to use the Post Office for such basic services such as paying an invoice, forcing business customers to take time out of the daily business activities, drive to a larger regional centre, locate the bank, and attempt to pay the invoice facing the same experiences highlighted above.
These are not small frustrations. These are Australia Post imposed structural barriers. As licensees we are encouraged and incentivised to build relationships with local businesses through the Australia Post Local Business Partnerships program, account manage the local business’s needs, and yet are stymied on what we can genuinely offer.
The combined effect of these changes and limitations is a business that is increasingly difficult to sustain despite genuine and consistent community demand.
What we are seeing locally is not a community that has moved on from its Post Office. It is a community being underserved by a network that is not keeping pace with what regional towns genuinely and authentically need.
If this outlet weakens, the consequences will extend well beyond us.
Coraki will lose its primary access point for essential services, and the economic and social flow-on effects for surrounding businesses and community members will be significant. This domino effect is not a metaphor here. It is something our customers speak about directly and with real concern.
This is not simply a commercial matter. It is a question of what communities in regional NSW can reasonably expect from this Government Business Enterprise. The network that exists today took generations to build. It cannot easily be replaced.
We would respectfully ask that you (Kevin Hogan): seek a formal briefing from Australia Post:
On the future of the licensed Post Office network and the services available in communities like Coraki, and
On why $250 million was invested in rolling out the new POST+ point-of-sale system, regularly touted as necessary to deliver more and additional services, when Australia Post is consistently reducing the number of available services and not replacing these with any new commission-generating services. raise this issue in Parliament as a matter of community access and regional infrastructure, write to the Australia Post shareholder Ministers with a clear request that Australia Post expand rather than reduce the services available through its licensed network, and visit the Coraki Post Office to see firsthand the role it plays in this community.
We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you and to share the on-the-ground perspective of almost nine years of service in this town.
Yours sincerely,
Paul Kelly and Steve Taylor
Licensees
Coraki Post Office
1. the Licensed Post Office Group (LPOG) representative (https://lpogroup.com.au/) for the Mid North Coast, the region Australia Post has placed Coraki into, and
2. owner/manager/licensee of Coraki Post Office