Not every story on the Court of Public Opinion is about billions of dollars. Some are about a single letter — and what it costs to send one. On this Garage edition, Jeremy Cordeaux turned to news that from September, posting a letter will climb toward almost two dollars, and found in it a small, sad marker of a passing era.
The Counterintuitive Rise
What struck Jeremy first was the logic, or lack of it. Hardly anyone uses the postal service anymore — and the response is to make it dearer. To him that seemed backwards: raise the price of a service few people use, and you hand them one more reason not to use it.
It’s the kind of decision that baffles ordinary people. If demand is falling, recouping costs by charging the dwindling number of users more only speeds the decline. Amazing, was his word for it.
Spare A Thought For The Postie
His sympathy went to those at the sharp end. If he were a postman, he said, he’d be seriously worried. A letter creeping toward two dollars, in a world already shifted to email, threatens the very volume that keeps posties on the road.
And the postie, in Jeremy’s telling, stands for something larger — the bike, the whistle, the familiar figure woven into Australian daily life for generations. When there’s nothing left to deliver because no one can afford to send it, that figure fades away.
The Passing Of An Era
Jeremy was careful not to be a Luddite about it. He gets it — people use email now, and the letter has been declining for years. But he framed the moment as the passing of a significant era, and mourned it a little.
He drew the parallel to the closing of face-to-face banking — another everyday institution quietly disappearing, one that older Australians in particular grew up relying on. These aren’t just services being trimmed; they’re threads of a shared culture pulled loose, one price rise and one branch closure at a time.
Small Change, Bigger Meaning
The near-two-dollar stamp is, in one sense, trivial. In another, Jeremy suggested, it captures how the familiar textures of ordinary life are being priced and automated out of existence.
His reflection wasn’t a demand for policy so much as an invitation to notice what’s slipping away — the letter, the postie, the banking teller, small human things that once knitted communities together, now quietly costed out of the picture.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
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