The proposed liquor outlet would have been in close proximity to three Indigenous dry communities.
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Controversial plans to build a Dan Murphy’s megastore near Darwin Airport have been scrapped, parent company Woolworths Group announced today.
Indigenous groups have been protesting against the plans for nearly six years. Today’s win came after Woolies’ Endeavour Group was found by an independent panel to have not consulted stakeholders sufficiently enough.
“The Gilbert Review has 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,” Woolworths Group Chairman, Gordon Cairns said in a statement.
Woolworths has pulled plans to set up a massive bottle shop in Darwin after Indigenous communities protested the development.
The Dan Murphy s megastore at Darwin Airport has been in the sights of the local Danila Dilba Health Service, which launched legal action last month.
It objected to the Northern Territory government s decision to approve the bottle shop and demanded the accompanying liquor licence be revoked.
The store would have been the largest in the NT.
Woolworths on Thursday announced it would no longer go ahead after receiving the findings of an independent panel led by lawyer Danny Gilbert set up in December to review the project.
The battle against the Dan Murphyâs store plan has been long and bitter. In 2019, the Northern Territoryâs 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.