Voice of Real Australia: Temporary changes to Australia Post or permanent service cuts?

There are a few experiences that every Australian will experience in their lifetime, regardless of their location - sunburn, taxes and issues with the mail.

But have you noticed more issues with Australia Post than usual?

It could be a result of the pandemic with more people shopping online - or it could be from the temporary changes the government made to Australia Post's service to cope with increased demand.

Australia Post implemented changes in April that cut letter delivery services in metro areas from daily to every second day, a move it says is necessary to keep up with coronavirus-induced parcel demand.

A quarter of posties will also be retrained and redeployed to delivery vans or warehouses, priority mail has been cancelled and the organisation has been freed of its legislated need to keep regional post offices open.

The government says all these changes will have a very minimal impact on Aussies, but that's what governments' are supposed to say.

Labor and the union representing posties believe the government is using the pandemic as cover to permanently slash the services of Australia Post to save money.

Both point to a 2018 internal report as evidence the organisation had plans to cut back services.

The report included a proposal to slow down mail deliveries to save an estimated $200 million a year, but Australia Post did not go ahead with the plan at the time because of a potential "clear reduction in customer service" and "reputational risk".

The union representing posties, CEPU, also claims its been briefed on plans that would see 25 per cent of posties made redundant, not retrained.

The government and Australia Post have denied the claims, ruling out any forced redundancies.

So which side is telling the truth? Only time will tell.

In politics, when the two sides say the complete opposite of each other, the truth often lies somewhere in the middle.

Labor tried to torpedo the temporary changes by moving a motion last week. However it ended in a stand-off and was sent to a (Coalition dominated) committee for further investigation.

The committee is due to report back in August, so keep an eye out for this popping up around that time.

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