FIREY EXCHANGE WITH AUS POST CEO
Today I confronted Australia Post CEO Paul Graham in parliament and asked him to explain to my face why he is shutting down the Coleambally Licensed Post Office.
Graham pulls in $3.3 million a year of public money including a $1.58 million bonus. To put that pay packet in perspective, the Prime Minister earns around $622,000 a year, the federal Communications Minister who oversees Australia Post earns around $402,000, and a NSW state cabinet minister earns around $333,000. Add those three together and you get roughly $1.36 million, which is less than half of what Graham pockets in a single year, and his bonus alone is more than the Prime Minister's entire annual salary.
That is the man making decisions about whether a small Riverina farming town gets to keep a real post office.
On Tuesday morning, over 200 Coleambally locals turned out to the rally to reinstate the LPO, before 8am, before work, before school drop off, all standing together in the main street to tell Australia Post the town has had enough. That is what a community looks like when it refuses to be quietly written off.
Australia Post downgraded Coleambally's LPO to a Community Postal Agency in February and shoved it into the local pharmacy, where mail is now sorted on a trestle table under a carport and the town has lost its PO boxes, its banking, its bill payments and its parcel tracking all in one hit.
97 per cent of Coleambally residents want their LPO back, 95 per cent say they were never consulted before Australia Post took it away, and when one of their own workers had the guts to speak out, Australia Post sacked him.
73 post offices were closed across Australia last year, and Coleambally is not going to be the next one Australia Post quietly takes off the map.
I am calling on Australia Post to restore full LPO status to Coleambally and reinstate the worker they sacked for telling the truth, and I am calling on the Albanese Government to actually intervene, because protecting communities left without services is its own stated policy.
Please share this post as widely as you can. The bigger this gets, the harder it becomes for Australia Post to look the other way. Send it to your friends, send it to a journalist, send it to a politician in Canberra.
