Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

Whatever we were doing in government over the last six years, one thing that the Rudd and Gillard governments did not face was an Australia Post which was seeking to cut next-day delivery to regional Australians. That is the situation we are facing today. This is a fundamental service for people in regional Australia. I come from regional Australia myself. The idea that next-day delivery is being removed from postal services internal to Geelong is a disgrace. It represents an abandonment by the Abbott government of the people of Geelong within the first couple of months of taking office. This is a prime example of a government which said one thing before the election but has turned out to be a very different government upon being elected. This is one of the first issues which has raised itself within view of the people of Geelong, and there is enormous concern about the decisions and the review that is being put in place by Australia Post.

We now have a situation where the proposal, specifically as it relates to Geelong in terms of giving expression to Australia Post's desire to cut next-day delivery from regional Australia, is that most of the mail that is posted in Geelong will go to Dandenong to be sorted and distributed, even though that mail is going to people within Geelong—that is, a letter will go from Geelong across Port Phillip Bay to Dandenong and will be sorted there and then come back to Geelong. This is an extremely disturbing turn of events, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is estimated by The Geelong Advertiser that something like 20 million of the 24 million letters that are posted in Geelong each and every year will go to Dandenong to be sorted before they go elsewhere. We are already in a situation where the commitment to next-day delivery for the people of Geelong is not being met. Again, in October The Geelong Advertiser did their own test by putting a number of letters around the Geelong region to see how long it took for them to be delivered. One in four letters in that test did not meet the obligation of next-day delivery, even though that is occurring within Geelong. On top of that, we are now seeing this proposal to have so much of Geelong's mail taken out of the city and its sorting and distribution being done on the other side of Port Phillip Bay.

What that ultimately means is a downgrading of the Geelong mail distribution centre. That is of enormous concern to me as the member for Corio, to the citizens of Geelong and to those people who work at the distribution centre. Jobs in Geelong have been a very important issue over the course of this year—as they always are, but particularly this year with announcements at Ford, Target and more recently Qantas's heavy maintenance at Avalon. So a proposal which will see further jobs cut is, in and of itself, concerning as well.

More fundamentally than that, there is the notion of trying to have a first-rate, productive economy in a regional city in Australia. To have that first-rate, productive economy, we need the same services in relation to our postal delivery that can be enjoyed in Melbourne and Sydney. Having next-day delivery is fundamental to the productivity of any place, and that is what is being sought to be removed from Geelong.

Finally, there is just an element of fairness here. We have a national postal service. We do not have a Melbourne-Sydney postal service; we have a national postal service which should apply in the same way in Geelong, Wollongong, Ballarat and Bendigo as it does in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. What is being proposed by Australia Post now denies that national service being applied in the same way in regional centres such as Geelong. We are being placed in a second-class situation, and that is ultimately not good enough in this day and age. So, with the member for Ballarat, I call on the Minister for Communications to intervene in this matter and have this issue resolved immediately.

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