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Here's my favourite quote:
Australians living in rural, regional and remote areas will also now have improved access to banking services with a $9.7 million commitment to Bank@Post. This will expand the giroPost network and banking services to 266 Australia Post outlets which handle more than 2500 transactions annually.
Hoooly doooly, an awesome 2500 transactions per annum! Do you realise that with our population of 20 million people, this comes out to a staggering 0.0125 percent of a transaction per person per year? Think of what you could do with your very own eight thousandth of a transaction. I'm reeling at the possibilities being offered. Thank you John Howard, thank you Helen Coonan, I almost feel guilty about not voting for you.
Let's look at the costing here, if they are spending $9.7 million to achieve 2500 transactions, that is a cost of $3880.00 per transaction, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and presume that once they get real high volume turnover, they will reap some efficiency of scale and get it down to $2000.00 per transaction.
Well hey guys, for $2000.00 per transaction, give me the money, I'll ride a bicycle to each regional centre and carry the payments in a backpack. We could restart the great bullock train tradition, or hire some skilled Aboriginal trackers to walk the transactions overland.
Has it even slightly occured to these people how many transactions go through Internet Web Banking? I'm taking a wild stab here but I feel reasonably confident that it's more than 2500 transactions per year (fraggle, I do a reasonable fraction of 2500 internet banking transactions all on my own in a year).
Here's another quote:
Labor's postal policy demonstrates they are a party without a plan for postal services, promising things the Government has already guaranteed and struggling to find ways to improve an industry that, under the Howard Government, has produced effective and world class postal services to all Australians.
Since the ALP don't have a history of selling off government services, why is it so amazing that they don't intend to sell Aust Post?
Furthermore, under Howard's guidance, Aust Post has contracted operations:
| Fin Year | Mil Articles Handled (2000-2001 report) | Mil Articles Handled (2001-2002 report) | Mil Articles Handled (2002-2003 report) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996-1997 | 4205.7 | ||
| 1997-1998 | 4372.0 | 4372.0 | |
| 1998-1999 | 4530.1 | 4530.1 | 4911.8 |
| 1999-2000 | 4822.6 | 4822.6 | 5203.7 |
| 2000-2001 | 4761.1 | 4887.6 | 5258.4 |
| 2001-2002 | 4870.9 | 5281.2 | |
| 2002-2003 | 5261.7 |
So every year they come up with a new methodology and in every case they find that number of articles handled reaches a peak and starts going down. In the 2002-2003 report they were so desperate for something to crank the figures that they even included unaddressed advertising mail (i.e. postal spam, or letterbox junk mail). So we can all be impressed by their high efficiency delivery of useless fodder for our recycling bins -- good work!
The fact is that email is beating postal delivery, it even beats the post when it comes to spam delivery.
Yup, I can see clear signs that there is a plan for Aust Post.
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