Bridie Jabour theguardian.com, Sunday 8 June 2014
Nationals' leader Warren Truss denies regions will be hit hardest; postal workers' union wants retrenched staff retrained
Australia Post's income from letters is declining while profits from its parcels services are increasing. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Proposed cutbacks at Australia Post will most likely be felt more in cities than in regional and remote areas, the acting prime minister, Warren Truss, has said.
Australia Post is preparing to axe 900 jobs, Fairfax Media reported on Sunday. The government-owned postal service will also continue lobbying to be allowed to scale back the number of weekday standard mail deliveries to fewer than five days a week.
The pre-budget National Commission of Audit report recommended that the postal service be sold. Australia Post lost $190m on postal deliveries last year, and the volume of letters posted was down by 25% from five years ago.
Truss, who is the federal leader of the National Party, dismissed concerns that the cuts would hit regional and remote areas the hardest.
“I think it will be a priority to try and maintain the mail services in remote areas; in regional communities,” he said. “The pressure is more likely to be felt in the cities, where the postal deliveries, the letterbox deliveries around towns and cities, may be substituted by an expectation that more people will go to the post office [to collect their post],” he said on the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.
“These are real challenges but we will have to deal with them … because there are less letters being written and less letters being posted.”
Australia Post faced a revenue “crisis” in future with its standard letter delivery service, Truss said. “They are doing well, obviously, in parcel delivery as a part of internet shopping, etcetera, but that represents a substantial change in the nature of the business.
“Other countries have had to face this issue already and there’s no doubt that that will also be the case in Australia,” he said.
The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU), which represents postal workers, has conceded that reforms are unavoidable but it wants any workers who are being made redundant to be offered retraining.
The secretary of the union’s NSW postal and telecommunications branch, Jim Metcher, said part of the reason for the job losses was to offset extra costs the company will incur in extending its services, such as a proposal to extend weekend opening hours.
“Any reforms contemplated by Australia Post cannot come as a cause for additional profit margins to Australia Post, or additional dividends to government. If we’re going to have reforms, and these things are going to be looked at in a sensible way, the government has to make a contribution towards that,” he said.
Metcher said the CEPU would like Australia Post to be offered government contracts, and a guarantee that not a single post office would be closed.
He said he had learned about the figure of 900 job losses from the media. The union had not been consulted so he did not know which specific areas of the company would bear the losses.
“It’s a terrible blow to lose jobs on this scale, but Australia Post is a big and evolving organisation and we’ll be making the case that new roles should be found for people who want to continue their service,” he said.
“The decline in volume of small-letter delivery, Australia Post's traditional service, does need to be addressed but there is significant growth in new and emerging parts of the business, like parcel delivery.”
Australia Post has neither confirmed nor denied the reported cutbacks. It said its priority was to support its staff through any changes.
“Australia Post has made it very clear that it is confronting dramatic change due to the impact of declining revenues in our letters’ service,” a spokesman said. “It is already responding to those changes and is a much leaner organisation than it was three years ago.”
Australia Post has floated the idea of a user-pays system for postal deliveries. In March, there was a suggestion that the cost of sending a standard letter could increase from 60c to 70c.
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