So Australia Post has finally gone nuclear and blown up mail, along with a lot of us.

Their application to the ACCC will add between 27 and 32 cents to the cost of presort letter, and unbelievably even pushes the cost of some pre-sorted mail above the cost of a standard stamp. It’s going to lead to a collapse of transactional mail and a lot of print and mail businesses going bust.

Can we stop it? Probably not. By the time a decision like this is announced the minister responsible, Malcolm Turnbull, will no doubt have already given a wink and a nod to Ahmed Fahour to get cracking.

But – there is this pesky thing called politics and that thing is run by politicians.

Now politicians have to be elected and for most of them, their main weapon in the electoral battlefield is print. And more specifically, print that goes in letterboxes.

You may think that the electronic media is the most important medium to get a message across and yes it is vital for national messaging. And if you are a country politician you probably have several local newspapers, radio and TV stations desperate for local content willing to put you on the air every day, so print isn’t the be all and end all.

But if you are a candidate in a metropolitan seat, and that’s most of them, the major newspapers and TV stations only care about you if you are doing something idiotic – see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W07iytEr9lY

If you are running for parliament in Bankstown or Fitzroy or Brisbane or Subiaco or anywhere Rupert Murdoch has a newspaper, you need access to print and mail to get your message out. Otherwise your whole campaign swings with the fortune or your party leader and his/her relationship with the major media and industrial groups who do their best to control public opinion in Australia.

But no one can stop you from putting a flyer in your neighbour’s letterbox. Just like in the days of the pamphleteers of old, print remains the great leveller of politics in Australia.

It’s true that state and federal politicians get communications allowances to pay for the printing and distribution of newsletters and direct mails. This gives them a massive advantage over anyone who would challenge them. There are restrictions that vary between jurisdictions on how they use these entitlements but broadly speaking any incumbent politician will be able to go about their everyday business without really being affected by the price change too much as the taxpayer will pay for ninety percent or more of what they do.

But come election time these price rises will still have a major impact on individual sitting parliamentarians, as well as the political parties, and most importantly for our democracy, anyone wanting to challenge a sitting member of parliament.

For MPs, even though they have allowances they will still need to pay for the material going out during the election period itself. After three or four years of putting out material on the public dime, it doesn’t take much to keep the message on track during the three or four weeks they have to pay for it themselves. And sitting MPs, especially government MPs, tend to attract enough in funding and donations to fund this period pretty easily but it’s still a lot of work shaking those money trees.

So it’s not the sitting MPs that will be truly disadvantaged by this. The real damage is to Australia, because when you or your mate get so pissed off with what’s going on with the country that you decide you want to run for parliament you’ll realise that the cost of competing with the sitting MP has just gone from high to astronomical.

Direct mail is bloody effective and whoever does it most and smartest will win a marginal seat, and what Australia Post is doing will reserve that weapon for those with the most money. Forget about the idea of selection of candidates by the people on merit. Forget about people from humble backgrounds being able to afford to run. These price increases will further entrench the advantages of existing members and wealthy candidates.

And don’t think this won’t have a real effect on the major political parties too. Sure this helps their sitting members, but all the major parties spend a lot of time and resources trying to win seats off the other side. They fund this work from a core amount of public funding, but they also chase donations to give them the upper hand come Election Day.

And donations are dangerous – anyone who doubts it should review the events in NSW over the last four years, where at one stage ten members in a parliament of ninety three were sitting on the cross benches as a result of ICAC investigations into dodgy donations.

These price rises will add hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to the cost of running an election for a political party, and they will need to get that money from somewhere. Maybe they’ll get more public funding, but the temptation will always be there to look for dicier and dodgier donations to get one up over the other guy, and that’s not good for anyone.

Now unfortunately the minister in charge of this issue also happens to be the richest man ever to lead a major political party in Australia, so a few cents here and there probably wouldn’t worry him and he won’t ever need to trouble you for a donation. But most politicians aren’t so well off, and if we can get the message across about how this will affect them, there may be some sympathy for our position in the back benches. And if recent events in the federal parliament show us anything, it’s that the back bench can be very powerful.

PIAA is going to do a mailout to MPs talking about jobs and traditions and economic consequences. Guess what – the minister and the government already know all that and they don’t care.

Ever since protectionism wrapped up in the 1980s, Australia has benefited from shutting down inefficient and dying industries. The politicians know this and they also know that that while it will be painful for a little while, in the long term the country is better off without zombie industries. And to them, that’s us.

But PIAA, make the thing personal. Don’t talk about jobs in mailing houses going – they just don’t care, and if they bother with a response it will be a vague promise of better jobs in better industries.

Tell them how much more expensive their next local election campaign will be. Tell them how much more difficult it will be to win a seat off the other guy. Tell them how much more fundraising they are going to have to do if they let Malcolm and Ahmed have their way.

Show them that it’s in their own interests to stop these price hikes. And as Keating said, self-interest is always the best backed horse in the race. Our only hope is that this time our self-interest aligns neatly with that of the humble politician on the stump. Let’s hope they see it.

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