McKenna appointment signals move to muscle-up Australia Post

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Australia Post is set to sharply escalate its already bruising battle with retail banks over who picks up the pieces, and the bill, from rapidly escalating branch closures and ATM removals appointing seasoned News Corporation senior executive Siobhan McKenna as its chair.

A previous chair of Australia’s other great government-owned communications monopoly, NBN Co — which is essentially the telecommunications arm of the former postmaster general (PMG) reconstituted using optical fibre — McKenna’s appointment indicates the Albanese government is about to get serious about restoring state-owned enterprises as serious economic players.

Australia Post already resells NBN plans under the Australia Post Broadband brand and has been positioning itself to gain a more lucrative slice of the retail services market as a way to offset spiralling losses from its letters business that is propped up by its parcels business.

Banks have had a love-hate relationship with Post ever since the government threw in the towel over the battle for online bill payments to BPAY which is controversially slated for shutdown and replacement by the outage-blighted New Payments Platform that has struggled to attract retail customers.

The infamous Cartier watch scandal resulted in former Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate being blasted out of her job by former prime minister Scott Morrison, stemmed from rewards for Post executives who extracted hundreds of millions in additional fees from banks for picking up over-the-counter transactions where banks had fled town.

Many suspect the Cartier affair was instigated by bank-aligned interests to damage what has been an increasingly competent competitor likely to pursue a retail banking licence as payback for commercial institutions dumping their unprofitable customers on the state-owned enterprise.

Holgate’s predecessor at Australia Post, former National Australia Bank chief Ahmed Fahour, famously commanded a $5 million annual salary during his time as CEO at Australia Post, a figure that was struck under preparations to create Rudd Bank.

Although never activated, Rudd Bank was planned as a state-owned institution to rescue fleeing customers and their savings and liabilities in the event of an institutional collapse triggered by the Global Financial Crisis that never eventuated.

With McKenna now chair of Australia Post, the Albanese government has more freedom to explore its options for muscling-up Post, refreshing its board and executive, and also has a demonstrable olive branch to the nation’s most powerful media clan as it seeks to lay down its policy agenda.

Whether that goodwill gesture will be repaid remains to be seen, but it has been made.