NZ Post faces anger over snail mail snafu
POSTIES fed up with complaints about slow mail deliveries want New Zealand Post investigated for serious misconduct over mail delays.
A Sunday News investigation that found standard letters taking more than two weeks to be delivered prompted the Postal Workers Union to bring the accusation against the stateowned enterprise.
Southern District president, John Maynard, said posties were continually receiving complaints from the public about the slow delivery of letters and parcels.
‘‘The postal service has degraded steadily since they switched to alternate-day delivery. The union believes this is a process of privatisation by stealth.’’
NZ Post has removed 1500 roadside post boxes nationally and begun to instruct posties in some branches to give priority to the delivery of parcels and to bring back undelivered letters at the end of the days, he said.
‘‘The union is getting reports from posties who are upset that they are bringing letters back to the office which can lead to delays of several days. Any news media reports of mail service failures usually brings pages of overwhelmingly negative comments about NZ Post.’’
NZ Post disagreed saying: ‘‘These assertions by the Postal Workers Union could leave your readers with a false impression of New Zealand Post. Parcels are not prioritised over letter mail and we take our performance standards very seriously.
‘‘We work very hard to, and in the vast majority of cases do, meet our stated delivery targets. However, due to the nature of logistics, from time to time delays can occur – sometimes for reasons outside of our control such as severe weather conditions and transport delays.
‘‘We always regret and apologise for any network delays and when they do happen, our focus is always providing the best possible service for our customers.’’
‘‘Our focus is to build a sustainable network and grow parcel volumes. Mail is very important to us, however at the same time, people are sending half a billion fewer letters per year than they did a decade ago.’’
Maynard said the union would advise the Ministers of Finance and State Owned Enterprises that it had information to assist in its investigation of a charge of serious misconduct.
NZ Post said it would discuss union concerns with them at the upcoming bargaining discussions. A battered blue sign on State Highway 35, just along from Opotiki, bears the legend ‘Pig Dog Training School and Bookbinder’.
Down the track beneath it can be found Joshua Kauta, 68, a few generations of his whanau, up to 14 pig dogs, three horses, and a shed brimming with 19th century leather-bound literature.
His hands lead a double life – knifing swine in the morning, caressing antique volumes of Shakespeare and God’s word by night. A triple-life, if you include strumming Engelbert Humperdinck chords at functions around the Cape.
The guts and dirt and dog hair of the first job get meticulously scrubbed off for the second, as even finger grease could mar the fragile pages.
‘‘I love all my worlds,’’ says Kauta, who returned to the land he was born on in 1981; a thousand hectares of bush between Torere beach and the vast Raukumara ranges.
Hunks of driftwood strew the shore and a sun-warmed lagoon gives the Kauta grandkids a safe spot to swim. The shed of books sits surrounded by hydrangeas, on a clifftop facing the Pacific.
‘‘You’d call it unproductive land, if you weren’t a hunter,’’ Kauta says.
‘‘But hunting and gathering’s our way of life here – I’m out there getting meat while others are harvesting from the sea, and we swap what we reap.’’
Each sunrise sees Kauta take to the stoney beach on his quad bike, a horde of pig dogs galumphing alongside. After postkennel hijinks, they hit the bush together on foot.
Today Kauta’s taking out Whip the keen huntaway bitch, and new recruit Spark – a lanky brindle crossbred. It takes 10 minutes for the team to pick their way through supplejack, slip down a muddy slope, and splash across a stream before Whip catches the scent and runs off.
‘‘People send me their dogs to train because I can guarantee they’ll get a pig every single day,’’ Kauta says.
Get a pig doesn’t mean kill a pig. It means sniff one out and bail it up: ‘‘that’s all you actually need a pig dog to do,’’ adds Kauta.
‘‘Then the hunter can determine whether it’s worth killing – most often it’s not – and dispatching the animal is his job.
‘‘You want no harm to the dog and no wounds on the hog, if you’re letting it go.’’
That’s in an ideal world. Kauta’s left hand shows pig hunting can be a risky business. The fleshy area below his thumb was ripped open by a tusk a few weeks ago.
He got the ‘‘wee nick’’ while helping two young hunters dispatch a hefty black boar. He dived in with his knife and got gouged in the process.
‘‘Part and parcel,’’ he reflects cheerfully.
Tusks aren’t the only hazard out hunting – there are roots to trip over and freezing, unexpected sleepovers to avoid. Kauta tries to press bush lore on younger hunters in his marae, for their safety.
‘‘Supplejack – you know that tough, twisting vine Tarzan swings on – for example, is good for binding up broken legs or to start a fire in the rain,’’ he says, reminiscing about times he’d done both.
Kauta worries that some hunters have a lust for the macho image of the sport, living out violent video game fantasies: killing for the sake of killing or orchestrating unnecessary pig versus dog brutality to make a ‘‘cool video for YouTube’’, he says. ‘‘That’s not what pig hunting is about.’’
It’s about the relationship you develop with your dogs, he reckons: learning from and relying on each other, sharing swashbuckling adventures.
Each week he selects a team of them for a ‘‘big hunt’’, saddles up a horse – Red the frisky chestnut, placid old Dusty, or a brown nameless gelding he’s thinking about calling Boy. He then heads up into the wop-wops.
Sometimes the posse camp out under the stars and they usually snare a juicy porker; gutted in the bush, slung across the saddlefront, and hefted home by horse power.
If Kauta doesn’t drop the pig off at the Torere Marae, he invites people over for a Barry Crumpstyle feed of wild pork and watercress.