Following the resignation of their highly paid CEO, it seems that our postal services need to recover some of the revenue it has been paying out in the last few years.
This is the only conclusion you could come to from reading the media release that has just arrived.
Apparently new rules are to be applied to the delivery of all mail delivered to residential letterboxes.
The media release states ‘that due to the enormous difficulties faced by postal workers on their rounds, it has been decided to ask residents to have inappropriate and badly designed letterboxes replaced by the end of 2017.”
According to the media statement, far too many residential letterboxes cause the deliverer of mail to waste time and in some case “the act of inserting the mail could be deemed to be a workplace hazard. The new rules regulate the design of the letterbox and its placement on the property. No longer is it acceptable to have the letterbox situated so that it is difficult to access or surrounded by inappropriate garden features.”
The media statement was accompanied by descriptions of what sort of letterboxes have been deemed to be acceptable. It makes for amazing reading – and I suspect my own letterbox would fail. One wonders what bureaucrat has thought of this as a way of raising funds.
To assist in this, and being curious, I used the guidelines to see what letterboxes in the neighbourhood would fail. Here’s a few that I suspect would fail according to the guidelines.
I have to say that I was bit taken aback by the high handed nature of the ruling. Do they really expect there to be a one size fit all when it comes to letterboxes? Surely this will take away from the spirit of difference that people often display in what they build out front to be their repository of their mail.
I would have thought that residents of Canberra, being now the official Bush Capital of Australia, should be encouraged to get even more creative with their letterboxes.
Sad to say, it seems the postal chiefs do not share my views on this. Instead if many of us do not upgrade by the end of the year, then fines in the order of $500 could descend upon residents depending on how bad their letterboxes have been deemed to be inappropriate.
As with such rulings in the present climate of an attitude to not raise a stink about the things that are really important, I suspect that this strange ruling will be objected to politely, but in the end it will come into effect for 2018. So I guess like many others, I will soon be off to the hardware store and I will be lining up for a new letterbox.
The above was based on a media release received on Friday (yesterday)– as they do with contentious notices from government and their agencies – they send them out last thing in the week. In this case ready to be distributed on this Saturday, the first day of April, when people are occupied with other matters such as raking up all those autumn leaves.