[gary]

For example, as at today, the price of an Economy Airmail parcel with
Signature to the United States rose from $36.19 to $38.20, a 5.5% increase.

By comparison, the current inflation rate is about 1.9%

In August of this year I was in Chatswood, Sydney and went to post
a letter at the post office in the heart of the CBD that had been there
for decades (picture below).

I was somewhat surprised that there were no longer any postal boxes
out the front.

I went inside looking for the postal boxes. There were no postal boxes
inside either and for that matter, no customers. Instead the post office
shelves contained nothing but baby formula, vitamin tablets and health
and beauty items.

There were two "workers" behind the counter who were doing nothing
except looking out inside an Australia Post post office with no customers.

I asked them where the post boxes had moved to?

They said, "Not here any more. Here only for shipments to China".

Under the apparent genius of the current Australia Post CEO,
Christine Holgate, the Australia Post post office was no longer a post
office but a so-called "Daigou shop" where Chinese buyers could buy
crap and conveniently ship it to China ostensibly so they, the shopper,
could do so at a personal profit.

The workers supplied directions to the new regular post office several
hundred metres away which was not easy to find, being hidden at the
end of a lane and then tucked away beneath the railway station complex.
I had to go back a second time to the "ship crap to China for a personal
profit post office" to get them to elaborate further as to where it was.