Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I had an opening for my presentation today and it too is on Australia Post, similar to the contribution made by Senator Urquhart, but I am diverted to urge Senator Urquhart and others not to politicise the debate in relation to the progress of Australia Post. The circumstances in which thousands of our small licensed post offices find themselves in and other stakeholders in this space have arrived after 20 years of neglect of a Commonwealth government of all persuasions. It is pox on all our houses. It would not be useful to them, to the debate and to the decisions that have to be taken to start to deal with this on a partisan level and attack the government. Within weeks of coming to office, this government got the inquiry going into the circumstances of licensed post offices—with the support of senators Madigan and Xenophon, and led by now retired Senator Boswell—that has resulted in the report, as indicated by Senator Urquhart, presented in this place on 24 September.

Let me now return to where Senator Urquhart and I agree—and I think all senators in this place generally agree. We have a critical situation—acutely critical in terms of the circumstances of the hundreds and possibly thousands of licensed post offices of this nation. They find themselves in these circumstances because of a litany of neglect by respective governments over a long period of time who have failed in their duty of care to these enterprises who deliver our community service obligations to keep them properly paid and indeed viable. It is a matter of public record that had CPI been applied to the payments that are made to these licensed post offices, in some instances those payments would be 70 per cent higher than what they are now. So it is truly pox on all our houses. But there should be no energy devoted to where we have come from. Everything needs to focus on where we need to go.

The impacts on these post offices and some of the changes that are contemplated are impacting beyond the post offices. I am going to focus today, given I sit with the National Party, on the impact on rural and regional communities. In some cases, these post offices are the maypole of an entire community. After decades of economic rationalism on the part of all sorts of governments, we have seen a depletion of services to people who live in regional and remote Australia. They have lost their courthouses, they have lost their railway stations, we have pulled up their rail lines, we have taken away their banks and we have almost given licence to the private sector to abandon these communities with us because they were not as profitable perhaps as investment somewhere else. In many cases the post office remains as the centre of that community. Post offices were always going to be the most affected when there was a reduction in the use of mail, which then impacts additionally, as a circumstance of aggravation, on elderly people in our communities who rely upon mail. They still write letters and they still receive letters; this is how they communicate. They are not up with the technologies in some cases. Indeed, in rural areas some of them do not even have good internet service, and some areas do not have any internet service. So you take the mail away. You take their ability to communicate through the internet—they have intermittent hard line services and absolutely no mobile services. So the impact of this, if we are not careful, will be catastrophic on some of these communities and the people who live in them.

There are other stakeholders who are interested in this question. The postal industry, for example, right across this nation will be impacted very negatively by any reduction of services that are delivered via what I call hard mail—that is, paper in a letterbox. They are taking a keen interest in what is happening because it will impact on their industry quite negatively. There are the employees of Australia Post, a loyal and proud workforce who, as a matter of history, delivered our first community service obligations in this nation in 1788. When the ships came out from England after the First Fleet, when the Second Fleet arrived, the first thing unloaded was the mail. It is the first community service obligation that this government took responsibility for all those hundreds of years ago—not medical services and not education services but postal services. There are legendary stories about how men and women over the decades and over the centuries have proudly continued to deliver these services. I say we have a responsibility to them to pay care and attention to ensuring the viability of this enterprise, a very proud iconic enterprise of this country.

There are some very disturbing statistics involved. There was some survey work done where there were 250-plus respondents who operated licensed post offices: 74 per cent of those respondents indicated that they had to inject external investment into their businesses to remain operational—not to remain viable but to remain operational, and there is a difference; 79 per cent, slightly up on that figure, indicated that they are not viable as a test; only 18 per cent believe that they would continue to survive and operate profitably over the coming two years, the survey having been done in the middle of 2014; and 98 per cent said that businesses were not mutually beneficial with Australia Post. These are, in effect, franchisees who are referring to their franchisor. They do not have a symbiotic relationship where they think that what they do is beneficial. And disturbingly—and this ought to send alarm bells off for everybody—of the respondents who were caucused, they indicated that contingent liabilities that they were unable to meet made up about $2.154 million. These are things like taxation obligations, contingent liabilities like the BAS payments, super contributions retained on behalf of their staff and things such as long-service and holiday pay. These are operators who themselves went for long periods between their own holidays or being able to nourish their family with any profits from these enterprises, reporting for the most part that they were not profitable.

One thing that Senator Urquhart was quite correct about—and I do not think we disagree even by the width of a Tally-Ho paper—is the fact that the minister should pay serious attention to many of the recommendations that were made in the report that was delivered in this place back in September. In particular—and this is at the heart of my argument and has been since day dot of my involvement in this—is recommendation No. 17, where it is recommended that the Minister for Communications undertake an independent audit of the licensed post office network, specifically to determine the validity of claims made by licensees that payments made under the agreement are not fair or reasonable. It goes on to recommend that, if it is found that they are not fair and reasonable, an inquiry should be held to determine what it ought to be. The clear question in that is the question of independence. Recommendation No. 17 says it should be conducted independently, and I mean seriously independently, of Australia Post. They did a hatchet job approach of it with KPMG. It was an embarrassment—I say—to KPMG and to Australia Post. I have never read a more partisan report. It definitely was not independent. The instructions were inadequate, and I think it failed on every financial level and bordered on being misleading in its presentation. I will close by saying that I agree with Senator Urquhart that the minister should look at the recommendation that approves an independent inquiry.