Woolworths pulls pin on Dan Murphy’s store in Darwin near three dry Aboriginal communities
Dan Murphy #DanMurphy
Woolworths has finally pulled the pin on controversial plans to build one of Australia’s largest alcohol stores in Darwin, near three dry Aboriginal communities.
The decision, which came as a relief to Aboriginal health groups, came after a panel commissioned by Woolworths to review the decision found the company did not do enough consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
“This has been exhausting for everybody and certainly for people who aren’t terribly well resourced. I guess what it shows is that sometimes sanity will prevail,” Danila Dilba Aboriginal health service chief executive, Olga Havnen, said.
“I’m kind of hopeful that others in the alcohol and gaming industry might look more carefully at some of these sort of social impacts and the harms that some of the businesses cause.”
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The battle against the Dan Murphy’s store plan has been long and bitter. In 2019, the Northern Territory’s independent liquor commission refused the application on the grounds that it would increase the risk of alcohol-related harm in the community and would be too close to the dry Aboriginal community of Bagot and within walking distance of two others, Kulaluk and Minmarama.
Woolworths appealed that decision and announced a plan to move the proposed outlet to a site 1km from the original location.
Then in November 2020 the NT government passed legislation that effectively overrode the independent liquor commission and gave the final call to its own director of liquor licensing, who was not required to consider the impact on the community.
In December the director gave the development the go-ahead but Woolworths said construction would not begin until after it received the results of a review it had commissioned about its community engagement to date from prominent lawyer and director of the Business Council of Australia, Danny Gilbert.
“It was great that the people on that panel took their roles absolutely seriously, and were committed to looking at the whole breadth of issues that we were concerned about. It wasn’t just simply the question of whether or not the consultations were adequate. It was really taking into account the social and economic impacts that you know having a store, a mega store of this size here,” Havnen said.
She said it was a win for ensuring big corporations take into consideration the social and economic impacts of their businesses.
“Those things have got to be taken into consideration. This is why we have environmental laws. This is where we have restrictions on the sale of certain products. For example, we don’t sell alcohol to kids – there’s a reason for that.
“I think these sorts of social responsibilities need to be taken into account and considered seriously, and that it’s not enough just to focus on the profits. Profits don’t come before people or before the environment,” she said.
The chair of Woolworths, Gordon Cairns, said the Gilbert review “made it clear that we did not do enough in this community to live up to the best practice engagement to which we hold ourselves accountable”.
“In particular, we did not do enough stakeholder engagement with a range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and organisations,” he said.
However, chief executive Brad Banducci denied the company had done anything wrong.
“There’s nothing wrong with what we’ve done, but we can improve it,” he said.
He said the company received a draft of the report from Gilbert on Wednesday and would receive a final version on Friday.
The company promised to release the full report, which it said “made a series of recommendations about a wide range of related matters”, together with a response from management, “no later than mid June”.
Woolworths plans to spin off its drinks business, Endeavour, into a separate company. It had hoped do this last year but it was delayed by the Covid-19 outbreak and it now plans to complete the process in June.
Banducci left open the possibility that Endeavour, which is run by Steve Donohue, might open a Dan Murphy’s somewhere else in the NT.
“It’ll be up to Steve and the Endeavour business to reflect on that and come back and see how we adjust our plans,” he said.
“We do want across all of our stores across our whole business to, to really create a more responsible drinking culture in Australia, particularly to help people drink better.”