History
The company was created on 1 April 1987 as a State-Owned Enterprise from the corporatisation of the New Zealand Post Office, a government department, following the recommendations of the 1986 Mason-Morris Review. The other state-owned enterprises formed from the New Zealand Post Office: the erstwhile monopoly telephone operator (Telecom Corporation of New Zealand Limited), and a savings bank (PostBank), were later privatised.
New Zealand Post began its life with 1,244 post offices, later rebranded as PostShops. Of these 906 full post offices and 338 postal agencies, 600 post offices or bank branches were downsized or closed after government subsidies expired in February 1988. As of March 1998, there are 297 PostShops, and 705 Post Centres. However, there are now more outlets than before corporatisation, with 2,945 other retailers of postage stamps. There has been a reduction in the 'real' price of postage, with a nominal drop of the postage rate from 45 cents (NZD) to 40 cents in 1996, and restoration of the 45 cent rate in 2004. Since then the cost has risen twice, to 50 cents in 2007 and to 60 cents in 2010.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand Post
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)