You’ve got (less) mail: COVID-19 hands Australia Post a golden opportunity to end daily letter delivery

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Paul Alexander, Curtin University

Australia Post delivered more than 3.3 billion items last financial year. That’s almost 14 million deliveries a day (not counting weekends and public holidays).

Its 2019 annual report itemises the massive logistical network required: 15,037 street post boxes, 4,343 post offices, 461 sorting and distribution facilities, 4,845 delivery vans, 2,600 trucks, six airline freighters, rail assets, and 8,992 motorbikes and electric delivery vehicles.

Letters and parcels move in “waves” to 12.1 million addresses daily. Federally legislated service standards oblige Australia Post to deliver a letter within the country in no more than four days at a fixed rate (currently A$1.10). And to do so every week day to 98% of all delivery points.

Or at least Australia Post did so until late April. That’s when the federal government granted a temporary suspension of the services standards, allowing it to deliver letters every second business day in metropolitan areas.

The rationale was to enable Australia Post to divert resources from letter delivery – the part of its business in decline for at least a decade – to the booming demand for parcel delivery driven by COVID-19.

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In May, with support from the Senate crossbench, the government passed amendments extending the suspension to June 2021.

That move is not universally supported. Unions fear postal workers will lose jobs. Federal opposition leader Anthony Albanese has signalled Labor Party support for a Senate motion to overturn the changes.

These cuts are to jobs, these cuts are to services that are absolutely essential […] In particular, older Australians really rely upon their postal services.

It’s true Australia Post provides an indispensable service. But its revenues tell a story of people relying on postal services less and less.

Lost letters

The decline of the letter business over the past decade has been relentless.

In 2009 Australia Post made a profit before interest and income tax of A$384.5 million. Of this its letter business generated A$52 million. Parcels and logistics made A$187 million. Other business (such as agency services and merchandise) made about A$146 million.

In 2019 its net profit was down to a razor-thin A$41 million. Profit before interest and tax for its non-letters businesses was almost A$259 million. Its letters business lost almost A$192 million.

Australia Post can still make profits delivering letters in major cities and regional centres, where population density is high and distances short. But not in in rural areas, where per-delivery costs skyrocket. Its commercial competitors, meanwhile, can cherry-pick the most lucrative market segments and avoid the loss-making ones.

Parsing parcels

Australia Post has long yearned to be freed from its obligation to deliver letters daily. In 2015 then chief executive Ahmed Fahour declared letter posting “in terminal and structural decline” and that Australia Post “is a parcels company more than a letters company”.

In March, current chief executive Christine Holgate told a Senate estimates committee:

Our most significant challenge is managing the tipping point of that transformation from letters for our delivery network, which is about 70% of our costs, which is actually now in need really of a significant transformation.

The cost of delivering a $1.10 letter is not much less than a $10 parcel. It makes no commercial sense to utilise resources on loss-making activities at the expense of profitable ones.

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But Australia Post is not just another corporation. Profits are not its only measure of success. It is owned by the nation. Its services are essential, particularly to rural communities.

Fingal Post Office, in north-east Tasmania.
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At this time, a strong case can be made it is a better social service to ensure timely parcel delivery.

In the longer term, the issue for policy makers is whether the social good is best served by keeping Australia Post to its historical obligations, or allowing it to meet burgeoning parcel demand and return a bigger dividend to the federal government to help fund other public services.

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While opinions will vary, the numbers make a compelling case. They show a mail delivery system designed before the advent of the internet doesn’t need to be daily any more – just as the telephone last century helped end the importance of mail being delivered twice a day.

Paul Alexander, Associate Professor, Network analysis, Procurement,Supply Chains, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Decline of traditional media

Should the threat to traditional media from the internet really be a cause for concern?

The new social media — blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube are current faves — revolutionising the publishing world, for better and worse. Let’s look at both the better and the worse in perspective.

The current tsunami of personal choices in communication is slowly draining the profit from mainstream media. These media traditionally depend on huge audiences who all live in one region and mostly want the same things (the football scores, the crossword, the TV Guide, etc.). But that is all available now on the Internet, all around the world, all the time.

One outcome is a death watch on many newspapers, including famous ones like the Boston Globe. As journalist Paul Gillin noted recently: “The newspaper model scales up very well, but it scales down very badly. It costs a newspaper nearly as much to deliver 25,000 copies as it does to deliver 50,000 copies. Readership has been in decline for 30 years and the decline shows no signs of abating. Meanwhile, new competition has sprung up online with a vastly superior cost structure and an interactive format that appeals to the new generation of readers.”

Traditional electronic media are not doing any better. As James Lewin observes in “Television audience plummeting as viewers move online” (May 19, 2008), mainstream broadcasters “will have to come to terms with YouTube, video podcasts and other Internet media or they’ll face the same fate as newspapers.”

Radio audiences have likewise tanked. Overall, the recent decline of traditional media is remarkable.

Some conservative writers insist that mainstream media’s failure is due to its liberal bias. But conservatives have charged that for decades — to no effect. Another charge is that TV is declining because it is increasingly gross or trivial. True enough, but TV’s popularity was unaffected for decades by its experiments with edgy taste.

Let’s look more closely at the structure of the system to better understand current steep declines. Due to the low cost of modern media technology, no clear distinction now exists between a mainstream medium and a non-mainstream one, based on either number of viewers or production cost. Today, anyone can put up a video at YouTube at virtually no cost. Popular videos get hundreds of thousands of views. Podcasting and videocasting are also cheap. A blog can be started for free, within minutes, at Blogger. It may get 10 viewers or 10,000, depending on the level of popular interest. But the viewers control that, not the providers.

The key change is that the traditional media professional is no longer a gatekeeper who can systematically admit or deny information. Consumers program their own print, TV, or radio, and download what they want to their personal devices. They are their own editors, their own filmmakers, their own disc jockeys.

Does that mean more bias or less? It’s hard to say, given that consumers now manage their own level of bias. So they can hear much more biased news — or much less. And, as Podcasting News observes, “Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.”

Understandably, traditional media professionals, alarmed by these developments, have constructed a doctrine of “localism” and, in some cases, called for government to bail them out. That probably won’t help, just as it wouldn’t have helped if the media professionals had called for a government “bailed out” of newspapers when they were threatened by radio, or of radio when it was threatened by TV. Video really did (sort of) kill the radio star, but the radio star certainly won’t be revived by government grants.

Still, the news is not all bad. Yes, new media do sometimes kill old media. For example, no one seriously uses pigeon post to send messages today. But few ever thought birdmail was a great system, just the only one available at the time. However, radio did not kill print, and TV did not kill radio. Nor will the Internet kill older media; it will simply change news delivery. Sometimes in a minor way, but sometimes radically.

Media that work, whether radio, TV, newspapers, books, blogs, or any other, thrive when there is a true need. Today’s challenge is to persuade the consumer to look at alternatives to their own programming decisions.

Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

The original news article can be viewed at:
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/decline_of_traditional_media/

Article from MercatorNet.com

PAKISTAN: CHRISTIAN AT CHURCH OF BELEAGUERED PASTOR ARRESTED

Young parishioner illegally detained, beaten with wooden rods.

ISTANBUL, October 17 (Compass Direct News) – In ongoing intimidation of a Pakistani pastor working in the outskirts of Lahore, police last week arrested and beat a young parishioner who was visiting his home to receive prayer.

Police on Oct. 9 arrested Javed Masih, a 22-year-old delivery driver and prominent member of pastor Christopher Manzer’s congregation, as he was leaving Manzer’s house. The pastor had already fled after receiving a telephone call warning him of imminent police arrival.

Police attacked Manzer five times between April and July, and the pastor of the Pentecostal Church of Jesus Disciples has recently received death threats.

As Masih was leaving Manzer’s home, police approached him, asked if he was Pastor Christopher and arrested him. Manzer searched for Masih in local police stations without success.

On Sunday (Oct. 12) Masih’s family learned that he had been taken to the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) police station in Ichhra, central Lahore. Authorities held Masih there for three days, kept in a small room with 32 other men and beaten, before allowing him to make a phone call.

“They beat me with wooden rods,” Masih told Compass through a translator.

Police held Masih until 11 p.m. Tuesday (Oct. 14). According to human rights group Sharing Life Ministry Pakistan (SLMP) staff, Masih was held illegally and without any official record. He was released after his family and Manzer paid a bribe of 15,000 rupees (US$185). Masih plans to post pre-arrest bail, in the hopes that this will avert future arrests.

The pastor and staff at SLMP believe the man instigating the attacks is Mohammad Nawaz, who opened a court case against Manzer, Masih and seven others, accusing them of kidnapping his wife, Sana Bibi.

Bibi and Nawaz converted to Islam and eloped last year believing Islam could shield and support their union, as their families did not approve of their marriage. Sources said, however, that Bibi filed for divorce and returned to her family, after Nawaz’s ties with devout Muslims led to disagreements.

Manzer counseled Bibi after she decided to return to her family and Christianity, and according to sources Nawaz blames him for the divorce in March and a botched abortion that led to her death in May. Manzer has denied all of the accusations.

 

Continued Defamation

There are numerous charges pending against Manzer and members of his congregation based on accusations allegedly fabricated and filed by Nawaz’s friends.

Should these “applications” become official First Information Reports, they would each require pre-arrest bail payments from those indicted.

Both Manzer and Shahzad Kamran of the SLMP have expressed concerns of police corruption, maintaining police make arrests in order to collect release bribes. According to Peter Jacob, a lawyer with the National Commission for Justice and Peace, these issues are surmountable.

“There is a problem of corruption and influence on police, a degree of malpractice,” said Jacob. “On the whole if the allegations are false… there is the possibility of redress if corruption has taken place.”

Kamran told Compass he believes Manzer would benefit from appearing before the Deputy Inspector General (DIG), who has authority over all local police stations, to explain to him the entire episode.

“He could then take action and issue a summary report to all the police stations informing them the pastor is innocent, so all the applications could be cancelled,” said Kamran.

Kamran and Manzer said they plan to bring their case to the DIG within the next week.

Despite these difficulties, Manzer remains hopeful, believing that the case will be settled in his favor. The court has now authenticated the Bibi-Nawaz divorce documents to be used as evidence that Bibi was not kidnapped, according to the SLMP. This is a crucial step in the defense of Manzer, Masih and the seven others.  

Report from Compass Direct News