Transportation Deployment Casebook/2024/Australian Post

Technology
Australia Post is a corporation that offers postal delivery service to Australia operating for over 200 years. It works to deliver goods including letters and parcels across people, businesses and communities in Australia.

The technological characteristics of Australia Post have evolved overtime as Australia Post shifts its strategies and service focuses to match with its loyal clients - Australia. In the modern age with increasing digitisation of information and communication, the key technological characteristic of Australia Post is its physicality - the mail and packages delivered are physical objects to be held and kept. The main advantage and market of this would lie in parcels - physical object deliveries which cannot be made through an email.

During the initialisation of Australian Post however, the essential technological characteristic had been the efficient transmission of information as a means of communication. At its creation the main advantage of Australian Post was through delivery of letters and communications across Australia - in particular between the early settlers, officials and convicts and their hometowns in Britain. Naturally the main market of the postal service was hence the people in Australia wishing to deliver letters across space and oceans. The Australian Post was created as a means of organising the masses of letters being delivered to allow the correct recipient to receive or collect their mail. It has since grown into a network of delivery across modes of pack-horse, carriage, trains, motor vehicles and planes.

Early 1800s Context
Prior to the establishment of the first Australian post office in 1809, connection between Australia and Britain could only be made through letters on ships arriving in Sydney. This system was limited as it meant ships could be mobbed and crimes of fraud and theft ran rampant. Centralised postal service had already been organised in Britain in 1516 but early settlers needed time to organise this system around the development of the Australian colony. Progression was made from mobbed ships with letters into a mail delivery service in 1803 with boatmen delivering letters across Sydney and Parramatta. This is described in the "Sydney Gazette” (first newspaper printed in Australia ) issue of the 10th July 1803 . This system was still to evolve further as this delivery system involved no prepayment. Recipients of letters would be expected to pay which led to an unreliable delivery system . The chaos of these earlier years created a need for a system of organisation for mail among early settlers in Australia. This was reflected in growing complaints to the Lieutenant-Governor until change was made.

1809: First Australian Post Office established
The beginning of the Australian Post office is often attributed to the opening of the first Australian Post office with Post Master Isaac Nichols appointed on 25th April 1809 in Sydney. This appointment was notified through the "Sydney Gazette" by the Lieutenant-Governor to address the concerns of stolen mail enabling fraudulent crimes. The purpose of this post office was for all parcels and letters coming from ships to be deposited and then organised to be distributed to correct recipients. The establishment of the post office in Australia did not implement much technological innovation other than incorporating the early British centralised postal service into Australia as the settler population grew. Isaac Nichols would use his home – which served as the post office – to sort mail. Rules for the method of handling mail and costs for the service were all outlined in this order forming the initial policy to shape the Australian Post in its birthing phase. The role of Postmaster gave Nichols the right to board ships and obtain mail addressed to Australians on their behalf - a list of names of people with mail to be collected would then be printed in the "Sydney Gazette". A fixed collection fee was charged and this business remained private until 1825. At its birth, the post office served the market of early Australians who were struggling to correctly receive their mail. The system required the recipient to travel to the post office and receive their mail as at this stage and the number of letters were still limited enough for this system to be manageable. With the growing population and land occupied by the settler population in Australia however, the natural progression of the technology and system would be for a delivery system to be established to allow service to those who lived further away.

1825-1828: Growth - First Postal Act and Delivery services
In 1825 "An Act to Regulate the Postage of Letters in New South Wales" was passed by the New South Wales Legislative Council. This transferred the Post office from a private business to the public sector. The Governor was authorised to establish more post offices in Sydney and the New South Wales Colony. This allowed the postal office system to grow with the population of settlers across New South Wales. The Governor was also given the authority to fix the postmaster's wage and mail collection fees. As with the establishment of the first post office, this legislation seemed to lag behind the growing population of New South Wales that already passed 30,000 by 1821 - it was put in place after growing market demand.

In 1828, postal delivery services were established in Sydney. A postman would be responsible for delivering and collecting letters using a pack-horse. This technological development allowed postal offices to better organise mail so as to not be over-flooded by those who were collecting mail. Mail routes were established and Postmasters were appointed in other parts of Australia. Coach services were established between Melbourne and Sydney in 1838 to allow overland delivery. During this period roads and horses were the primary technological characteristic of postal delivery. It was the more efficient alternative to walking - delivering 50,000 letters and newspapers with a staff of three people: Postmaster, clerk and postman, but would lack the later reliability of steam trains.

1828-1901: Emerging technologies
Emerging technologies appeared for delivering mail in the 1800s including the Cobb and Co. Coaches that were brought to Australia with the gold rush. These coaches replaced the pack-horse as the official transport mode of mail from 1862. This was an upgrade from the pack-horse to allow larger volumes of mail to be held during a delivery run. As railways developed throughout New South Wales they were also increasingly adopted for larger distance mail delivery - particularly between Sydney and Parramatta from 1855 onwards.

During the 1800s other technologies also developed that challenged the function of letters in communication across distances. Telegraph services were opened in Australia in 1854 and allowed communication across distances that was far more rapid than mail delivery. This new technology, initially private, was incorporated by the government into the postal office however and spread with the postal offices across the nation. Likewise in 1878, the first telephone call was made in Australia. These technologies allowed for rapid communication across distances greatly lowering the market need for letters and mail. The adoption of telegraph systems within post offices however kept post offices serving the existing market of those looking to communicate across time and space.

Timelines of key developments and growth
Key technological developments and their effects within the post office are listed in the table below:

Maturity and decline
With peak Australian letter volumes being achieved in 2008, this has been prescribed as the mature phase of the mode. From the rise of technological advancements such as the e-mail and internet replacing postal letters the mode has become less economic and rapidly declined. Australian Post has attempted to shift focus towards parcels but faces competition with other delivery services that have risen with the rise of online shopping. This attempt to shift is reflected in the 2021 opening of a new $33 million processing station in Adelaide - capable of processing 130,000 parcels in a day. The future prospects of Australian Post after consultation with the Australian Public is a business model which aims to decrease normal delivery speed in an attempt to minimise expenses while maintaining revenue through express delivery.

Model
The life cycle of Australian Post has be modelled using the S-curve with periods of birthing, growth and maturity. Data analysing the productive output of Australian Post was fitted to the logistic function $$S(t) = \frac{S_{max}}{[1+e^{(-b(t-t_0)}]}$$.

where: The observed data used was of Australia Post's Total Output Value which aggregates revenue from reserved letters, other addressed and unaddressed mail and money orders. This data was approximated using the above logistic function and modelled by the following equation:

$$S(t) = \frac{5400}{[1+e^{(-0.127(t-1994)}]}$$

The method of calculating this model was found using Ordinary Least Squares Regression. The Logistic equation was rearranged to obtain a linear equation of the form $$Y = bX + c$$ where the following values were taken.

$$Y = \ln\left(\cfrac{S(t)}{(S_{max}-S(t))}\right)= bt-bt_0$$

Method and Evaluation
Although there is a slight decline in Value output for 2001-2002, with hindsight knowledge that peak achieved in 2008 it is assumed that these were years of fluctuation and $$S_{max}$$ had not yet been fully achieved, hence they were also included in the S-curve approximation. The unknown in this case was $$S_{max}$$, hence different regressions were found for variable values of $$S_{max}$$. The R-squared value was used to evaluate which regression was the best fit for the data. The R-squared value for the final regression chosen was $$0.9829$$.

Given the R-squared value being very close to 1, it is presumed that the model is a good fit. Issues with the model are the larger variations occurring during the earlier and later years. It may be possible that given more data from earlier and later years, a better fitting equation for modelling the life-cycle of the Australian Post office would have greater growth during the 2000s and a later earlier inflection point.

Life-cycle years
From the observed data the periods of birthing, growth and maturity are identified as the following:

Birthing: Pre 1976-1980

Growth: 1980-1999

Maturity: 1999-2002