Congratz ricktas & others who contributed to this thread so far!

You know/have researched - nothing about mail delivery in Australia.

If you live in a flat/unit you will ALWAYS have to go to the PO to pick up mail because of low-lives stealing car/vans/motorbikes full of mail. We don't let YOUR mail out of sight now.
If you live beyond sight of the road (long driveway etc.) mail & personal security reasons apply due to incidents that have occurred & you will have to pick up signature items at the PO

Aus Post in in the middle of rolling out 26,000 new Motorola hand-held scanners so we will do a better job of tracking items via scan events, that's $208M of your money!! @ no additional postage costs to you.
That's more than the profit AP made last year!

All international items have a barcode but unless signature item price is paid it is NOT tracked, although the customs item # is recorded, at the moment, this may change & WILL COST THE SENDER & HENCE THE RECEIVER MORE!

AP has one of the world's cheapest, most reliable mail delivery services, handling almost 52 MILLION mail articles a DAY covering an area larger than the US 48 states.

If you want to know more you should read the AUSTRALIAN POSTAL CORPORATION ACT 1989 to find out what your entitled to.

..... or you could ask me, I've run a delivery team for 20 + years.

By the way - Aust Post parcels are delivered by contractors who get a grand total of less than a $1 per parcel & have to pay all expenses (car, fuel, insurance, registration, ect) to get it to you. Then again you want the service as cheap as possible....