Australia Post is celebrating its 200th anniversary … but have mail users anything to celebrate, writes Peter Coleman. Indeed there are times when it seems the biggest threat to printed media today is not competition from slick internet-based publishers, but the lack of a system able to deliver publications to readers in a quick and cost-effective manner. Australian experience suggests the latter to be a major problem: A postal service which takes credit for introducing ‘stamped sheets’ in 1838 – a couple of years ahead of Britain’s famous ‘Penny Black’ – but has its head stuck in the past. I received a curious press release this week spruiking a talk in which “industry commentator” Andy McCourt would seek to debunk acquired knowledge including Rupert Murdoch’s musings of “the day, maybe 20 years away, where you don't actually have paper and ink and printing presses”. Keynote speaker at a dinner being held by staged by the Printing Industries Association of Australia, McCourt is actually employed by copier maker Océ, a company with a vested interest in certain forms of print, and the event’s sponsor. Referring to the Australia Post increases, and also a PaperlinX/SunChemical-sponsored report predicting a 32.5 per cent decline in end user markets for printed paper by 2020, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s support for eliminating printed textbooks from schools, McCourt groups individuals and organisations as “four apocalyptic horsemen, riding brumbies backwards in the bush”. Colourful language to accompany an acknowledgement that “print communications will change and become even more merged with digital datastreams” and claim what McCourt calls ‘Print Version 2.0’ is “here to stay”. We’d like to think so. But it’s the version of print that McCourt’s sponsor promotes which is most under threat from Australia Post’s intransigence: The more targeted and focussed print gets, the more it needs a delivery system capable of putting personalised communications into the hands of individuals. Other countries have it: A postal system capable of delivering daily newspapers is a given in some European and Asian countries. In Australia, we have Australia Post, an effective monopoly, because the alternatives are simply less effective: Magazine publishers have to depend on Australia Post’s PrintPost product, which promises a first-class service for a discounted price, but in effect does neither. Newspaper publishers appear perpetually at war with the newsagents to which (with rare exceptions) they delegate daily deliveries, in a ‘love-hate’ relationship which works in spite of itself. And then there’s letterbox delivery, which has – if the PMP experience is anything to go on – its own challenges. I listened to the depressing spectacle of Australia Post’s Allan Robinson bemoaning the problems of the postal service at a seminar a couple of years ago. But there was hope, he suggested: His 15-year-old son still wrote letters to girls. There’s no sign things have improved. Yesterday the publicly-owned service was refusing to back down over a raft of price rises which will increase costs for publishers (including GXpress) by upwards of three per cent, nine months after the last increase and at a time when publishers are facing the same economic strictures as every other non-monopoly. A high-level deputation including representatives from Publishers Australia (and Westwick-Farrow), Haymarket Media, Reed Business Information and Pacific Magazines failed to wash with a couple of Australia Post representatives, because its board had “already voted on the issue”. Suggestions, such as that from Publishers Australia chairman and Westwick-Farrow operations director Geoff Hird that Australia Post should be dealing with cost pressures internally “like the rest of us” rather than externally via their customers, do not appear to have made much impact. They’ll pass on the message, of course – verbally, perhaps, since sending a letter might create even more concerns over timing – and get back to their jobs. And as D&D Mailing’s Jennifer Shaw put it in a note to publisher clients last week, “rest assured, they will be publishing the second edition of their Customer Publish magazine, with a supporting website, later this year. “That should make you all feel better about the increases.” Meanwhile a 40-page advertorial supplement I picked up this week was celebrating the service launched in 1809 by a former convict … at the expense of anyone who could be persuaded to take advertising space to wish Australia Post well. It was delivered as a newspaper insert.