Letter to the Editor

27 Feb, 2023

Do we need another liquor store in Mangawhai?

During the recent bad weather my wife was browsing the Rodney Times (RT) paper when she came across an application by Liquorland for an off-licence in Mangawhai Central. The Times is an Auckland-based (Warkworth) publication which rarely carries local Mangawhai news, so I was interested to learn more about why this notice was tucked away in an out-of-District publication and not placed in the Mangawhai Focus, which is widely read throughout our community.

The Rodney Times is circulated widely to surrounding Districts such as Wellsford and Langs Beach and is delivered to some, but not all households in and around Mangawhai, but unlike the Mangawhai Focus, you will rarely find the Rodney Times available outside retail shops.

The notification process for a Liquor Licence is set out in the 2013 The Sale and Supply of Alcohol Regulations S.36 (a) and states that a public notice must appear in a newspaper that circulates in the district nominated by the Secretary of the Licencing Committee.

In this instance the Committee Secretary supplied Liquorland with four newspaper options from which to choose but strangely the Mangawhai Focus was not on the list. It is not surprising that Liquorland chose The Rodney Times which leaves me bemused and struggling to understand why the Mangawhai Focus was not placed on the list to better address the intention of the public notice clause of the Act.

To address this issue I placed a notification in the Mangawhai Locals Facebook page and have recently been advised that the Kaipara District Licensing Committee has received 20 objections and the matter will now go to a hearing to allow Mangawhai residents an opportunity to voice their opinion.

My concerns are not philosophically based on this issue, but based on my 29 years of experience as a police officer, which is supported by numerous studies including those conducted by Auckland and Waikato Universities, which concluded a correlation existed between the number of liquor outlets and the instances of alcohol related community harm. In other words, more liquor stores in a community will result in an increase in community harm e.g. domestic violence, vandalism etc. This revelation should not come as a surprise.

You need look no further than South Auckland to see what can happen when a community is overwhelmed by liquor stores and is now paying the price for the poor decisions made by their local liquor licencing committees. We need to learn from the mistakes of others.

Derek Parrott

Mangawhai