Australia Post To Close Many Local Post Offices

For the past 30 years, for initial reasons more than half forgotten, I have rented a post office box at Highpoint West. The post office address is Highpoint City, not the original Highpoint West, nor the current simple Highpoint, reflecting the name of the shopping centre post 1986 expansion, which the post office has never bothered updating.

Thirty years is a long time. The Highpoint Post Office has moved location once, and the post office boxes have been moved twice, most recently twelve years ago to the barely accessible basement car park. I myself have moved home twice, dropped out of my masters degree, had three promotions at work, and recently retired from work.

It sometimes is hard to remember the person I was 30 years ago.

Through that time, I have, possibly due to pretentiousness, maintained my post office box, which now costs about $150 per year, and which has a constantly decreasing amount of traffic delivered to it.

Two weeks ago I received a notice in my box that whilst the PO Boxes will remain, the actual Highpoint Post Office which services them will close in late May.

It’s not the only one. Braybrook is about to close, as are Glenroy and Essendon.

I’m surprised about Highpoint PO. On some days, when it opens, there are huge queues to get served.

Closure of post offices is going to have an impact on the community. Many newsagents do not sell postage stamps (and barely sell newspapers anymore for that matter), as there is no profit to it, only nuisance. I recall the existence of primitive stamp vending machines about 30 years plus ago separate from post offices, but have not seen any such since, except in the Melbourne GPO.

The inability to buy postage stamps easily is going to impact further on the physical mail traffic, as it will be harder for those more likely to rely on snail mail to actually send it.

Post Offices, being government owned, also have a community service obligation. Where this en masse closure is occurring, it is difficult for both Australia Post and the Federal Government to assert that those community service obligations are being met.

As for me… I just spent over an hour ensuring that my residential address has become my postal address for all my banking, investment, tax, medicare, electoral enrolment etc records. All I need to do now is update my insurance policies (all paid up til next March) to my home address.

After that, I will not be renewing my PO Box next year. I will save that money. I wonder where I should return the PO Box key.