Earlier this year I wrote a Farmers Weekly article on the incompetence of NZ Post.
To reiterate, we were in Cairns flying back to NZ and had to fill in an online immigration form. When it came to the address it wouldn’t accept any we tried.
Our address is RD12 Masterton 5872. Put that in the system and it tells you there is no such address.
Further, we have a fire number as rural addresses do. We put in our fire number, the road and the RD number, to be told again there was no such address.
We then inserted the general area, for the same result. At this stage the plane is about to depart and we’re sweating. Finally it came to us: it was our name, the fire number and the road – with the suburb required the beach some distance away.
That took an hour of stressful playing around and anything with our RD number in it wouldn’t work.
Obviously some clown at NZ Post HQ doesn’t have the faintest clue there’s a rural mail service they’re supposed to be serving.
It creates a larger problem when you order a parcel to be delivered. You tell the enterprise you are RD12 and they tell you there is no such address.
Quite a few FW readers contacted me with similar problems. One in Canterbury had their address changed by NZ Post with no notification.
Another from the Bay of Plenty told me that their address had been changed from Whakatane to Rotoma by NZ Post, which was crazy as Rotomā was some distance away.
A Hawke’s Bay couple received their Christmas cards that were postmarked December 15 on January 15. They had previously made a claim to NZ Post for damaged goods in transit but heard nothing.
A Waikato couple had their address changed after 45 years when NZ Post removed the RD number. Another had their address moved from Te Puna to Wairoa.
These are only examples. My inbox was full.
As I mentioned, I tried every way I could to contact NZ Post without success. In frustration I sent them an Official Information Act (OIA) request and heard nothing. In extreme frustration I contacted the Ombudsman, after which I received a response from NZ Post. My OIA was sent on February 18. By law NZ Post has 20 working days to file a response. My response was dated May 16, which didn’t improve my sense of humour.
The NZ Post response, in the believe it or not category, was to tell me that “NZ Post has not changed the Rural delivery addresses”. That’s despite both my experience and all those who communicated with me saying that they had.
When I asked about consultation they told me that as they hadn’t changed any addresses “there had been no consultation”.
Unsurprisingly I have a major problem with that, but it gets worse. They told me that RD12 was only a partial address and it needed a street name and number as well. I’ve tried that, to be told there is no such address. The only way I can get my address accepted is to entirely drop the RD number and add Riversdale Beach, which is some kilometres down the road. Whareama is the area where I live but that obviously doesn’t appear on NZ Post’s approved lists.
With my OIA to NZ Post I couriered it to their head office and tracked it. It arrived on February 19. Why would an OIA request sit on an executive’s desk being ignored for three months? Is this standard practice at NZ Post? Why did I have to complain to the Ombudsman’s office to get any reaction at all?
We don’t live in a third world country and have the right to demand a professional and reliable postal system. Being a country that is sparsely populated by international standards, it is pivotal we have a system that works.
Ours doesn’t. Recently I had a friend phone thanking me for the Christmas card. I sent it pre-Christmas and it arrived in Auckland late May.
The problem seems to be a complete disconnect at NZ Post HQ.
Going to their website, they have executives for everything with some extremely fancy titles. My issue is that it is impossible to physically contact any of them. Email and postal addresses or phone numbers don’t appear.
Google “NZ Post board members” and you’ll find nine distinguished personnel with qualifications coming out of their ears. It tells me the “NZ Post Board of Directors is responsible for the overall direction, objectives and strategies of the group”.
If that is indeed the case my firm personal opinion is that they either don’t know what’s going on or don’t care.
It would be great to take NZ Post back to the time of the late Sir Michael Cullen.
