Australia Post CEO Paul Graham visits Orange to announce pilot community hub

The post office has expanded, opening into the adjoining shop that had formerly been occupied by a Gloria Jeans, and other clothing and toy shops.

Australia Post CEO Paul Graham and Retail executive general manager Catriona Noble visited Orange to discuss the project with community and business stakeholders, including mayor Jason Hamling on Monday.

"We're doing our very first Community Hub@Post pilot here," 'Ms Noble said.

She said the meet and greet would be about finding out what the community and business leaders think will work for the community hub and what's needed and they have already shown enthusiastic support.

"They really know a lot more about Orange than we do so we really want to bring that to life," Ms Noble said.

The concept of the community hub was about recognising that a big part of what the post office now does is around e-commerce.

"We've seen during COVID a real change from bricks and mortar to online," Mr Graham said.

"We've seen a lot of small businesses grow and develop, particularly in regional areas so we are looking at how we can cater to them, not just to move their parcels but also to give them showrooms where they can exhibit their products and help them to go from that small business and kitchen table or garage to being a larger business.

"The community hub helps to promote them and also plays to our strengths as the largest e-commerce operator of parcels in the country."

He said they are still looking at how the hub will operate and how it will also benefit Australia Post financially.

"The first one here in Australia is here in Orange," Ms Noble said.

"We think Orange is a really thriving regional town, it's got a lot of great things going on, a lot of small businesses have started up here over the period of COVID, it's got some amazing products and we really do want to showcase those.

"We have a lot of people who visit Orange but don't necessarily get to see all the small online businesses."

Ms Noble said such businesses would be able to take their key products and showcase them in the newly reopened retail space.

"We will also have a 24/7 space for parcel lockers so customers don't have to battle to get here within the hours of 9-5 Monday to Friday," she said.

The community hub will also include banking services through Bank@Post. Ms Noble said Australia Post has 4300 locations and can provide banking services for 80 different banks, which are giving them more and more business.

"Being able to do Bank@Post with less bank branches around now people find really helpful," Ms Noble said.

She said the idea of the community hub has been considered for a while and Monday's meet and greet would help them develop the project further.

"We're working with a retail designer called Landini Associates and they work all around the world looking at different ideas that customers like, we already think we're an important part of each community so how could we build on that and offer more, and also be a lot more modern and relevant," Ms Noble said.

"We used to be a letters business so people would need to come in every day but now with the advent of the internet and email, what's the modern version of Australia Post?

"We also think this is commercially beneficial for us because we're owned by the Australian people.

"We don't want to be a burden on the tax payer, we want to be able to actually make a return for the tax payer so all the investment that's been made over the last almost 200 years that Australia Post has been in existence this is now actually going to allow us in this new digital age and e-commerce age to leverage that investment that Australians have made in the network so we think we can do more for more customers and we think it's a real win, win."

She said the Orange community hub would be rolled out in stages, and it would be the key one in the Central West.

"We might roll out stage one at the end of this year and then another stage next year, just depends on working with the council and the development application we need, particularly as we start to make any changes to the ouside of the building, which we really want to minimise, we really want to preserve the heritage of the beautiful building and celebrate that."

The community hub will take up the entire front post office space, which will be divided into three zones, the traditional post office space will "have a lot of red, but it will be the modern version of it, so it will have open counters, our staff won't be stuck behind the counter".

In the centre will be an "orientation zone" and in the former shop space will be a barista and local merchants being able to showcase their products.

The work will be done without having to close the post office and the work has already started with the wall separating the shop and post office having already been removed.

Australia Post would also like to trial it in other parts of the country.

"You can see this is quite a a big post so we'd like to try some smaller ones, we'd like to try one in a metro area, so can we create a sense of community?

Obviously that's easy to do in a place like Orange because there's already that wonderful sense of community but even within our cities now people are more working from home, wanting to stay local, not going into the CBD as much so how can their own suburb be an important community hub, and how can the post office be central to that?"

However, Mr Graham said they would wait to see the feed back from the Orange community about the pilot site before moving into other areas.

"If it proves successful like we expect it to be then we will look to continue rolling out the concept where it's appropriate to serve that community and at the same time it needs to be commercially viable for us," he said.

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