Dear Residents,

We urgently need your support to address a critical issue: NZ Post's refusal to deliver mail to our homes in Ara Hills.

Despite our development having essential services like Auckland Council recycling and food scraps collection, Uber Eats delivery, and being just a few hundred meters from the current residential mail delivery zones of Orewa, NZ Post continues to classify Ara Hills as a rural area. We share a fence line with the northern motorway and are similar to Millwater, which recently had its status changed from rural to residential.

This outdated classification, based on the land's former use as farmland, is being used by NZ Post to shirk their obligation to provide mail delivery to what is now a densely populated community that will soon include around 1,000 homes.

NZ Post's proposed solution of delivering to cluster mailboxes is not only impractical but also blatantly unsuitable for our community. These cluster boxes belong in actual rural areas, not in our densely built neighbourhood where individual letterboxes are already in place at each home. Installing cluster boxes would be an eyesore and impose unnecessary costs on residents who have already invested in accessible letterboxes. The burden of using these cluster boxes would fall especially heavily on the elderly and those with disabilities - yet NZ Post has explicitly stated that no special allowances will even be made for those with disabilities.

Initially, we thought the cluster mailbox proposal was a temporary stopgap while NZ Post adapted to our rapidly growing development. However, NZ Post has since revealed that they view cluster mailboxes as a permanent solution, citing the declining mail market as justification for refusing to extend proper service. For a suburb of nearly 1,000 homes, this long-term neglect is unacceptable.

The impact of NZ Post's refusal is already being felt. Many residents have missed important legal, medical, and financial documents, such as passports, credit cards and fines. These missed fines have escalated to debt collection agencies and in some cases doubled the original sum, simply because residents were unaware of them. This situation is placing an unnecessary financial and practical burden on our community.

NZ Post has a clear responsibility under its Deed of Understanding to provide equitable services. By classifying Ara Hills as rural, they are blatantly failing to meet this obligation. Their refusal to adapt to the needs of our growing community sets a dangerous precedent for other developments in the future.

We need your support to hold NZ Post accountable. Please sign this petition, which we will present to the NZ Post Chair, demanding the residential mail delivery service our community urgently needs. When signing, we encourage you to share how the lack of mail delivery has negatively impacted you in the comments section.

Your support is crucial. Thank you.