Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This report from Australia Post continues to show profits and that is always good for a public corporation. At estimates the other day Australia Post were indicating that their mail business is going downhill but they are doing very well out of the parcel side of their business.

I have raised this matter directly with Australia Post, and they are responding very well in trying to address it, but we have a problem in Rockhampton where the Rockhampton Mail Centre has expanded beyond its original being as a suburban post office. That is okay—it is a very efficient postal centre—but the trouble is that it is in a residential area and the people living next door to the mail centre simply are not able to sleep at night. Many of them are pensioners and many others go to work early to do manual work. There is a whole street of people who cannot get to sleep because of the noise of trucks reversing at two, three and six o’clock in the morning and metal containers clanging on the cement. It means that people are really inconvenienced. It is something that I know Australia Post are conscious of. I know they are trying to do something to help and I hope a solution can be reached.

My limited understanding suggests to me that the only solution is for the government to provide Australia Post with sufficient money to move the whole mail centre out of a residential area and into an industrial estate. I am pleased to say that Australia Post is meeting with the residents. We are making a date when we can get together, and that is good. I appreciate the courtesy and the cooperation of Australia Post officials, but I expect in the end result it will be beyond Australia Post. It will need the government and the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, instead of wasting $55 billion on a National Broadband Network that is unnecessary, to put some of that money into establishing a new mail centre in Rockhampton and so give people a bit of rest. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.