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:
“Bias, point of view, fury—are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)