Australia Post suspends most postage to the US ahead of new tariffs

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Australia Post has taken the extraordinary step of immediately suspending many forms of postage to the United States following similar moves from European postal services.

Transcript

00:00So Australia Post is suspending most forms of shipping to the states just days ahead of a

00:09crucial deadline where tariffs will be applied to packages going into the states, mostly when

00:16they're sent by online retailers. So this is called the end of the so-called de minimis

00:22exemption until now. Packages worth less than $1,500 Australian dollars could go into the states

00:30tax-free, but the Trump administration is ending that exemption on Friday for all of the world,

00:37and instead it's saying that packages that arrive will get slapped with tariffs depending on their

00:44country of origin or fees of around $80 US or more. Now this looming deadline has been creating chaos

00:53and confusion for retailers here in Australia and in other parts of the world and Australia Post.

01:00Australia Post last week already suspended transit shipping to the states. Now that's when other

01:07countries use Australia's network to on-send packages to the states. And then today they've

01:14made this quite unusual announcement that now packages will be suspended indefinitely. It is

01:20worth noting that people can still send letters and documents to the United States and packages

01:26that are worth less than around $150 Australian dollars and are declared as gifts. So it's very

01:33much online retail that's being impacted by this suspension. Yeah, and you've been covering this

01:39story for some months now. Tell us about that impact on retailers. Retailers have been really

01:45confused ahead of this tariff deadline that's approaching on Friday. Now I've been speaking to

01:52retailers big and small. They say they've been struggling to get a really clear picture of how these

01:59tariffs will work. Many of these businesses are scared that they'll send packages to their customers

02:05in the United States. Then they'll arrive there and their customers will be slapped with unexpected

02:10fees and that's going to end business goodwill. I was just speaking this morning to a small business

02:17owner based out of a regional town here in Victoria. She makes quilts and patterns and around 70%

02:24of what she sells goes to the United States. So it's a really big market for her. She already made the

02:30decision last week to stop shipping to the states via Australia Post because she just didn't have

02:35clarity on what would happen next. Do we know when Australia Post will resume this sort of shipping?

02:41So Australia Post is saying this is a suspension and it's working as fast as possible to find a

02:47solution for its business customers. Part of the issue here seems to be that there just aren't

02:52processes in play to collect or distribute or deal with these tariffs that now are being applied.

03:00In fact, one analogy potentially would be the reverse issue of when GST was starting to be applied

03:07in Australia. So when packages were coming to Australia, they had to figure out how to apply

03:12the GST. This is almost the same in reverse. It involves a lot of different complicated processes.

03:19So Australia Post says that it's working with a third party platform that it hopes will be able

03:26to remedy this issue. It's urging its business customers to sign up to that platform in the

03:32meantime while it finds a solution. But yes, for now, there's not really any clear deadline on when

03:38postage to the States is going to resume.

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