Save this core public service
Afriend arrived looking chuffed, saying he had something to show me as I dutifully followed him outside and down the steps. In all the decades I have known him, his mode of transport has been trotters, bicycle wheels or public transport. So imagine my surprise when I saw a large stationwagon parked outside. And joy of joy, to the owner of a tiny car, it had a towbar a mate could rely on to take a trailer load to the dump. But it didn’t have registration.
We jumped in to take it for a celebratory spin and headed to a post office we hoped would still be there, so we could make the motor legal.
Imagine my surprise when we entered a reconfigured post office stuffed with racks of cards and books. There was a small NZ Post counter and when we approached the bench (your honour), bearing the outdated rego from the windscreen, the attendant said they didn’t perform that function any more, redirecting us to VTNZ.
Exactly what duties the post office does perform any more is anyone’s guess, as the stateowned entity continues to morph its postal service counters into third-party-hosted agencies. Nearly 80 standalone post shops are up for this shape-shifting, buck-passing, downsizing of public services which is going to be allowed to continue under a Left-wing Government.
We shouldn’t have to ask the question – is NZ Post for the public good or there to make a profit?
With all the money being flung at the regions, and the dosh being spent on much-needed infrastructure after nine years of neglect under National, let’s look at saving NZ Post from being whittled away and undermined as a core public service.
With so much being done online, don’t forget those who have chosen not to buy into doing business at the touch of their fingertips on their smartphones and other devices.
And don’t forget an older generation bewildered and disenfranchised by fast-changing innovations that have left them cut off from the cold cuddle of the online community. Calling Winston Peters – your GoldCard community needs you now in its hour of need.
We might be an overwhelmingly secular society but our church, in the post-colonial history of this country, has always been the local post office where the congregation gathered together under solid bricks and mortar to fill out forms, post letters and parcels, and pay their bills to any government department or essential service provider.
These services were officiated by ordinary approachable folk who didn’t have to put on any false corporate front. Post office workers could perform a multitude of tasks and often knew their clients by their first names as they drew upon vast institutional knowledge to help navigate the bureaucracies.
Local post offices were a certainty, a constant place on the map you didn’t have to hunt down to find, or turn up at your chemist/dairy/post shop only to discover that the business might have gone tits-up, taking the post shop with it.
A post office used to be the frontline friendly face of government, a place that could help you humanely toward compliance.
Now it’s an add-on, a cloakroom for the quaint who have the audacity to want face-time rather than yell an Edvard Munch scream down a phone as a recorded voice tells them to punch in the numbers.
At least in the standalone queues of a post office, someone would always hear your scream. Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.” Hosea 6:3