Australia Post – Post Office Spruce Up (1987)

Synopsis

This program, produced for in-house use aimed at individual post office managers, details the Australia Post ‘Spruce Up’ campaign.

Curator’s notes

By 1987 when this in-house programme was made, Australia Post was on the way to becoming a Government Business Enterprise, formalised in 1989 under the Australian Postal Corporation Act (the APC Act). The organisation’s development of a corporate image was central to the way in which it responded to its new exposure to competition and its increased accountability.

This video program was directed at the then called ‘postmasters’ – managers of post offices and postal agencies. Under the new corporatised structure, they were renamed ‘postal managers’. The video outlined the role of individual post offices, as representations of the new image, in the Corporate Identity Program. It introduced a competition between post offices as part of the ‘Spruce Up’ campaign – a campaign that marked the end of the bureaucracy-styled, administratively-based post office, and the launch of the first incarnation of the commercial, sales-oriented shopfront we recognise as a post office today. Today’s post office, or PostShop, was first trialled by Australia Post at the Brisbane Expo in 1988. PostShops were introduced more widely in 1991 and in 1992 the entire network of post offices and postal agencies was restructured. Today the network is made up of Corporate PostShops, Business Centres, Licensed Post Offices (LPOs) and Community Postal Agencies.

Adrienne Parr, curator

Original aspect ratio: 4 x 3 (TV)
Original censorship rating: not rated