The mail must eventually get thrown

NZ Post can’t be King

Canute.

What was it Macbeth said about getting down to the unhappy task of killing someone off?

‘‘T’was well t’were done quickly.’’

Might the same be said of NZ Post’s approach to the increasingly unrewarding business of handling letters?

Postal Workers’ Union president John Maynard has slated the company, not just for failing to do more to keep that side of its business going, but for appearing to be actively undermining it. With cutbacks to services and staff it was almost as if they wanted to get out of letters, he said.

If that is the case, and to an extent it may be, it’s less an example of murder than euthanasia. It’s a dying form of communication.

The company’s line is that its future, while mainly about parcels, does involve letters ‘‘for as long as people want to send them’’. That does seem to be less an encouragement than a sigh.

The missing word is ‘‘enough’’. As long as enough people want to send them. And what constitutes enough is a decision that is relative to the increasingly ugly costs of maintaining a network that is suffering a dramatic and accelerating decline in usage, with letter volumes falling by 60 million a year.

It’s not a straightforward matter of NZ post either wholeheartedly supporting or slyly subverting the doomed letter service.

Short of convincing the wider public to lay down those devilish smartphones, laptops and desk computers, all it can do is try to manage as graceful an exit as possible. And doing so in the knowledge that it exists as a company, required to operate at a profit, not a social service agency.

Those who would argue that this shouldn’t be the case are trying to re-litigate a lost argument. Whomsoever you want to blame for that, it shouldn’t be the directors or management of NZ Post. Of course it’s not all about company priorities. Caught painfully in this we have those who aren’t simply users of the letter service, but who feel reliant on it. They are caught up in a time of difficult transition and are typically older members of our community. The fact remains, however, that cheap and simple electronic alternatives are well within their reach.