Adelaide first on hitlist for AusPost letters

Residents in 40 Adelaide suburbs will be the first in the country to suffer from national mail monopoly Australia Post axing its letter delivery schedule from daily to five times a fortnight.

AusPost plans to chop back its letter delivery schedule across the country in the weeks to come as it switches resources from letters to parcels. It will be releasing the names of suburbs across the country that will move onto the alternate weekday schedule over the next month.

Every city in the country will be impacted by the move, which has drawn the ire of the printing and mailing sectors. AusPost says the move is temporary. But sceptics are not convinced and see it as further evidence of the lack of faith in its mail business.

Letters has been on the downward slope for several years, with the AusPost strategy of jacking up prices and reducing service levels doing nothing to arrest the slide in revenue. 

AusPost revenue jumped by seven per cent in the Covid quarter as buyers flocked to online stores and parcel delivery. Its CEO Christine Holgate is Australia’s highest paid civil servant but has just had a proposed bonus knocked back by the chairwoman of the board, along with those of other senior execs. Last year Holgate’s remuneration was $2.75m.

As high as it is, it is way off the $5.6m her predecessor Ahmed Fahour was trousering before being forced out. Fahour is now making hay running buy now, pay later business Latitude Financial.