Australia Post’s shift towards parcels, lockers and digital services is quietly undermining the licensed post office network that many Northern Territory communities rely on for banking, government services and everyday transactions, writes Licensed Post Office Group chairperson Scott Etherington.

There are post offices in communities across the Northern Territory that do things that no app can do.

They provide banking services to people who have no bank branch within hours of their home. They process government identity documents for people who cannot navigate an online system. They dispatch and deliver the goods that remote small businesses depend on.

Australia Post is a national retail network that has decided to become a parcel company.

That decision is destroying the counter network that communities depend on. Not through a single announcement. Through a hundred quiet decisions that individually look like efficiency and collectively look like abandonment.

Over 55 services were removed from the post office network in a single financial year across financial services, identity, bill payment and government transactions.

Each removal was individually defensible. The cumulative effect is a network that gives people fewer reasons to walk through the door.

At the same time, Australia Post is actively redirecting parcel collection away from the counter. This is not incidental. Business customers are already being directed to provide email or mobile contacts to ensure parcels can be diverted to lockers rather than post offices.

Lockers. Safe drop. Pharmacy trials. The result is the same. No customer at the counter.

That distinction matters more than it might appear.

Most post offices in the NT are licensed post offices. They are franchises run by small business owners. The LPO model runs on people, you, walking through the door.

And when you walk through that door to collect a parcel, your next transaction might be a passport renewal, a bill payment, or a banking transaction.

One visit generates three. Remove the first reason to come in, and the whole thing unravels. That is not an unintended side effect of the current strategy. It is the predictable outcome.

For a post office in Nhulunbuy, Maningrida, or Tennant Creek, there is no fallback. Across much of the NT, digital alternatives are not always real alternatives.

Connectivity is uneven. Distances are vast. Bank branches have withdrawn.

Government offices have consolidated. In a city, losing a post office is an inconvenience. For many communities across the NT, the post office is not simply convenient community infrastructure.

It is the remaining infrastructure.

The post office infrastructure already exists. It is built, staffed, and trusted.

Banks are withdrawing. Government services are moving online. The people left behind by branch closures and digital-only services are not a small group.

The post office is the only physical network in the country that can reach all of them.

Right now, it is being wound back. When a post office closes, the need does not disappear. It shifts onto systems that are already stretched.

That the current environment is producing post offices that their owners cannot sell is not a coincidence.

It is a consequence. Australia Post is a government business enterprise operating under a community service obligation.

The Federal Government’s 2024 statement of expectations requires it to maintain the retail network and support community access to financial services. The current strategy is in direct conflict with that commitment.

A full-service post office, a limited agency counter, a parcel locker, and a pharmacy pickup point are not the same thing. Australia Post’s network reporting treats them as equivalent.

That makes network contraction look smaller than the loss communities actually experience. When the reporting does not distinguish between them, the government cannot see what is actually being lost.

The answer is not managed decline disguised as modernisation.

It is more services, not fewer. Australia Post already operates the largest retail network in the country.

Banks could expand what happens at the counter.

Government services need a physical front door. The infrastructure exists. What is missing is the decision to use it.

Licensed post office operators are not asking for a subsidy. They have run viable businesses for decades.

When customers come through the door, the model works.

What is changing is the foot traffic, by design. Operators are not asking for protection from competition. They are asking for a commercial model that reflects the value they deliver, and a government that holds Australia Post to the obligations it already has.

Post offices across the NT are not closing because the communities they serve have changed.

They are closing because Australia Post’s strategy has. That is a policy choice. And it can be reversed.

The burden does not disappear when the post office does. It shifts to local councils and community organisations that are already under-resourced and were never designed to fill that gap.

You do not need to use the post office every day to rely on it being there. The moment you do need it, nothing else will do.