Australia Post will immediately suspend its postal delivery service to the United States, saying it was forced to take the action due to significant changes made by the US government to customs and import tariff rules. FULL STORY (subscription required)
Emma McGrath-Cohen from the AFR reached out to Paul Zalai, director of the Freight and Trade Alliance, who said some logistics providers were able to anticipate and prepare for Trump's tariffs on e-commerce goods, but postal authorities globally have been caught short with insufficient time to adapt.
But the readiness of Australia Post was a smaller concern to Zalai in comparison to the fundamental shift in trading patterns that the Trump tariff changes will cause.
"This policy change will push businesses away from high-volume, cross-border shipments of individual consignments and toward more conventional logistics models such as bulk importing, warehousing in the US, and domestic fulfilment," Zalai said.
"By applying tariffs at the retail sale price rather than the wholesale or manufactured cost, the US government's removal of the de minimis threshold strips away the cost advantage of low-value cross-border transactions that previously entered duty-free."