New Zealand Post Office

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Building of the old New Zealand Post Office in Auckland , construction started in 1909, inaugurated in 1912 and used as the main post office until 1988.

The New Zealand Post Office (NZPO) was up to 31 March 1987, a New Zealand Authority, the total for the postal service and the area of telecommunications in the country was responsible determined and also banking transactions u. a. also performed services in the field of person and vehicle registration. The headquarters of the agency was Wellington .

The authority was in the course of the privatization of public tasks and state-owned companies with effect from April 1, 1987 into the following three independent companies

split up. The basis for this was the Postal Services Act 1987 .

The New Zealand Post remained state-owned as a State-Owned Enterprise (SOE).
The New Zealand Telecom was the 1990 Bell Atlantic and Ameritech , a subsidiary of AT & T sold.
The Post Office Bank went to the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) in 1989 .

history

The first official post office in New Zealand opened in Kororāreka , now Russell , in 1840 , the year William Hobson came to New Zealand as the newly appointed lieutenant governor of the new colony and made Kororāreka his temporary seat.

When New Zealand, which until then had been under the administration of the Governor of New South Wales , became an independent British colony in early 1841 and Hobson had moved his seat to Auckland , he began to organize the postal service . But 18 months later, on September 1, 1842, the British Post Office took control of New Zealand postal traffic.

In 1845 there were already eight post offices in the new colony. When New Zealand was granted more self-government in 1852 and held its first general assembly two years later, the country had just under two dozen post offices for around 40,000 residents. After the provincial governments were given the right to open post offices with the Local Posts Act of 1856 , the number of post offices was to change quickly. With the Post Office Act of 1858 , the postal system was reorganized again and for the first time a separate Postmaster General was appointed, who centralized the development of the postal system in the country again.

The new law and the gold discoveries (see also: Gold Rush in Otago ) caused the number of post offices to skyrocket. In 1860 there were 107 offices, and 20 years later there were 856 in the entire country. From 1860 the postman service was introduced and mailboxes in the post offices. In 1863, money could also be obtained from the post office for the first time, a service that led to the Post Office Savings Bank opening within the Post Office in 1867 .

In 1881 the Electric Telegraph Department , founded in 1863 , which had taken over the Auckland Military Network and in 1866 for the first time telegraphed Wellington to Auckland , was merged with the Post Office Department . From that point on, postal, telegraph and monetary services were all from a single source and the new agency was renamed the New Zealand Post Office .

In 1879 the first public telephone was opened in the post office in Port Chalmers . But the boom of having your own telephone connections only came after the turn of the century. In 1930 the New Zealand Post Office had around 125,000 customers. In 1950 the number had tripled and just 10 years later over 686,000 customers had a telephone connection.

The New Zealand Post Office , which had gone into the 20th century with over 1,700 post offices, gradually took on more and more tasks. With the registration of births, marriages and deaths, with the registration, de-registration and re-registration of vehicles, with the receipt of television and fishing license fees, with the registration and registration of voters for a wide variety of political elections and with the payment and administration of Pensions, the post office took over important municipal functions and state tasks over the years and was therefore one of the most important contact points in the municipality for people. Even weddings could be carried out by the postmaster of the respective post office and the collection of weather data for the Meteorological Office , as well as the transmission of weather data via the post office to the citizens, once again demonstrated the breadth of their tasks.

1987 came the end of this authority. In the course of privatization, triggered by the Labor government under Prime Minister David Lange , the authority was dissolved, divided into its three business areas Post, Telecommunications and Finance and transferred to independent state-owned companies with profit maximization.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Britomart has an AMAZING ... History . Britomart Transport Center , accessed January 7, 2011 .
  2. ^ History of Telecom Corporation of New Zealand Limited . Reference for Business , accessed January 4, 2011 .
  3. ^ History of ANZ . Australia and New Zealand Banking Group , accessed January 4, 2011 .
  4. ^ Evan Tosh : The Life & Times of Charles Hook Gordon Logie . Family Histories , archived from the original on September 3, 2014 ; accessed on May 5, 2019 (English, original website no longer available).
  5. ^ A b History of New Zealand Post . New Zealand Post , accessed January 7, 2011 .