Ms Debbie Byrne:

We will have new Post Point technology deployed this July which will allow a retailer to give more post office services. Currently they cannot sell national or international stamps, but they will now have a weighing scales to be able to send parcels, they will be able to top up foreign exchange cards, and do other transactions. We are expanding the scope of Post Point. While I hear back when communities use the post office and when that service is gone from an individual community, we come back to the viability and sustainability of the network. We now have very good data that show that of the post offices that closed in 2019 and 2020 as a result of the agreement, which was about 152 post offices, the business transferred to 128 neighbouring post offices. The average increase in business for all of those offices was 9.8%, but a lot of those businesses were up 20% and 30%.

That created viability for that next tier of post offices. There are some exceptions but in most cases the nearest post office was 5 km or 6 km away. We must look at the size of the population. We are trying to generate new products and services all the time but if we divide the cake too small, it does not create a viable opportunity.