RURAL MAIL SERVICE

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 41, 17 August 1921, Page 9

RURAL MAIL SERVICE

TO THB EDITOR. Sir,—l read the telegraphed outline of the Postmaster-General's remarks on the proposed new rural mail service with very great interest. lam sure all backblo'ck settlers'like myself very niuch'ap-' preciate. the Minister's sympathetic atti- | tude towards them, and will most heartily welcome the Department's endeavour. | to improve their mail service. Mr. Coatcs says in your report, dated Ist August: ".Tt is the endeavour of the Department to arrange, as far as possible, for some facilities for the people wlib were brave enough to settle in the backblocks." I think the community as. 1 a whole will agree with him. People who live in the cities have ho idea what the backblocks settlers have to put up with, nor how., isolated they are. To .give you an example; the writer, who resides 50 miles from the distributing post office and 18 miles from the nearest, country post officey -after- sending out IS miles for his mail bag, on 6th Saturday, and getting his mail—the first for a week—finds his weekly paper (the Auckland .__ Weekly News/ missing, and no later copy of The | Evening Post than that of Wednesday, 3rd. And the writer not only pays 50s per annum for a mail bag, but along with a number of other settlers is paying an additional 50s a_s subsidy for a once-a-week service to within nine miles of h'i3 home, or a total for their mail service of £5 each. Then, the service is not reliable. For example: Last Saturday,,, a high creek stopped the mail car, and I fyad to i send out 15 miles for the mail, instead of nine miles. We have to thank the Department for contributing to the extension of the mail service once a 'Ween t«i withiii nine miles; but where I think the Department is a little exacting y3 that it is not' content with having collected from us the subsidy in advance right up to the end of November, when the present contract expires, but it has insisted on pur paying the broken period from then up till the. end of the year. Although it holds my personal bond, and the arrangements with the contractor arc far from businesslike, the Department seems to have no arrangements in its contract for any fixed rate per mile for extension, so that the contract is I costing the Department three times what it" is worth. Now, any ordinary business man would have a fixed mileage rate, and in case of either extension or reduction, or missing of one or more trips, would pay contractor accordingly. —I am, etc.,

BACKBLOCKS.