Good morning, everyone. I am Scott Perkins, Chair of Woolworths Group. I also acknowledge the traditional owners of the Darug country and pay my respects to elders past and present. I welcome you to the 2026 Annual General Meeting of Woolworths Group and look forward to engaging with you during the course of today's AGM.
Turning to today's AGM, we are pleased to offer Woolworths Group shareholders the option of participating in today's meeting in person and online. Our Group Company Secretary has informed me that a quorum is present, so I declare our 2026 AGM open. For those in the room, I would like to first outline the emergency procedures for this venue. Please take a moment to identify the emergency exit closest to you. In the event of an emergency, one of two alarms may sound. The alert alarm is a series of warning beeps.
If this alarm sounds, please stand by for further instructions from the wardens. If the evacuation alarm sounds, a whooping alarm, all occupants will be directed by the wardens to leave via their nearest emergency exit quickly and calmly, and to make their way to the assembly area, which is located through reception, leading on to our on-grade parking.
Once there, please remain at this location until Woolworths Group team members advise you it is safe to return to the venue. If we are required to evacuate, please leave your voting handsets and your smart card on your chair. I would now like to introduce my colleagues on the stage today. Starting on my right, our Managing Director and CEO, Amanda Bardwell. Cathy Teschier, Non-Executive Director. Jon Alferness, Non-Executive Director, and Jon is standing for election at this meeting and will address the meeting later today.
Jennifer Carr-Smith, Non-Executive Director and Chair of our Sustainability Committee. Finally, Ken Meyer, Non-Executive Director. On my left is Dom Millgate, our Group Company Secretary. Terry Bowen, Non-Executive Director. Terry is standing for election at this meeting and will address the meeting later today. Maxine Brenner, Non-Executive Director and Chair of our People Committee. Philip Chronican, Non-Executive Director and Chair of our Risk Committee.
Warwick Bray, Non-Executive Director, Chair of our Audit and Finance Committee. Warwick is also standing for re-election at this meeting and will address the meeting later today. Also in attendance today is Tom Imbesi, the company's Lead Audit Partner from Deloitte, and members of the Woolworths Group Executive Team. I will now talk through the procedural matters for this meeting.
Instructions to help you navigate the online platform are available in the notice of meeting and in the online meeting guide, both of which are available on our website. The notice of meeting sets out the business of the meeting and the explanatory information for each resolution, and I propose that it be taken as read.
If we experience a significant technical issue or if we are required to evacuate this building, I will suspend the meeting until we are able to recommence it. Or, if we are unable to recommence within a reasonable time, I will adjourn the meeting to another day and time. We will provide shareholders with details of any adjournment via the ASX and our company website. To vote at today's meeting, you need to be registered as a shareholder, which includes body corporate representatives and attorneys, or a proxy.
We will vote on each resolution by way of a poll, which will remain open until the conclusion of the final item of business. The final votes for and against each resolution will be released to the ASX after the meeting is closed. For those participating online, you can vote by clicking on the voting tab at the top of the screen, which will open a list of all the resolutions and the voting options.
For those in the room eligible to vote, votes will be submitted using electronic voting handsets. I am sure everyone in the room is well accustomed to using the handsets. However, if you have any issues or you are voting and you do not yet have a handset, please raise your hand now and one of the Lumi or registry assistants will help you.
If you have not already done so, please insert the smart card into the top of the handset with the barcode at the bottom and facing towards you. Your name should now be displayed across the top of the screen of your handset. To vote using your handset, select one to vote for, two to vote against, or three if you wish to abstain from voting on any resolution.
You can change your vote at any time while the poll is open. Only shareholders and proxy holders may ask a question or make a comment during today's meeting. I ask that all questions and comments are directed to me. I may also direct questions of a more detailed nature to the CEO, Amanda Bardwell, the CFO, Stephen Harrison, or any other lucky members of the Woolworths executive team.
For those in the room today, please see the attendant at the microphone nearest to you. In order to allow a reasonable opportunity for all shareholders to speak, I will limit shareholders to no more than two questions or comments at a time. If you have additional questions, there will be an opportunity for you to ask them once other shareholders have had a chance to speak.
If we receive multiple questions via the online portal that are largely identical, one of the questions will be read and the related questions answered together. I would like to stress that it is not in the best interest of this meeting, nor respectful of all of the shareholders attending, for questions to be repeated nor for individual shareholders to dominate proceedings with a large number of questions.
I would like to give all those shareholders wishing to ask a question the opportunity to do so, and therefore will not permit repeated questioning on essentially the same matters. Finally, we will conduct the meeting in a responsible manner and ask that shareholders are respectful when asking questions, as we will be when answering them.
To submit a written question via the online portal, click the messaging tab at the top of the screen, type out your written question and select the send icon. To submit an audio question via the online portal, please refer to the online meeting guide. A member of our communications team here at Woolworths Group will read aloud questions to the meeting. I will deal with questions in accordance with the item of business they refer to. Each year we receive a number of questions about individual customer service, product, or store-related matters.
For those in the room, you can speak with one of our customer service team members in the foyer area after the meeting finishes. For those of you online, if you submit a question about an individual customer or administrative share registry matter, I have asked the team to inform you that the best way to get resolution of your matter is through the customer service channels or through the share registry.
Those contact details can be found in the notice of meeting and also on the Woolworths Group website. We now turn to the Chair and CEO addresses. Can I again welcome you all to the 2026 Annual General Meeting of Woolworths Group Limited. Today you will hear from me and our Group CEO, Amanda Bardwell. Together we will share our reflections on the past year, including our operational and financial outcomes.
This time last year, I stood before you acknowledging that we needed to improve performance. I am very pleased to report that over the last year we have made strong progress across almost every measure of our business. Improvements in our customer metrics, in sales, in operating efficiency, and in team engagement.
All of these have come together and explain the material share price improvement and dividend growth you have experienced in the last 12 months. Under Amanda's leadership, we have a refreshed and invigorated management team who have worked hard to recover from a period of disruption to one focused on continual improvement of our retail fundamentals, while positioning ourselves for medium-term growth in an ever-changing retail landscape.
Pleasingly, each of our key business segments contributed meaningfully to the Group's FY26 performance, which was achieved against a backdrop of record low consumer confidence and rising costs, defining a challenging macroeconomic environment. FY26 Group sales increased 3.6% to AUD 71.5 billion, and EBIT before significant items rose 12.7%. This was driven by improved execution in Australian food, delivering greater value and convenience to rebuild momentum.
Combined with BIG W's return to profitability and group-wide productivity discipline, these efforts led to strong financial outcomes. Group NPAT before significant items increased 15.4%. Reflecting this performance, the Board declared a fully franked final dividend of AUD 0.52 per share, bringing the total FY26 dividend to AUD 0.97 per share, a 15.5% increase on the prior year. Even more importantly, we recorded improvements in safety outcomes during the year. We focused our activities on risk reduction, hazard elimination, and early care pathways.
This drove a 10% reduction in our total recordable injury frequency rate. We also took a leadership position to address the shocking rates of violence and aggression that our frontline teams face every day. These have increased more than tenfold since prior to COVID, such that last year our teams experienced more than 7,800 acts of violence and aggression in our stores.
We sponsored the implementation of new regulations creating Workplace Protection Orders, which are proven to reduce recidivism. We call on all remaining states and territories to implement these protections to further protect our teams. We are also pleased to see Group team advocacy scores improve by six points to 29% by year end, reflecting strong store cohesion and leadership. Alongside investment in our people, we also continue to invest in infrastructure, digital, and data to continue to strengthen our competitive edge.
Expanding e-commerce and fulfillment capability has been key to meeting shifting customer needs. Group e-commerce sales rose 15.9% to AUD 10.6 billion in FY26, driven by On Demand and 60-minute fulfillment propositions. Store investments also enabled this growth with Direct to Boot facilities now across 785 stores, including 661 offering Direct to Boot Now. in November, we opened the state-of-the-art Moorebank Regional Distribution Centre, making our Moorebank precinct fully operational.
At a total cost of over a billion dollars, these facilities feature advanced automation and safety design, moving up to 4.5 million cartons weekly and building sequenced palettes to accelerate store restocking. During the year, we also launched Agentic Olive, our conversational AI shopping companion in the Woolworths app, whilst also deploying AI tools to drive productivity, such as through optimizing store picking routes and supply chain workflows. The wise decisions of former leaders of Woolworths have positioned us well in this regard.
Building on more than a decade of digital and data investment, we are ready to embrace an AI-augmented future with all of its promise and uncertainties. We are focused on clear and present opportunities to improve the experience of both our customers and our team members, while carefully navigating issues of data privacy and security. Turning now to sustainability. Earlier this year, we launched our 2030 sustainability plan, focused on five key areas: climate and nature, circular packaging, human rights, community support, and responsible sourcing.
We made notable progress across each priority in FY26. The Group maintained its global number one ranking by KnowTheChain for the second consecutive year, recognizing our efforts to combat modern slavery. In FY26, we expanded human rights due diligence deeper into our supply chains to safeguard workers' rights. In December 2025, we achieved 100% renewable electricity across Australia and New Zealand operations.
For FY26, Scope 1 and 2 emissions fell 45% against our 2023 baseline, keeping us on track towards our 80% reduction target by 2030. We continued collaborating with suppliers, government, and industry on Scope 3 emissions. This year, we partnered with key beef producers to trial methane reduction technology in grass-fed cattle and expanded our electric vehicle prime mover pilot to decarbonize transport logistics.
Managing nature-based risks is essential to securing our food supply chain. Last year, we completed a comprehensive nature materiality assessment aligned with TNFD LEAP framework across direct operations and key commodities. We have made good progress across many of our short-term priority areas, with priority focus on our animal protein categories of red meat, poultry, eggs, and seafood outlined in this year's standalone nature report.
As we work to maintain the many existing sourcing standards and animal welfare practices we have in place, we also continue to pursue new areas of innovation and practice improvements across our supply chain. Continued focus was applied to our oversight of the sourcing of fresh Tasmanian salmon, a product valued by our customers.
I recently visited Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania and engaged directly with our partners and key stakeholders. I met with scientists from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, specialists in water oxygenation and ecosystem health, as well as our suppliers, key government representatives, and the Blue Economy CRC, which is trialing offshore farming in Bass Strait. It was clear from these discussions that there is a shared understanding of the situation and a strong alignment on the necessary actions to support the long-term sustainability of salmon farming.
We are confident that our approach is grounded in expert advice, appropriate stewardship, and ensuring we can continue to provide the quality of fresh salmon our customers enjoy. Moving to board renewal. Shaping Woolworths Group's board for the future has been a constant focus. Warwick Bray and I will stand for re-election today, and Jon Alferness and Terry Bowen will stand for election, all with the full support of the board.
Jon Alferness joined the board as a Non-Executive Director in March 2026, bringing over 20 years of international technology, product, and retail leadership, including as Chief Product Officer for Walmart US. Terry Bowen joined as a Non-Executive Director on the 1st of October 2026, bringing over 30 years of senior executive experience across the retail industry and, most recently, a highly relevant chapter in e-commerce, media, and AI implementation.
Tracey Fellows retired from the board in March 2026 after valuable service across several committees. We thank Tracey for her diligent contribution. These appointments strengthen the board's retail expertise, combining fresh perspectives with deep institutional knowledge to support management in delivering long-term results for shareholders. During the year, the board also conducted an externally facilitated effectiveness and independence review.
This confirmed the benefits of a period of continued stability, consistent with the ongoing succession planning process. As a result, we expect Chair succession to take place over the next few years. Orderly succession and governance renewal remain primary responsibilities of your board. In summary, while pleased with the restored momentum in FY26, we are grounded in an operating context that has cost of living pressures, intense competition from new and established sources, and supply chain volatility requiring ongoing agility. We are, however, energized by our prospects.
The importance of fresh food and the opportunity for Woolies to play to its established strengths remain a winning formula. We have a materially sharper focus on operational efficiency and a substantially new team that has galvanized around Amanda's leadership and our plans for the future.
With customers at the center of what we do and building on our momentum, we look forward to the balance of 2027 with optimism, with Woolies very much back on the front foot. On behalf of the board, I thank Amanda and her executive team and all of the 209,000 Woolworths Group team members for their exceptional dedication over the last 12 months. Finally, I thank you, our shareholders, for your ongoing trust and support. I'll now hand over to our CEO, Amanda Bardwell, to discuss operational progress in detail. Thank you all very much.
Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. I also acknowledge the traditional owners of Darug country and pay my respects to elders, past and present. Thank you for joining us today. It is an absolute privilege to be with you all. Last year, after a difficult FY25, I spoke about our plans to make Woolworths Group a better and stronger business.
The aim was to reposition the group for long-term sustainable growth. Since then, we've made good progress on our ambition to be the first choice for customers, and this showed up with stronger financial performance in FY26. There is more to do, but we've made good steps forward. Our customers are at the heart of everything that we do, and many are under significant pressure right now. I'll come back to here and talk to you a little bit about what we're hearing from our customers shortly.
In FY26, all businesses delivered an improved performance, with group sales increasing by 3.6%. This improvement in sales momentum across the group, together with good productivity and cost control, drove solid group EBIT growth before significant items of 12.7%. I said last year that our key priority was to restore trading momentum in Australian food. During the year, we invested in value, fresh, convenience, and we worked hard to improve our retail execution.
Customers have noticed. Advocacy scores improved through FY26, finishing 4 points higher than the year before, and sales momentum was strong. That momentum was driven mainly by customers putting more items in their baskets, and pleasingly, we have seen this momentum continue in FY27. E-commerce growth was a highlight, with an acceleration in the second half of the year, supported by investment in our customer offer and network expansion.
Our complementary businesses and services also made a significant contribution to growth during the period. In New Zealand, progress on our customer strategy and cost discipline delivered an improved earnings in FY26. However, lower sales growth driven by a customer flight to value, a highly competitive market, and disruption from store operating model changes led to lower profit in the second half. BIG W returned to profit in FY26.
A better range and a better execution through the year, particularly in clothing, meant more full-priced sales and less clearance and markdowns. In store and above store productivity initiatives largely offset inflation, supporting a strong profit improvement. We remained focused on making every dollar count and restoring a low-cost discipline across the group. We delivered above store savings of approximately AUD 400 million in the year, in line with our target.
This, together with a strong focus on productivity, helped deliver a reduction in cost of doing business across the group. in August last year, we outlined the strategic actions we were taking to reposition the group for long-term sustainable growth. We made good progress on each of these in FY26, which gives us confidence in our plan. In Australian food, we made meaningful shifts for customers to put us first with a focus on value, fresh, availability, and convenience. Value came first.
In FY26, we invested more than AUD 100 million in lower prices to rebuild price trust and provide dependable value. We also launched Lower Shelf Price with a commitment to longer-term price reductions. We have kept that commitment with over 1,000 products now part of the range. We also delivered more benefits through our Everyday Rewards program.
Together, these steps lifted our value for money scores by 3 points in the year. However, we know value customers can trust matters even more in the current environment, and we are continued to be committed to doing more. The best fresh offer remains critical to our success, and we delivered improvements in quality, in availability, and value during the year.
We also took steps to improve our range and offer in other key categories, particularly in own brand and everyday needs. A highlight was the transformation of our convenience meals range. As part of this, we launched 83 new and 60 reformulated ready-made meals to better meet the growing needs of convenience for our customers alongside quality. Better availability starts long before a product reaches the shelf. In FY26, we completed our Moorebank Precinct, the largest supply chain investment in our history.
It continues to perform strongly with the National Distribution Centre fully operational and the Regional Distribution Centre ramping up well, with the Moorebank Precinct delivering over 4.5 million cartons per week. AI is also making a practical difference. Olive, our digital shopping assistant, has taken a big step forward through agentic AI. Customers can use Olive for recipes, meal planning, product discovery, and Smart Basket builds an online basket with one click.
Turning to our second strategic priority, both New Zealand and BIG W delivered an earnings improvement in the year, supported by their transformation agendas. While we're not satisfied with our overall performance in New Zealand, we took action to improve our customer offer. Investment in Everyday Rewards and value, a wider own brand range, and greater convenience help us improve our customer metrics and brand scores in FY26.
In BIG W, we continued to reposition our range with better quality and more affordable options. We also improved our execution, supported by new technology and productivity initiatives. Digital and e-commerce growth was a highlight in FY26, supported by the extension of range through BIG W Market. However, we know we need to continue to build momentum in both of these businesses to deliver double-digit returns over the medium term.
Moving to our third priority, our complementary businesses and services, including Petstock, Cartology, and PFD, all made a significant contribution to the group's EBIT growth in FY26. A highlight was media rewards and services with record Everyday Rewards membership and growth in Cartology in the second half, following a number of successful promotional campaigns. Petstock completed a value reset and strengthened its own brand offer.
Despite a more challenging customer environment in the second half, PFD delivered solid sales and EBIT growth. As Scott mentioned in his address, this year we launched our 2030 sustainability plan. Sustainability is fundamental to Woolworths Group and the way we operate, helping us make a positive impact for a better tomorrow.
I'm proud of our long-standing partnerships with our food relief partners, including OzHarvest, Foodbank, FareShare in Australia, and KiwiHarvest and the Salvation Army in New Zealand. In FY26, we donated over 44 million meals to our partners across Australia and New Zealand. This is a powerful example of how we live our purpose every day. Soft plastic recycling matters to our customers, and I'm also proud that we've restored these services in more of our stores. We now have over 700 locations and have processed more than 50 million pieces of soft plastic.
Yesterday, we released our sales results for the first quarter of FY27. It has been a good start to the year with a continuation of trading momentum. Group sales grew 4.7% in the quarter, led by Australian Food. Customers continue to respond to the progress we have made to improve value, enhance our range, and provide more convenience. This has seen more customers choose Woolworths first and shop with us more frequently.
In Australian Food, total sales increased by 6.9%, driven by strong item growth. Sales growth in the early part of the quarter benefited from the success of our Disney OOSHIES collectible program, which drove customer engagement. Importantly, growth remained strong throughout the quarter. Customers responded to the value in our stores, and we saw more items and more transactions than last year. In e-commerce, sales increased 20.2% compared to the prior year.
On Demand continues to be the fastest growing delivery proposition as we provide our customers with even more convenient shopping options like Milkrun, Direct to Boot Now, Delivery Now, and our partnership with DoorDash. In New Zealand, sales increased 2.9%, with growth benefiting from OOSHIES early in the quarter. However, sales growth moderated following the conclusion of the campaign, reflecting a weakening macro environment and a highly competitive market.
While customer metrics softened in the quarter, value for money, voice of customer, increased 2 points compared to the prior year as customers responded positively to significant value investment. Australian B2B sales increased 4.4%, with PFD sales remaining solid, driven by growth in QSR. In BIG W, total sales declined modestly, reflecting a challenging discretionary retail environment and ongoing cost of living pressure on households. I want to return to what customers are telling us.
Interest rates have risen 4 times this year, and fuel, electricity, and insurance are rising faster than food. For an Australian budget family with a mortgage, we estimate groceries make up around 10% of household spending. We know customers remain under significant pressure. 4 in 10 Australians tell us they often struggle to make ends meet. Customers are protecting their food shop, but making careful choices around it.
They're choosing more own brands and using Everyday Rewards and specials to stretch the budget. Customer advocacy has remained resilient during this period, although we know value for money scores have come under pressure. We have more work to do so customers continue to choose us first, particularly as we head into the key Christmas and holiday trading period. Looking ahead, we're determined to continue building on the momentum we achieved in FY26.
I'm confident that further progress on our strategy will provide a strong platform to achieve the group's financial aspirations and deliver long-term shareholder value. Our progress this year would not have been possible without our dedicated team. When I visit our stores every week, I see their commitment firsthand and the pride they take in ensuring every customer walks away with a better experience.
It is these moments, repeated millions of times every week, that have helped us start rebuilding trust with our customers. One part of that picture I want to highlight, ensuring that every team member goes home safely is our primary responsibility. As Scott said, violence and aggression against our team remains a growing challenge. In FY26, we recorded 240,000 retail crime events.
About 7,800 were incidents of abuse, violence, and aggression towards our team, and 410 involved an edged weapon such as a knife, a machete, or scissors. This is unacceptable. Behind each number is a team member who came to work to serve customers. Nobody should feel unsafe doing their job. To anyone affected, please know that we are with you.
I welcome the Workplace Protection Orders now in place in the A.C.T. and South Australia, and the progress made to legislate in New South Wales, Victoria, West Australia, and Tasmania. We'll keep advocating for stronger laws as there is more to do. With only 8 weeks until Christmas, I know our team is ready to deliver a great festive season with quality and value our customers can count on. Christmas will feel different for different families.
Many customers are planning earlier to spread the cost, and many Everyday Rewards members are saving their rewards dollars for it. For some, it will be a tighter Christmas, and we want to help every one of them. Our new festive range of more than 500 products is one way we are doing that, and our award-winning half leg Christmas ham is still AUD 8 a kilo, the same price as 2014.
While we expect the challenging economic environment to continue, I am confident that we can deliver for our customers, team members, and shareholders in the year ahead. I would like to thank our team for their commitment, our customers for choosing us, and our shareholders for your support. I will now hand back to Scott. Thank you.
Thank you, Amanda. We will now turn to the formal items of business for this meeting. The items of business for today's AGM are set out in the notice of meeting and will be voted on by poll, which is now open. As set out in the notice of meeting, I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of each of the resolutions. Our share registry, MUFG, will act as a returning officer for the poll.
The first item of business is to receive the financial report, sustainability report, Directors' report, and auditors' report for the year ending 28th of June, 2026. There is no vote on this item. A copy of these statements and reports was published in the 2026 annual report and sent to those shareholders who requested copies. Shareholders have also had the opportunity to view the statements and reports.
I now invite comments or questions on the financial statements and reports, as well as general shareholder questions, including on sustainability and ESG related matters. All questions to the auditor should, in the first instance, be addressed to me as Chair, and if appropriate, I will ask Tom Imbesi to address the meeting. I will firstly deal with questions from the floor and then questions submitted online during the meeting. Are there any questions in the room?
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Natasha Lee.
Welcome, Natasha.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good to see you again, Scott. Firstly, I would like to thank the board and the staff for their results over the last financial year. That is very good. Also, thank the Petstock Foundation for their support for the domestic violence charity Lucy's Project, which I am involved in. I know that you addressed some of the issues which you probably anticipated about agentic AI, and that it is a journey rather than a destination.
I understand that there is sort of like front of shop and back of shop elements to it. Apart from Olive, what other agentic AI platforms have been rolled out or are being rolled out? I suppose tied up with that is the appalling issue of violence and other things which are happening in the store. I understand that there is sort of like an increase in cameras and surveillance. Is that being tied into AI in any way?
Thank you for the question. Woolies is actually in a very strong position to judiciously deploy AI for the benefit of you, our customers, and our team members. You might recall, as we built our e-commerce business over the years, that has started with a very strong understanding of data security and having the right kind of processes, the right kind of data in the right place. Through our investment in Quantium, we are now the majority shareholder.
We have also developed over time, I think, very strong credentials in terms of machine learning that have led on to AI and will lead on to further developments of AI and to generative AI. We look at this technology, I suppose, in much the same way at various other technologies have entered Woolies' communities over the years.
They can prove to be somewhat disruptive, but over the long period of time, human ingenuity has a habit of embracing these technologies for the benefit of our customers and our team members. We are certainly seeing evidence of that early on in this journey with widespread mass adoption of AI tools by our team members.
All of that has been undertaken with an eye to data security. With our AI partners, we have very advanced protections for all of our customer data that we do not share with any other party. Customer data for you as a Woolworths customer stays inside Woolworths. The use cases that Natasha Lee has referred to are not only as they relate to customer, Olive helping you with a predictive basket, Olive helping you navigate a store, but it is also for addressing some of the processes.
There are reasonably menial and sometimes quite manual paper-based processes that exist inside Woolies that are going to be better done by AI agents over time. They might be in coding. They might be in some aspects of our legal function. They might be in order to optimize all the data we collect in and around promotional effectiveness, pricing, labor scheduling in stores. AI is currently and will continue to be used to make us more efficient and deliver a better experience for our customers.
Right. Yes. That is sort of what I expected. As long as there is some human audit process to ensure that it is doing what it is supposed to be doing.
The second part of your question related to acts of violence and aggression. I certainly appreciate you drawing that to everybody's attention again, as both Amanda Bardwell and I have in our speeches. Yes, we are deploying camera-based technology. We are working with the regulators on a trial in ACT in respect of facial recognition to help address this scourge.
What we know is when Workplace Protection Orders, which both Amanda Bardwell and I spoke to, when they are in place, they reduce recidivism from the most troubling reoffenders by up to 90%. We are very keen to have that regulatory backstop along with the technologies in store that protect our team.
How long are the videos from the cameras retained in sort of like ordinary circumstances? Obviously, if there is a crime, you will want to preserve that as evidential material. But for the vast majority of customers coming in and out of the store, what is the time period for retention of that data?
Yes. Well, that is something we are working with regulators on. It is important to appreciate that the technology actually depersonalizes. The AI enables identification of the reoffender, not the tracking of the individual consistently in store. It has a method to match to the identity of the reoffender. But it needs to be retained for a reasonable period of time in order for it to be effective, because obviously if reoffenders visit us, they may go to another place and then return sometime later, and we want to be able to identify them on entry so that we can quite justifiably restrict their entry to our store.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
I'll take a question from this side. Thank you.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Alan Golden.
Thank you.
Hello, Mr. Chair. How are you?
Welcome.
I'm here representing the ASA, and I have proxies from 540 shareholders holding just over 1,700,000 shares. I'll just ask my two questions. If I have time later, I may try, but I don't think I'll have much.
No worries.
Let's try for the first two. Both of my questions are dealing with your priority two. The first one is New Zealand. In the first quarter, that increase that you showed is based upon the variance in currency exchange. If we look at Australian dollars, which is what you report in, Woolworths New Zealand sales actually fell 6.4% in Australian dollars.
This is just a continuation of what's been happening. Woolworths New Zealand generated an EBIT of NZD 309 million in 2017, but only NZD 163 million in 2026. Over this period, you've had the benefit of Australian purchasing power, logistics expertise, technology. You've had so many advantages, but they haven't been able to be translated into stronger profitability.
As the CEO said, you've been taking steps, at least in the last six months you've started to. I can understand it hasn't come in yet, but what specific changes are being implemented, and by what financial year will a turnaround be seen?
Thank you for the question. We are very much up for the challenge in terms of the performance of our New Zealand business. It was pleasing last year to see broad-based improvement in the business. It is currently encountering, I think, quite difficult trading conditions with record low levels of consumer confidence in New Zealand.
There is also an election coming up. But rest assured, it is getting a lot of focus from the board, and we remain confident that over the medium term, there is a strong place for Woolworths in the New Zealand market, given the competitive environment over there, and given, really to your point, Alan, what Woolworths can offer New Zealand customers. We lead the market in e-commerce in New Zealand. We have strong scale economies that we think we will be able to realize in the New Zealand marketplace.
At the same time, we realize that it is a distinct market that needs its own strong customer face and customer value proposition, and we have been rebuilding the team and strengthening the capabilities in order to turn around performance over the medium term. I will pick up one point on constant currency.
There is no question that the best way to measure this business, in terms of comparing performance quarter on quarter, is on a constant currency basis. Over the long term, depreciating currency will affect the value of that New Zealand business, so it is right over the long term. Otherwise, you will compare apples for apples unless you do constant currency. Thank you for the question.
What you are saying and what the CEO said before is very encouraging. We are not talking about a new problem. We are talking about something that has been there for a decade. It has been the same situation. What I am wondering is what specifically is being done?
Look, I think I have referred to a number of things that are being specifically done, and if you just, again, settle ourselves on the facts here. Over the last decade, there have been periods of quite reasonable profitability from the New Zealand business, so it has not been the case for the entire decade. But absolutely, we are up for that challenge.
It is receiving a lot of management attention, not only in terms of price proposition, our range, our cost structure, and really playing to Woolies' traditional strengths, which we think will resonate with New Zealand customers, and hence our confidence of medium-term performance improvement.
Okay, thank you. Going to your second priority and the second one of your priority two, BIG W. It returned to a positive EBIT, which is really encouraging. However, the improvement seems to have depended partially on reducing clearance sales and operating costs, as well as increasing marketplace sales.
The first quarter, and I accept it's only a first quarter, saw a small fall in sales, especially those generated in store. What I'm wondering is can you quantify how much of the EBIT improvement came from sustainable sales growth and gross margin improvement as opposed to the cost reductions? Also, what is the outlook for BIG W over the next year? Is there going to be positive EBIT ongoing?
Yep. So again, you've quite rightly focused on the two areas of the portfolio that aren't performing up to scratch. We were pleased last year to see the rebound of profitability in BIG W. That reflected many years of hard work in terms of refining the customer offer, dramatically improving price competitiveness, starting a period of experimentation with investment and renewals, which I'm pleased to say have been trading very well, lowering the cost structures, especially in central services, setting up a separate IT function for the business.
Again, I think the underpinnings in terms of price and product, but also team. The team under Dan Hake, I know is with us here today, is a new team, and we feel very good about the capabilities in that BIG W team that have been assembled over the last couple of years.
That takes nothing away from the fact that the discount department store industry is a challenging one, and we face high degrees of competition. So we need to be laser sharp in terms of our delivery for value and our value proposition to customers. That has been consistently improving. All the underlying customer metrics in BIG W have shown a consistent period of improvement.
We need to see that translated into sales and profitability. Growth and profitability will come from both. It'll come from improving items in store and bricks and mortar sales, but we do see a considerable online opportunity. As you've seen over time, that's been growing quite strongly. Now with DoorDash, we have, I think, a much more competitive on-demand and same-day, next-day offer through DoorDash that we haven't had in the past, which I think has been a break on BIG W e-com sales.
So-
I am going to have to call time on you here, Alan. We've got a long line of shareholders behind you.
Yeah
So thank you.
It is just on the same thing with BIG W. 10 years ago, when I asked the same question of the previous Chair,
Yep
he went and said, "What we are trying to do is get BIG W into a stage that it looks right for a sale." Obviously, this is a challenging part of the market. Is that an option?
Look, across all of our portfolio of businesses, we always ask ourselves these questions. Are we the highest and natural best owner for those businesses? Are they performing to their full potential? So, the answer that the Chairman gave 10 years ago was 10 years ago. That is my answer today.
Okay.
Thank you, Alan.
Thank you very much.
Pleasure. Nice to see you.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Denise Zotowski.
Good morning, Chair.
Good morning.
I am Denise from the Australian Conservation Foundation. Earlier this year, Woolworths quietly amended an annexure in its no deforestation policy, narrowing its commitment to deforestation-free beef from all Woolies' own brand beef to only the beef it directly sources. As I understand it, that means that many of the beef products sold under the Woolworths brand no longer fall under your commitment to be deforestation free.
My question has two parts. I will ask the first question. First, deforestation has the same environmental consequences regardless of whether beef is sourced directly or indirectly. Given the environmental impacts and growing consumer interest in sustainable products, does the board accept that addressing deforestation risk across all Woolworths' own brand beef is just as important as addressing those associated with direct source beef? If so, why has the commitment been narrowed? I will ask the second question after.
Is the second question related to the first? Because I might give a comprehensive answer.
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah.
What proportion of the own brand beef sold in Woolworths stores is covered by your deforestation free commitment?
Right. Thank you for the question. This is a very important matter for Woolworths. We absolutely are behind efforts to minimize and eliminate deforestation, and you are right. When last year we chose to have our emissions reductions pathways certified by the gold standard of SBTi, that required us to report our emissions, not only in terms of Scope 1 and Scope 2 and Scope 3 under the prevailing methodology, but it required us to actually report our Scope 3 emissions. Remember, Scope 3 are not our emissions.
They are emissions of our suppliers or in our wider supply chain. It required us to report them under what is known as a FLAG and a non-FLAG basis. The FLAG reporting requires those emissions to be reported separately, and we have a series of targets.
As part of getting SBTi approval of our emissions reductions pathways, we were required to commit to a no deforestation policy, and we agreed and we are happy to do that. What have we done about it? Deforestation risks are present in five key commodity groups. They are partly under more of our direct control, like fresh beef, but they also exist in cocoa and soy for the supply of animal feed, timber in our supply chain, palm oil, and as I said, fresh beef.
When it comes to fresh beef, we have been working for the last couple of years with the industry, who have also embraced the challenge of no deforestation. There is no disagreement that from what we understand from the Australian beef industry, that deforestation needs to be eradicated. What have we done about it?
Well, the first thing is we have ensured that across all of our customer contracts, not just direct source beef, we have a no deforestation term in our supply arrangements. The second thing, where it is under more direct control of ours, and the most obvious one of that is fresh beef because of our own brand procurement of beef. We have also undertaken our own aerial surveillance, and to the best of our knowledge and understanding, we have not identified in our direct supply chain with farmers who supply Woolworths with fresh beef any instances of deforestation.
The final thing that's happened this year, and it's very relevant to the answer to your question, is that there is now federal regulation and new federal legislation that prohibits deforestation. So it's not just Woolies and all of our efforts in terms of working with the industry, aerial measurement, working with our suppliers.
We now have a law, and that law has been enforced with certain stoppages and interventions into agricultural practice to ensure that there's no deforestation. The final bit of your question was, yes, the vast majority of our beef is sourced directly. We will continue to work with all other suppliers, as I mentioned, to ensure that there's no deforestation, and I think we've made some real progress in this regard.
Thank you, Chair. Respectfully, I don't think that answers my questions at all. Will the board and Woolworths commit to publishing the percentage of Woolies' own source brand beef for shareholders and customers to understand what forms part of the commitment and what doesn't?
Well, with respect, I think the question raised is Woolies taking deforestation seriously. The proof point you're looking for sits under that broader umbrella, and I think my answer more than adequately outlines the measures we are taking to take it seriously. In respect of the specific reporting, I'll take that away and speak to our sustainability people and with Amanda, and we'll consider that request.
Okay. In terms of the first question, if Woolworths is still committed to eliminating deforestation, why was the scope of the commitment amended?
I am not actually sure of the answer to that question. I will take that on advice. I am happy to connect you with Simon Lowden here, who is our Chief Sustainability Officer, and he might be able to explain the detail of that. I am not aware that there was a change.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Emily Dixon.
Just want to make sure there's nobody on this side of the room. Thank you. We'll go to this side of the room first, if that's okay. Thank you.
Chair, we have a question from shareholder David Ritter.
Thank you for your patience, shareholder.
Well, I need to fess up first. I am here as a proxy for shareholder Daniel East. My day job is that I am the Chief Executive Officer of Greenpeace Australia Pacific. I want to start by noticing that this decade, Woolworths did the extraordinary thing of committing to sourcing all your electricity from renewables. It was a fantastic moment when Woolworths did that. It was a genuine moment of corporate leadership and one that I will not forget.
Also want to congratulate you on what is a nice, civil, open AGM. I think that is commendable corporate practice, and commend you on that. I do want to build on the excellent questions asked by my colleague from ACF, because Greenpeace has around 1 million supporters across all platforms in Australia. Many of our supporters no doubt buy their groceries from Woolworths.
I can tell you for a fact that your customers care a very great deal about Australian wildlife and Australian forests. With all sympathy and respect, I am not sure that the previous answers got to the core of the risk that confronts your board here. You do not know where the beef on your shelves comes from. You do not know where the beef on your shelves comes from.
The consequence of that is that you do not know whether you have got beef from deforestation on your shelves. The consequence of that is you do not know whether the beef on your shelves comes from illegal deforestation, and you do not know whether the beef on your shelves comes with a whole unseen bag of magnificent but now wiped out Australian wildlife. I know you want to be the leading fresh food people in the country.
It is a laudable ambition, but you cannot do that when you have got this shadow hanging over you, and it is a shadow of risk. It is a shadow of risk. I have got a sweet tooth, and I may have, over the years, had the odd bag of Woolworths' own brand fudge, and it is not bad. But an own brand fudge that is not knowing where your beef comes from, that you can take it back to source, that is an own brand Woolworths fudge that will leave an extremely sour taste in every one of your consumers that deeply cares about Australian wildlife and forests. I do have a follow-up question.
Look, so in terms of the visibility of our supply chain, we have a great deal of visibility of our supply chain in respect to suppliers of fresh beef. There will be some volume that comes through third parties that we are continuing to work with our partners to get to the 100% of full visibility, and we acknowledge that there are different tiers of visibility, and we are working as we are across all of our supply chain to get into the second-tier suppliers who might be cleared through other aggregators.
But for the vast majority of the beef in our supply chain, we do have that visibility, but we are also up for your challenge as well. As I said at the start, we are not shying away from the importance of deforestation.
We won't be able to please everybody with our progress, but you have our commitment that we will do everything in our power to get to that position of full visibility through the fresh beef supply chain to enable those questions to be asked.
Taking you up on the offer of that full commitment. The level of executive engagement with this issue is not, frankly, what one would necessarily expect of an ecological issue of this scale that concerns something that is of such deep concern within the Australian community. I would also invite you to consider whether the engagement with the new system that you mention, the new environmental laws that are there to protect our forests
Yes
and that do create new risks for non-compliant landholders, whether that is at the level that your board can be confident that this scale of risk to reputation and so on is being appropriately addressed.
I think it's a very fair question. To date, as you can tell, we've spent a lot of time on this issue, and if you look at our reporting, it's very transparent on this issue. We will continue to challenge ourselves to that test.
We look forward to joining you in that challenge.
Thank you. I also acknowledge and thank you for the acknowledgement of our progress in other areas at the start of your comments, proxy holder. Thank you.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Emily Dixon.
Good morning, Chair.
Morning.
My name's Emily Dixon, and I'm from the Wilderness Society. I too would like to build on my colleagues' questions from ACF and Greenpeace, to note that, in 2024, of course, there was that deforestation commitment, and this year when we saw in the Woolworths report, it was acknowledged that that commitment in relation to deforestation wasn't met. My specific question on this issue is what practical steps will Woolworths take in the next 6 months toward lifetime beef traceability?
I think I've substantially answered this question, but just out of courtesy, I'll just repeat what I've mentioned before. We acknowledge we require no deforestation from all of our suppliers. That's a term of trading that we have with all of our suppliers, and we intend to enforce that.
And we spend time and energy and resources on technologies to surveil our suppliers in order to make an independent judgment as to whether there's no deforestation. To date, we've not identified any deforestation. We will continue to do that. That's the first aspect of the answer to your question.
The second answer to your question is that we will work with the agencies as they enforce the no deforestation regulations to identify any risk areas in our supply chain that would warrant additional investment of time and resources in order for us to meet the commitment that I've outlined this AGM.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Given that it is only last place of origin, will Woolworths commit to publishing a time-bound commitment to ensure lifetime traceability over the course of a cattle's life, given that the deforestation happens before the last point of origin?
We will take that suggestion on notice and discuss it with our team.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question.
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Tara Jones.
Thank you.
Good morning. I am Tara Jones, plastics and packaging Program Manager at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, Australia's leading national charity dedicated solely to protecting our precious ocean wildlife. Excessive plastic packaging poses reputational and material risks to Australian companies. This year, in a welcomed move, Woolworths has signaled its commitment to transparency and mitigating some of that risk by publishing for the first time its plastic intensity score, the amount of plastic used per item sold, in its annual data pack.
Woolworths has demonstrated leadership in this area and is the only major Australian supermarket who published this information this year. My questions are, will Woolworths commit to publishing this information annually in order to publicly demonstrate progress on plastic packaging reductions to customers and shareholders? How does Woolworths plan on reducing its contribution to plastic pollution in the 2026/2027 financial year?
Thank you, shareholder, for the question. I have a message to all of our shareholders here present and online. In this area of soft plastic recycling, eliminating the plastic garbage we see, the plastic that leaks into our waterways, the plastic that leaks into marine environments, and potentially into our food chain, Woolworths is taking a leadership position.
Not just by a little bit. Woolworths is the clear market leader in addressing this problem. What are the proof points of that? The proof points of that is, in addition to stepping in to rescue the failed industry participant who was processing soft plastics, we now have stood up a soft plastic collection network in over 700 of our stores.
Which means you can take everything, all those problematic soft bits of plastic that you are not sure whether they go into the garbage or they go into recycling, you take them to your local Woolies, we will take them off your hands. I believe the next largest retail supermarket chain has 5 stores doing that. 700 stores. That is costing real money, and we are doing it because it is important. We are doing it because it is what our shareholders and our customers want us to do.
In addition to that, we have made a series of commitments consistent with the APCO, Australian Packaging, the overarching body, in respect of recycled plastic content in our own plastic packaging, we set that at 30%, and we are already at 31%. We set a target in respect of plastic packaging in our own brand that was either recyclable, reusable, or compostable. We are now at 94%.
The industry average is in the 80s. We lead. We set a target to eliminate problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging. In our own brand products, we have eliminated 97% of it. The industry is about in the 40s. We set a target of having a minimum of 50% recycled plastic in all of our packaging, plastic and paper. We have exceeded that target, well ahead of the industry.
So this is an area, and we will end up talking a lot about sustainability today, but these are the proof points for where Woolworths has conviction that it is the right thing to do, that we will lean into it and we will lead the industry. We will do what is right for customers, and ultimately that will be good for business. In respect of your question, yes, we will continue to publish our plastic intensity score.
Thank you, Chair.
Get out there and tell it to all of your friends, "If plastics matter to you, shop at Woolies." Next question.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Sasha Hawkins.
Thank you.
Good morning, Chair.
Good morning.
My question concerns the certification that Woolworths relies on for its no deforestation commitment on timber.
Yes.
We welcome the disclosure in your 2026 nature report that you continue to monitor your pallet suppliers' commitment to transition away from native forest timber sources by 2028.
Yep.
However, 10% of that supply is still in native forest today. Your policy accepts Responsible Wood, the PEFC-endorsed scheme, and your nature report says that Responsible Wood has strengthened its standard to mitigate deforestation risk. Yet Responsible Wood continues to certify Forestry Corporation of New South Wales, which has more than a dozen convictions of unlawful logging. Your own policy identifies illegal logging as the key risk to manage.
Relying on the Responsible Wood scheme exposes Woolworths to the risk of greenwashing as well as reputational risk. My question is, will the board stop accepting Responsible Wood or PEFC-certified timber? What evidence supports your claim that Responsible Wood has strengthened its standard?
Thank you for your question. The short answer is no, we won't stop accepting global benchmarks of PEFC and FSC in terms of the sustainability of our timber packaging. You're absolutely right. We are placing some reliance on Responsible Wood to get us to over that final 10%. We're at 90. All of the information we see is that the 2028 benchmark time we've set ourselves for that 10% to be eliminated will be eliminated, and we will work closely with the governing body, the peak body, Responsible Wood, to ensure that is achieved. Thank you for your question. Next question, please.
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Roger Johns.
Thank you.
Chairman, I've noticed in the media that Woolworths has built a massive new distribution center in Sydney, and I was quite impressed when I noticed that. Have you got rail access to your terminal? I was just wondering on that question, because that's a sustainability issue, is how the other DCs. Have you got a program of linking them into the railway network? Because it's going to reduce a lot of emissions.
Absolutely. Thank you for your question, shareholder, and I encourage you to connect with Alan Beacham, who is here, who heads our supply chain, to get all the details on that. You are absolutely right. It is a multimodal billion-dollar investment. We are very, very pleased with the way it is performing. It has got a fantastic location that can address both. Physically, it is interlinked into both our road and rail networks. It has got state-of-the-art automation. We think it will ultimately reduce, improve our efficiency, enable us to pass that benefit onto customers. Next question.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Robert Catterson.
Robert.
Yes, I have not been here for a couple of years, but one of the last questions was on plastics, and plastics are one of my banes, too. I do not see any vast reductions or any reductions from the last time I was here to now in the packaging of plastics in the first place on the shelves at Woolworths supermarkets or in, say, BIG W. When you look at a vast range of items, I see the same sort of plastic. Here I am using that new system, but that has been the only improvement, and I congratulate Woolworths in doing that in the recycling. In the first place, we have to reduce. The second part of my question goes to pricing.
I do not know what the status is of the ACCC matters, but I still see a lot of price collusion between or wherever. The way that I see it in Coles and Woolworths, I can go to the same shelves of your major suppliers like Kellogg's or Bega Cheese or McCain and see the same prices at both supermarkets. It tells me that, obviously, your buyer and the Coles buyer gets together and works out what prices everyone is going to pay for the same product, in that matter.
Also, recently I noticed I was going to buy a Woolworths gift card under the New South Wales Seniors Card, and you have reduced that from 5% down to 3%. In a cost of living situation, I think I would like an explanation of that as well.
Let me unpack that question. Can I first address the comment you made about any communication between category managers, between Woolworths and Coles? That does not happen.
Doesn't happen?
Does not happen.
Okay, well-
If it did happen-
Are you dictated by these-
Let me finish to answer the question. If it did happen, there would be very serious consequences for those people concerned. That, frankly, is an irresponsible comment to make. It is absolutely not the case. The second point is, I am more than happy to invite you to connect with Simon Lowden, our Chief Sustainability Officer, on the matter of the gift card. I am not fully aware of why the discount might have changed.
Yeah, well, last month I bought it at 5%, now it is down to 3%, so-
I'll invite you to connect with him.
I've had it reduced as well.
I will also answer your plastics question. Like you, when I walk into a supermarket, I see a lot of plastic. We're always asking ourselves, and I know Amanda Bardwell and the team are absolutely assiduous in this, where can we reduce plastic? In those situations where there is really no viable alternative, and often for health and food safety matters, we actually are required to pack goods.
Often to preserve quality, we are required to do that, and avoid a kind of a shambolic spillover of goods in transit, we are required to and need to use various different packaging forms. I can emphatically guarantee you there has been a reduction in absolute tonnage of plastic used in our system. I mentioned to start with, there are categories of plastics that are categorized as unnecessary or problematic. We have reduced those out of our supermarket by 97%.
It may not be evident to you, shareholder, and sometimes it isn't evident to me as well, but I can assure you that the underlying progress on plastic has been material. Thank you for your question. Next question, please.
Thank you.
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Adam Coffey.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chair. I just have a very brief statement of support from the Australian cattle industry. My name is Adam Coffey, and I am attending as a shareholder and Director and Deputy Chair of Cattle Australia. We are the peak industry body for all of Australia's beef cattle producers. We have worked closely with Woolworths for several years now on the implementation of its no deforestation policy, with the company achieving its target of implementation in December 2025.
I would like to acknowledge Woolworths and their constructive engagement in working together on this issue, and in considering more than 50,000 beef producers who actively manage over half the continent to feed millions of Australians every year. Australian beef producers operate in one of the most highly regulated environments in the world regarding biodiversity protection and vegetation management, operating under at least 136 different state, territory, and federal vegetation management laws.
Cattle Australia categorically does not support deforestation, but what we do support is the ongoing right of landholders to undergo routine agricultural activities in accordance with state and federal regulations. This ensures the ongoing prosperity of our country and the agricultural sector, and it allows us to maintain and grow our ability to be a world-leading supplier of sustainable beef.
Australia actually has the seventh-largest forest area of any country on Earth. Over the decade from 2010 to 2020, the Food and Agriculture Organization recorded that we have the second-highest rate of reforestation of any country in the world, an increase of 4.4 million hectares of forest area. These are not marginal statistics. They describe a continent-scale trend of expansion, not loss.
Cattle Australia remains highly concerned that activist organizations continue to make not only misleading, but categorically false and damaging allegations against our beef cattle producers, and we fully support Woolworths for their mature, science-based approach in engaging with industry to continue to find and manage any areas of concern.
Australian consumers ought to be highly alarmed at the ongoing ideological attacks aimed at our industry and its supply chain partners such as Woolworths. I want to be very clear that remnant vegetation in Australia is protected, and ongoing vegetation management is just that: routine agricultural activities to maintain the productive capacity of our land. These activities are not specific to the beef sector and are an integral part of agricultural land management as a whole.
These activist attacks undermine our reputation as some of the best beef producers and land managers in the world, and they are unfairly damaging Australia's ability to maintain its position as a supplier of quality product that millions of people depend on domestically and abroad. This risks raising the cost of food in Australia, and it also directly negatively impacts our food resilience.
This is something that every consumer in Australia should take very seriously. Personally, as a beef cattle producer within the Great Barrier Reef catchment in Queensland, I can assure you that the ongoing ecological health of our land is tied directly and profoundly to the ongoing economic viability of our business.
Queensland beef producers care deeply about their land and their waterways, which flow into the reef, and this is reflected in the fact that the reef's raw coral cover is the highest it has been of any of the preceding 35 years, according to the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Finally, I thank you for your time, and I congratulate Woolworths on the proactive steps in positively engaging and working with Australia's cattle industry. Thank you.
Thank you, shareholder. Appreciate that. Next question
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Jess Coughlan.
Hello. I am from Environment Tasmania and part of the coalition that forms SIX Invest to Save the Skate. It is good to hear that you have been down to Tasmania and you have met with the scientists. I have also met with them. I am sure that the information and advice they have given to you is just as alarming as the advice they have given to me.
The Maugean skate's numbers have overall declined. The population is heading towards a cliff, with the average age of those animals still surviving around eight years old. The animal itself only lives to be 10 years old, roughly. Among the one juvenile cohort that has successfully been recruited within the last decade, only one female has been located. The animal population is also moving into an area of the harbor which is dangerously low in oxygen. The situation has not resolved. It has not gone away.
It is getting worse. I also want to note the oxygenation program in which tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent to pump oxygen in to keep the salmon alive. Those plumes of oxygen remain targeted around the salmon farms themselves. I want to posit to you to consider if taxpayers' money was not being spent on that and instead that cost was being put onto Woolworths, would that cost be enough for you to make the decision to transition out of Macquarie Harbour in line with your fiscal policy?
Your sustainable policy does not seem to be doing the job. Woolworths has demonstrated that it can make a very rapid decision to change its Tasmanian sourcing when rising freight and production costs make supply chain commercially unsustainable.
From 2027, Woolworths will stop sourcing Tasmanian beef, citing the costs. You've demonstrated that you can make such a decision, including working with the Tasmanian beef farmers to transition out of that supply chain sustainably for them. Yet somehow when you're faced with an extinction crisis, which arguably is the existential crisis question of our generation, you have turned a blind eye. The endangered Maugean skate, as you know, is 66 million years old.
It's been around since the dinosaurs. It only exists in one place on Earth, and that place is Macquarie Harbour. It's not going to survive salmon farming. Yet Woolworths continues to source salmon from Macquarie Harbour with no plan to transition. The EPA, the Tasmanian environmental regulator, has still not yet renewed those salmon farming licenses in the harbor that expired in November last year.
That is how much they cannot support a decision to renew. You've demonstrated the ability to take sunscreen off the shelves when faced with scientifically evidenced flaw in the labeling of these products, which could be misleading claims that could leave your company and shareholders vulnerable to the causation of harm. Yet where is this diligence when faced with the imminent threat of wiping a species off the Earth?
I note that you have taken the responsibly sourced labeling off the product. However, you've replaced it with a label that says independently certified and verified. I want to point out that those independent certification and verification labels have been consistently labeling Macquarie Harbour salmon for the entire period between 2014 and 2022, when the latest updated scientific data shows that the population decline on the skate was by 77% due to the damage to the harbor in that time.
They're flawed. If they were doing their job, that would not have happened. I ask you, how on Earth could this be considered certified under any credible environmental standard? The labels that you currently use are rubbish.
Three years now you've had an opportunity to support workers in partnership with government to transition out of the harbor, which truly could not only have lifted the risk of reputational damage to Woolworths and its shareholders, but moreover, you could have saved an animal from extinction. This is not a zero-sum game. Your financial gain from selling this product is far, far outweighed by the loss of an animal forever.
Thank you for the question, shareholder.
Sorry, my question, my question is exactly what price do you put on that. I'm sure that over the last three years, the maths has been done and you've figured out how much it would cost to move your sourcing away from Macquarie Harbour, yet you have defined this cost under your policy as being too great. I'm asking you how much that cost is.
Thank you for the question. You've asked, it's a very broad question that touches on a number of matters as they relate to Tasmanian salmon. I think it warrants a comprehensive answer. You will see in our formal disclosures this year in the nature-based report that we have outlined very clearly what we believe are the legitimate questions and risks that climate change is posing to Macquarie Harbour.
We also describe the way in which we assess those risks in order to arrive at a, have regard for the best scientific advice and evidence, to work with the industry on risk mitigation, to understand where government policy is heading, and take a responsible position in respect of all of our sourcing, and in particular, as it relates to Macquarie Harbour. Yes, in that regard, I did spend time in Macquarie Harbour out on the water with suppliers.
I also spoke to a community leader about the impact that the industry has in terms of employment at Strahan and other places. I did meet with the two leading scientists at IMAS, one a specialist on the Maugean skate, the other a specialist on deoxygenation in the harbor. The advice they gave me, consistent with the published IMAS report, is not as you have characterized.
That's not true.
I will answer the question.
I can provide sources.
You have had your opportunity. Now it is my opportunity to put the Woolworths position. So at that meeting, I actually quizzed them on the conclusions of the IMAS report. And the IMAS report, whilst it has caveats and draws caution to the conclusion, it did report an improvement in the numbers of the Maugean skate.
There is also no question that oxygenation, which is one of the critical issues facing the Maugean skate, has improved since the industry, on scientific advice, substituted and replaced all oxygen that the industry actually uses through salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour, which just to put some context around it, is six times the size of Sydney Harbour, and salmon farming occupies about 1% of that space.
Nonetheless, I completely acknowledge that we are in a period where there remain issues and risks in respect of the Maugean skate and in respect of the recovery of that population. However, what you fail to address is what the industry and what science is doing about it.
And having met firsthand not only the peak industry body, not only the scientists, not only the expert scientific advisors who advise Woolworths, not only the Deputy Premier and the Minister responsible for fishing, it is clear that progress is being made on the risk mitigation across Tasmanian salmon farming for stock, but in particular in Macquarie Harbour.
There are changes and there are improvements being made in selective breeding for temperature resistance, selective breeding for antibiotic resistance. There are changes being made in terms of biomass practice in the harbor to minimize biomass during peak periods.
We look at all of this evidence about the sustainability of fishing, of salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour. We are also mindful of the role that certification can play. We require all of our seafood to be independently certified as to best practice. In Macquarie Harbour, we have asked all of our suppliers to work towards the highest level of certification available, which is ASC.
ASC has a new policy out for review at the moment, and both of our suppliers have indicated that they will work to attain that certification. Now, certification may not be enough for you, but it certainly is enough for the World Wildlife Fund. The World Wildlife Fund supports ASC certification.
ASC withdrew their certification of Macquarie Harbour and WWF called them out for it.
ASC is in the process of issuing a new standard. That new standard currently has been under review. Our major supplier has already conducted a draft audit against that new standard, so whilst it has not been finalized or published yet, we are quite appraised of what that standard is about.
Then we ask ourselves where government is, and it is very clear that in addition to balanced, best scientific advice and the scientific evidence that suggests that the Maugean skate population and oxygenation is improving in Macquarie Harbour, given the support that is clear that both federal and state government have for this fishery, we are not about to abandon Tasmanian salmon farming.
We will, however, continue to assess the scientific evidence, and if that scientific evidence changes, and of course, all of these things will be considered by the overall review of the industry that the Tasmanian Government is undertaking that is due for publication we think the middle of next year, we may well adjust our stance. But today, based on the science, based on our engagement, based on risk mitigation, based on certification, based on public policy, we believe we are adopting an entirely reasonable and prudent approach. Thank you for your question. Next question.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Jasmine Label Idrisi.
Good morning, Chair. My name is Jasmine, and I am here representing Neighbours of Fish Farming, a community-based organization founded in Tasmania. Jess Coughlan has just outlined the stakes in Macquarie Harbour, the last home of endangered Maugean skate. But the impacts of industrial salmon farming do not stop at the harbor mouth. These farms are in Tasmania's public waterways, in the place where our communities live, swim, and fish.
Today, I want shareholders to picture this. Since Woolworths' last AGM, more than 16,900 tons of dead farm fish have been reported to Tasmania's EPA. That is 20% of the total farmed salmon yearly production. Now, imagine a cattle supplier with animals dying on that scale. Out of 100 cows, 20 would be belly up, rotting away. In that case, would Woolworths simply point to a certificate and carry on buying?
The farmed fish are only part of the picture. Government wildlife records show 18 marine mammals. These are our seals, the dolphins, that have died in interactions with salmon farms over the last 2 financial years. In the first 6 months of this year alone, salmon companies reported using almost 1,800 underwater explosives to deter seals. In 2025, the Tasmanian salmon industry used 3,948 kilograms of antibiotics, around 22 times more than in 2024, all to treat the consequences of having cold water fish in our continuously warming waters.
These are industry-wide figures. They paint you a picture of what is happening in waters that belong to every single Tasmanian. Woolworths' own 2026 nature report acknowledges the risks: warming waters, disease outbreaks, and impacts on threatened species. It acknowledges that industrial salmon farming is a threat to the endangered Maugean skate. You know about these risks.
Your shareholders should now know about them as well, and the communities living alongside these farms see the consequences in their own waterways every single day. The question is this, what is Woolworths' own threshold for environmental and animal welfare harm, and why do you accept a 20% death rate, a number that is likely to increase as waters warm?
Thank you for your question. I actually think I've pretty much addressed Woolworths' position on salmon farming, but I'll just restate the key principles in response to your question. We take all of these matters and reported issues of mortality very seriously.
We take the antibiotic issue very seriously, and we're aware that florfenicol is yet to be recertified and may not be recertified for use in Macquarie Harbour. It's currently under review at the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicine Authority. All of these matters, I think, ladder up to the same questions.
Is the scientific advice, is the risk mitigation, the public policy, does it warrant Woolworths abandoning the industry? It does not in our view, but we continue to take an evidence-based approach and will continue to review the data and the evidence around the very things you point to in our deliberations. Thank you for your question. Next question, please.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Danielle Wood.
Good morning, Mr. Chairman.
Morning.
I addressed the AGM last year regarding the ongoing issues experienced by my neighbors and myself as residents of a mixed-use development in Matraville, with Woolworths store operating directly beneath our homes. At that time, you asked Ralph Kemmler to discuss my concerns, and I appreciated that gesture. Although we have had some improvements, unfortunately, we are still experiencing issues.
Many residents continue to experience significant disruptions to their daily lives, particularly from operational impacts, that affect their ability to rest and enjoy their homes. It is disappointing that complaints are often dismissed or ignored despite residents providing detailed information, firsthand accounts of these ongoing issues. Matters that could be resolved through genuine dialogue instead have resulted in legal correspondence, creating unnecessary stress and expense for everyone involved.
Our community of 111 apartments is made up of hardworking Australians, including essential workers, shift workers, young families, and elderly residents who have downsized in the hope of enjoying a quieter lifestyle. These are ordinary people simply seeking the basic right to affordable living with peace, comfort, and uninterrupted sleep in their homes.
We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for understanding, transparency, respect, and a consistent willingness to acknowledge and address the impact that Woolworths' operations have on the people who live above the store. We have recently been advised proposed structural changes to our property submitted under the guise of a refurbishment to the store with the addition of a Direct to Boot service will be installed in the underground car park.
This will have further negative impact to the residents with regards to traffic congestion and questions over structural integrity over our property. Once again, there was no consultation as to how the refurbishment can limit the negative impacts to the residents over your last two years of planning. As Woolworths Group is a company that proudly promotes its commitment to caring for all Australians, we would like those values extended not to only customers, but also to the communities that live alongside your businesses every day and contribute to the profits.
Shares have certainly gone up, but at what cost has this been to our residents? After many years, almost six of complaining, we are getting increasingly frustrated and disheartened. Once again, I request Woolworths Group management to work with the owners' corporation constructively and demonstrate the care, responsibility, and community-minded approach that its public values represent. I am more than happy to provide examples of some of our issues should you like.
Look, thank you for the question, proxy holder or shareholder. I forget which one. Shareholder. Thank you for the question. I am very sorry that you have been experiencing these disruptions and to the extent that they have involved our store, I apologize on behalf of the company. I am going to do two things. The first is to repeat the offer, but I will do something else as well.
Repeat the offer, and I know Ralph Kemmler is here, I have seen him earlier on, for you to connect with Ralph. But I will also ask for Ralph to send the board a summary just of these issues just so we are better informed, as I know we have a very, very significant, and for the most part, highly constructive engagement with our communities when we bring the amenity of a new store into a community. It tends to be something that the community celebrates. In this case, it clearly has not worked for you, and, again, I will get to the bottom of it. But meanwhile, Ralph will be available to talk to you today.
Okay. Well, it is the building model of Sydney moving forward with
Thank you.
mixed-use development.
Thank you.
There are issues there that need to be addressed. Thank you for your time.
Thank you. Next question.
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Roger Johns.
On the fishing matter, I am not going to break over it, Chair, have we got, with risk and all that, obviously we would have other supplying avenues along, I was just wondering if that is the case. Can you just give some kind of brief explanation?
Thank you for the question, shareholder. Yes, we do resource fresh Tasmanian salmon from a number of different locations. Macquarie Harbour plays an important role in that. As I mentioned and as I think is outlined in our nature-based report, we also consider actively alternative sourcing arrangements and alternative sourcing locations should the scientific evidence and the progress on risk indicate that changes need to be made to Macquarie Harbour.
For that reason, we have been exploring and staying close to the activities of the Blue Economy CRC, and that has trials currently underway for the In fact, I think they've finished some of their first trials for salmon farming in Commonwealth waters in a different ecosystem for that to Macquarie Harbour. Next question.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Meredith Clark.
Thank you.
Hello. I'm a former farmer's daughter from South Australia and a longtime shareholder of Woolworths. My children all worked at Woolworths, and I whilst they were at university when Roger Corbett was in charge. I've got two questions. They're short. The Woolworths catalog of specials on sale from Wednesday, September 3rd to the 26th, and here it is, featured new Barossa Fine Foods ham at AUD 29 a K, save AUD 8. When I inquired at the counter, I was told that it contained less than 10% Australian content.
The staff, including the manager at St. Ives, were as shocked as I was. In the 1970s, I lived in Blayney, New South Wales, where there was an abattoir. The meat buyers all told me to buy Woolworths meat, as Woolworths always bought the best meat.
Sadly, my farming relatives across Australia, from Armidale, New South Wales to Esperance, Western Australia, say this was right, but not anymore. Why is this so? Surely it is economically better to use its Australian products and not import inferior products from overseas.
My second question is, if any fines are issued by the regulators for transgressions, surely the person responsible for the wrongdoing should have to pay a percentage of their salary towards the fine and not leave it all to the shareholders to foot the bill. After all, their salaries are not commensurate with PMs. I would appreciate your response to these questions.
Thank you very much, shareholder, for drawing that to our attention. I find that very unusual, I have to say, because the vast majority, and if it's not 100%, it's in the very high 90s, of all of our animal protein, fresh food, and vegetables are Australian sourced. Let me follow up with you.
Okay.
Amanda will try and find you and we'll get the details of that product. There may well be some very niche products where the inputs don't exist in Australia. Certain very, very specialized meats. I'll follow up, but rest assured, nothing has changed. If anything, over the years, our commitment to local sourcing has deepened and those percentages have increased. We'll come back to you. Thank you for drawing it to our attention. Next question.
Chairman, I have a question from shareholder Martin Mansfield.
Welcome, shareholder. You are all right. Thanks.
Good morning. I presume it is still morning. Just before I get to my question, I just want to make a point that you said earlier in the meeting that you wanted people to be respectful. There has been a previous reference made to activist and ideological attacks.
I do not regard that to be respectful. I do not think I am indulging in an ideological and activist attack on anyone, but I just wanted to make that point. My question is just a follow-up to some of the previous ones, but my question itself is a specific one. As a Woolworths shareholder and a long-term Woolies customer, I was very pleased when I learned a couple of years ago that Woolworths had made a commitment to deforestation-free beef.
It seemed that my local supermarket, which in fact is not very far from here, just over at Baulkham Hills, it seemed that it was part of a company that was taking strong action not only to protect nature, but also to support Australian farmers who are looking after the forest on their land. I am an avid bird watcher and a grandfather of 3-year-old and 4-month-old girls.
I want them and all future generations to inherit a world rich in wildlife, not one where we have to explain why we failed to protect it. All is not as it seemed when I first heard about that Woolworths commitment, and this disturbs me. There is a gap between the commitment that Woolworths made to sell deforestation-free beef and what I and other customers actually experience when we walk into our local store.
The source of the beef we buy is not clear, so we cannot be confident that it comes from Australian farmers who are protecting nature and not engaging in deforestation. While I certainly take the point that the vast majority of farmers are not indulging in deforestation, there are unfortunately a small number who demonstrably are.
The situation is made more difficult for us by your recent policy change that not all Woolies own brand beef products will be covered by your commitment to deforestation-free beef. I take your point that it may not yet be possible to be certain that beef from some third-party suppliers is deforestation-free. How does the board think we will be able to work out which beef on the shelves is deforestation-free and which is not?
Chair, can I suggest that you could, for example, label the products you are certain are deforestation-free, you could label them as such, and label the others with words such as, "Warning, this beef may be linked to the bulldozing of Australian forest." Then there would be no confusion and consumers like myself can make an informed choice.
My question to the board is this: Are you concerned that Woolworths is giving customers a misleading impression that all the beef on its shelves is deforestation-free? Will you commit to clearly state on the beef on the shelves which is definitely deforestation-free and which may not be, so that customers like me can make informed choices rather than relying on a promise that may not apply to the product we are buying?
Thank you, shareholder. Can I also thank you for the professional and constructive way that you've challenged us on this. As I certainly hope you also appreciate, and we've talked about this a lot already, but it doesn't come across, we are 100% behind this deforestation commitment and have made real investment working with the industry, working with surveillance, working alongside the government that now requires it to have that enforced.
We've got a bit of the supply chain that we need to work harder on to make that commitment. I'm going to take away your suggestion and talk to our commercial people and sustainability people about whether there's something more we can do. I thank you very much for the suggestion.
Thank you.
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Wolfgang Schwarz.
Good morning, Chair and board. I have been a shareholder forever since Woolworths listed. I am living on the Central Coast, shopping in Erina Fair Shopping Center. To get away from beef and from salmon, I do not buy beef. I have not bought it for years. Salmon, I do not buy it either because I would rather buy wild-caught fish like mullet or something.
My question is regarding AI. You are rushing head over heels into AI, and we are warm-blooded creature as humans, and we want to interact with people. With this AI, what I wonder, are you in future going to just talk to machines? To some AI agent, lifeless, no feeling, no compassion, no empathy? How is it going to affect us, older people, who like to still communicate with people who are standing on two legs, who are walking and talking? How is that going to impact the older generation who are not into this technology?
It is a lovely question. A really good one, shareholder. The overarching concept we have for AI is that it augments what humans do. Right? Yes, there will be some task where frankly, you will be better talking to an AI agent because it will not make mistakes. It is available 24 hours a day. It can instantaneously understand all of your context.
It can, within a nanosecond, process all of your purchase history. It will know that you are a celiac, or it will know that you have these preferences, and it will do a better job. But for the most part, when our customers come into store, they want to touch and feel fresh produce. They enjoy the interactions with our teams.
Yes, what sits behind that, if fulfillment, pricing, the right amount of labor at the right time can be enhanced through AI, we will have a better experience, but one that still is very much grounded in the humanity of shopping. Thank you for your question.
Chairman, I have one more question.
Thank you.
Chairman, I have shareholder John Simone.
Thank you.
Good morning, board and shareholders. I wanted to say that I am grateful and congratulate you on what you have achieved. I am disappointed that you have had to be subjected to so much political activists. You can see they are organized because they jump the microphone first. They are all self-righteous, self-entitled narcissists, and whatever you do or commit to, they will never be happy.
On the issue of violence and aggression towards your staff, I have never personally witnessed that, although I have been subjected to it in the past myself, and I do not doubt that it happens. My issue is theft. I have seen people in the store steal food. I have seen people at the checkout walk out without paying. I have seen people eat food. I am not talking about the fruit that you provide for the children. I am talking about adults who will tear open a product and eat it as they walk around the aisles. I am just wondering what processes you have to track and address that issue.
Thank you for your question, shareholder. Just before I answer it, I do want to say the following, that Woolies is a very large company. We are present in virtually every community in Australia. Our business touches very many sustainability issues, and we try our hardest to get it right, and I think today you have heard from us in terms of, I think, the culture of the company and the preparedness to make difficult choices.
We will not get those always right, and maybe the evidence will change and will require us to change our position on some of these things. I personally respect the right of, quote-unquote, "activists" to express their opinions at this AGM and for us to, in the most professional way possible, address them. Occasionally, it will be highly frustrating, and occasionally it will be manifestly not fact-based, but occasionally we will learn something as well.
That is the spirit upon which we engage, and I think as an organization, we are better off for it. While I appreciate your vote of support, I do think it is important we try and strike that balance at an AGM. The point you have raised on theft is extraordinarily important. It is not only associated with acts of violence and aggression because often the two go together.
People shoplifting and taking our goods and then confronted by a team member, and then these things can sort of transpire and get out of control. Stock loss is a major opportunity for us to use technology. We invested the best part of AUD 60 million in various forms of not only technology to protect our staff, but technology to actually try and stop shoplifting at its core, and we continue to invest in technology to do that. At this point, I might ask Amanda, if you would like to actually sort of just expand on that for a little bit. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you, Scott. Yes, absolutely agree that it is an ongoing challenge for us, for our team members, and for our customers shopping in store who might witness exactly what you have just described. We have made a number of key changes over the last 12 and 18 months.
Including things like putting additional exit gates in our self-checkout areas that are enabled by security to ensure that people have paid for their goods as they walk out. We have also continued to look at ways in which we improve the entry and the exit of our stores to make sure that if people have been browsing the aisles and picking up items, that they are paying for them.
Because unfortunately, it is a growing issue for us, and we continue to look for ways constantly around how we can improve the security, both for our team, but also protect the products that we want to sell to customers who are willing to pay. Thank you for your question.
You are welcome.
Thank you, shareholder.
Nobody's against protecting the staff. Nobody supports aggression. I do not mind the activists having a say. It is just it is a long narrative, and if they do not like Woolworths, do not buy the shares. Or they are organized, set up their own business to rival you. But that would require risk, sacrifice, and hard work, so it is never going to happen.
Thank you, shareholder. If there are no more questions in the room, we now move to questions online.
Chair, I have a question from shareholder Judy Jap. In your remuneration report, you have in your targets cost of doing business, percentage of sales, voice of customer, value for money, and voice of team, action taken on feedback. How come there is no voice for supplier? Also, for voice of team, does that also cover workers' safety and mean that if workers feel safe, your bonus will increase?
Thank you for the question. We most certainly do have supplier metrics that frequently come to the board for review and are intensely tracked and managed by and followed by our management team. Obviously, the support of our suppliers is the lifeblood of our business alongside our customers. For example, we participate in independent surveys that rate Woolworths against the entire retail universe in terms of a number of criteria that are important to our suppliers, and we continue to score very well on that basis.
That certainly is the case that we do have tracking of the voice of our supplier. The issue on safety is a very good question. 20% of our STI are safety metrics. Pleased to see the progress that we have made in safety in recent years.
This year, our TRIFR declined by 10% and that has come from an enormous effort from our safety teams throughout the organization to improve the underpinnings of our safety risk management framework, the tools that people have in store, how we work with injured people to come back to work. Very much, improved safety performance is tied to the STI plan. Thank you for the question.
Chair, I have a question from shareholder David Hewson. The question is, pay remediation. Note 2.2.2 to the financial statements reflects a charge for end-to-end payroll remediation costs of AUD 710 million plus AUD 20 million of interest, equaling AUD 730 million in total. In note 3.12, the second paragraph on page 151 says,
"During the period, an additional provision of AUD 753 million was recognized." Additionally, the increase in the salaried team member provision from AUD 61 million last year to AUD 829 million this year is AUD 768 million. Where did the additional AUD 38 million above the AUD 730 million in the P&L come from?
Thank you for your question, shareholder. The principal difference in the provisions reflect both the position as we have paid out to our workers, and also the recognition of the provision and the accrual of interest. All of those things add up to solve for the maths that you outlined. Needless to say, this matter is still before the courts. No final determinations have been made in respect of largely the interpretation matters that are there before the courts. Given the court decision, we felt it prudent to recognize that provision. Next question.
Chair, I have a question from shareholder Judy Jabb. In your sustainability report, I see that you have one page on flood management, page 66, and you mention reducing emissions, but have nothing on water management that I can see. Can you please tell me if Woolworths is and/or will be mentioning anything about water management in future annual reports? Currently, what is Woolworths doing now about water management?
Thank you for the question, shareholder. I think this is a good prompt for us as well. Certainly, it gets very actively managed in terms of water efficiency measures that are deployed in store, recycling. This may be an opportunity for us to report on that a little bit more openly. We'll take that on notice and we'll speak to Simon Lowden and the team about it. Thank you.
Chair, I have a question from shareholder Michael Danil. We're seeing some exciting developments in AI and robotics in European supermarkets, with various leading chains rolling out electronic shelf labels combined with computer vision to monitor stock levels and some deploying autonomous robots that patrol aisles and identify empty shelves. We're also seeing robots physically picking and packing groceries.
Woolworths has made significant investments in warehouse automation, but I'm curious about the next step inside supermarkets. What are Woolworths' plans for deploying visual AI and physical robotics more broadly, particularly for shelf monitoring, replenishment, and online order picking? How significant do you believe the opportunity is to improve labor productivity and reduce operating costs over the next three to five years?
Shareholder, it sounds like you should join our tech team. You're clearly right on top of this topic. If I sort of break this down into several buckets, in terms of large-scale warehouse automation, we're clearly well on the way to realizing the benefits of large-scale automation. We referred earlier on to the progress we've made in Moorebank and the technology deployed there.
That's not only safer, it's very heavy manual labor that we're replacing by automation, but it's also lower cost, it's more reliable, and enables us to reinvest back and to better value for our customers. The same technology may well be available to improve identification of out-of-stocks on shelves through the use of video and camera technology.
We have undertaken some trials with various technology providers in order for our customers not to arrive at the location of their favorite good and it not to be there. That technology, I think, has got quite an interesting use case. It is still in progress. We are an early adopter on robotics. Some of you might remember Greggles. Greggles was a nod to Rob McCartney.
Greggles was a robot that actually we trialed in our stores, I am going to say, Amanda, was it seven or eight years ago? To surveil for health and safety and potentially out of stocks as well. I think it was principally health and safety and slips and spills. That technology was very unreliable, got in the way. I think in-store robotics is a way off, but as you would expect us, we will continue to be vigilant on the opportunity to improve the experience for customers and make our stores safer for our teams as well.
Chair, I have a question from shareholder Judy Jap. In your annual report on page 145, the estimated useful life of software and other software, their estimated useful life is 3-5 years, and software core systems' estimated useful life is 5-10 years. Technology and software, they change so fast. How could you say that the estimated useful life of a software is more than one year, and in your estimated useful life, it is over three years?
I am confused by that. I understand that if you write in your annual report that the estimated useful life of a software is less than one year. Can you give me your thoughts on Woolworths updating its software or still using software that may be three years old?
Thank you for the question. This is a key focus in the ordinary course of our financial statement preparation and audit sign-off. There is dedicated focus on this at the audit and finance committee and ultimately at the board and obviously through our auditors, Deloitte, on the matter of software obsolescence. This topic is considered every time we prepare our accounts and on an ongoing basis.
The essential distinction here is that there are some applications that just by the nature of what they do, there are lower barriers to entry, more competition, and substitute products emerge more quickly, and therefore their useful life is less. Whilst there are some core enterprise-type products, like SAP and the others, where they actually have got a much longer life and the barriers to entry to replace these are actually quite high. Nonetheless, it's a very good point, and we will continue to be vigilant for that risk.
Chair, I have one question from Judy Jap.
I'm just going to make an observation here, Judy. I think just given that time's marching on, we will give you one more question. I think you have asked four, so we will give you one more question. It's in the interest of respecting all the time of our shareholders here at the AGM.
The question is, this question is about customer and worker safety and your thoughts about Coles Elizabeth Street store closing, and if Woolworths were in that position, what would you do? Also your thoughts about Bunnings using AI to minimize unruly behavior and enhance safety in your stores. Would Woolworths use these as well as using body cams too?
Look, I won't comment on competitor store openings and closures. As I referenced, generally, we are interested in watching the potential for deployment of new technologies and various forms of AI. Enhanced visual recognition must clearly be out there to be assessed. We'll obviously work with regulators and others as we consider whether there is a relevant use case. Are there any more questions online?
Chair, I have no further online questions for this item.
That concludes discussion on item one. I confirm that the financial report, sustainability report, directors' report and auditors' report for the year ended 28 June 2026 have now been received. The next item of business is to consider the remuneration report, which is set out on pages 98 to 121 of the 2026 annual report.
This is an advisory resolution. It gives shareholders the opportunity to provide feedback on the Group's remuneration policies. The remuneration report sets out details of the company's remuneration framework and the remuneration arrangements in place for the directors, CEO, managing director and other key management personnel. I now invite questions on resolution two. Are there any questions in the room?
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Natasha Lee.
Natasha.
Thank you, Scott. Just following up, a little bit of overlap with the previous question about the historic underpayment provision of AUD 730 million additional. I note in the remuneration that there was adjustment in the year 2020 and 2022 executive remuneration for presumably long-term incentives. It seems to me that, well firstly, the amounts which has been adjusted in the executive pay wasn't quantified, but usually these things are relatively small.
You are talking about maybe AUD 1 million or AUD 2 million against the AUD 730 million additional, which ordinary or the company itself, which affects all shareholders, have been stung by. Can you quantify how much actually has been docked from previous executives and just note the concern about sort of the inequity about the relatively small amounts relative to what we are having to pay out or potentially having to pay out?
In FY 2019 and FY 2022, when the wage underpayments were first identified, remember we self-reported those. The board took very significant action in respect of remuneration for the affected employees. The then chief executive lost 100% of his STI. The then chief people officer lost 100% of her STI. The then chair took a 20% deduction of fees, and there was further adjustments made in 2022. I believe the total figure for those remuneration adjustments was AUD 6.26 million.
Somebody will correct me if that is not right, but it is about that. I do note that that is at multiples ahead of any other retailer who has confronted the same issues. Not that necessarily our circumstances are the same. In respect of the current provision, these are really matters of interpretation of issues that have been identified. What is before the courts, we do not see any new material sources of underpayment.
It is really, for example, how is set off defined? How is fourth Sunday defined? How are meal breaks defined? There are hundreds of these issues that the court has been trying to work its way through. It is still before the courts, no final declarations have been made. If my 6.2 is not correct, if somebody could just correct that with Natasha Lee afterwards. I think it is AUD 6.2 million.
Okay. Thank you for the clarification.
Chairman, I have a question from Alan Golden from ASA.
Hello, Mr. Chair. Just a clarification. Usually, we see the results of the vote before the resolution is put nowadays. Is that going to be happening here? It is just a clarification.
They are already released. Yep.
Are we going to-
The REM report got about, I think, 96 point-
Are we going to see it on the board?
96%.
Are we going to see that?
It is on your phone under the ASX announcements. It will be when released, but I can confirm that the REM report got 96.4% for. Thank you, Alan, for your question. No more questions. Any questions online?
Chair, there are no online questions for this item.
That concludes the discussion on Resolution 2. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you have not yet lodged your vote for this item of business, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. A voting exclusion applies to this resolution as set out in the notice of meeting.
I will now move to the re-election of board-endorsed, Non-Executive Directors, including myself and Warwick Bray, as well as the election of Jon Alferness and Terry Bowen as board-endorsed Directors. The process for the nomination of Directors standing for election and re-election involves an assessment by the board of the Directors' skills, expertise, and their performance and contribution to the work of the board during their term, and in particular, over the last 12 months.
The results of this assessment form the basis of the board's recommendation to you, our shareholders. Having followed that process, the board, other than each candidate in respect of their own candidacy, unanimously recommends that shareholders vote in favor of the re-election of Warwick and myself, as well as the election of Jon and Terry to the Woolworths Group board. As Resolution 3A is for my own re-election as a Non-Executive Director, I will now step down as Chair of the meeting and hand over to Philip Chronican, Chair of the board's Risk Committee, to chair the meeting for this item of business.
Thank you, Scott, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As Scott is a candidate for re-election, I have the privilege of being Chair for this item of business. I note that a member statement has been submitted for this item, and as a result, I would like to make a few brief remarks on behalf of the board in support, very strong support, of Scott's re-election.
It is clear that our shareholders share our conviction, and based on the proxies that have been received prior to the meeting, there is an overwhelming majority in favor of Scott's re-election. Over 90% of votes and proxies received in support, including all of our top 20 shareholders. On behalf of the board, I thank our shareholders for this decisive endorsement of Scott's leadership and his ongoing stewardship of the company.
And in recommending Scott's re-election, the board and nomination committee undertook a rigorous, structured, and comprehensive assessment of his performance and his continuing independence. This process was conducted in accordance with our board charter and the ASX Corporate Governance Principles and was facilitated by an independent external advisor.
The review was thorough and deep. It encompassed detailed evaluation questionnaires across both the board and senior management, in-depth one-on-one interviews, and independent benchmarking and external perspectives. I also had the opportunity to speak directly and at length with our external facilitator to probe and test the findings concerning Scott's leadership and his effectiveness.
That evaluation confirmed unequivocally Scott's ongoing leadership effectiveness, the value of his contribution, and his continued independence of mind and judgment. Scott has been Chair for only four years after having joined the board in 2014.
The ASX Corporate Governance Principles explicitly recognize that the interests of a company and its shareholders are well served by a healthy balance of tenure, combining fresh perspectives with deep institutional knowledge, and that listed company Chairs are frequently in the longer tenured category.
Given the dynamic retail context in recent years, the transition to a new CEO in 2024, Scott's tenure has provided critical leadership stability and continuity, and we are seeing progress on the group's strategy and performance showing through.
At the same time, the board is firmly committed to responsible renewal, and over the course of the upcoming term, Chair succession will be a central priority. The board has already established a formalized process to ensure that succession is planned, thorough, and executed in an orderly manner. Before turning to questions on this item, I would invite Scott to say a few words in relation to his own re-election. Scott.
Thank you, Phil. Good afternoon again, fellow shareholders. You probably heard enough of me from now, but it is both a privilege and a responsibility to serve you as Chairman of Woolworths. I was appointed Chairman some four years ago in 2022. As Chair, my job is to work with my board colleagues to provide both appropriate oversight of and support of Amanda and the management team as it executes Woolworths' plans.
It has been reassuring to see over the last 12 to 18 months, as we have emerged from a period of disruption, to see those plans starting to come to fruition and reflected in sustained share price appreciation. However, this success does not guarantee success going forward. Every day is a new day in retail and rapid shifts in customer preferences, enabling technology, and competition now the business as usual setting.
This requires us to be nimble in navigating near-term market volatility while holding firm to our long-term convictions as we allocate capital to generate returns well into the future. The decisions we face in this context draw upon my experience as a company chairman and director and my experience in corporate strategy and capital markets. Strategy, capital structure and capital allocation are constantly in focus as we weigh both the risks and opportunities.
Looking ahead, I remain optimistic about Woolies prospects. We are fortunate, thanks to those who have come before us, to have the endowment of our scale, our fresh food people brand, our network, our digital and loyalty platforms, a family of adjacent businesses with their own growth potential, and maybe at the center of it all, a team of dedicated people trying their best, serving more than 26 million Australian and New Zealand customers every week.
The proof will be in the results, steadily growing shareholder value for you all. I have the time, capacity, and energy to commit to Woolworths on this journey. Working alongside my board colleagues and our management team, I believe we share the determination to realize this remarkable company's full potential. As I mentioned in my earlier address, we expect an orderly chair succession process to unfold during this term. I have been heartened by the support of you, our shareholders, something that I do not take for granted. I look forward to continuing to serve your best interests in the years ahead.
Thank you, Scott. I now invite questions on Resolution 3A. Are there any questions in the room?
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Geoff Cousins.
Yes, thank you very much. As many people here probably know, I have made it publicly clear that I oppose the re-election of Mr. Perkins along with some other organizations in the full knowledge, of course, that he will be re-elected. I knew that long ago. Do you know in the history of corporate Australia, I can find no record of any Chair of any public company who has not been re-elected.
I can think of a couple who should not have been, but I do not know of any that have not. The reason for that is that the system of getting 50% of the vote, which is what is required, very much relates to the views of the big international proxy advisors who advise a lot of the fund managers and other businesses that hold shares in Woolworths.
At every single point, the majority of them have gone for re-election. The reasons have changed through all, but there is always a reason where they advise re-election, and that is what has happened here. I oppose the re-election of Mr. Perkins for a number of reasons. The very obvious ones are that when he is re-elected, which he will be very shortly, he is asking for a 15-year term.
15 years. I have been on a lot of public company boards, probably more than anybody sitting up here, I would think. I have never previously known of any director who even asked for a 15-year term, and I cannot think of any directors other than founders of companies or industry experts who have such deep knowledge that it is felt it cannot be replaced. Mr. Perkins has neither of those.
He was an investment banker, but we will not condemn him for that. It has been commented by one of the leading proxy advisors that this board has not made any great plans for succession. Who is the Chair of the nominations committee, which looks at these matters?
Mr. Perkins is also the Chair of the nominations committee, a practice that a number of major companies have put into place in recent years, which I also regard as highly inadvisable. The other comment that one of the large proxy advisors has made relates to sustainability. Sustainability is a word that has appeared up on that screen a lot, and Mr. Perkins, in various remarks, has referred to it. That proxy advisor points out that there is now not a single director sitting on that stage who has any qualifications of any kind in that area.
There has not been any succession planning. Lots of new directors have been brought on. Last year, you might remember a couple from America. I think now another one, not candidates for succession, clearly, just from practical terms, and we now do not have anybody on the board who has any qualifications in that area.
Those obvious ones are not really my concern. What I think you look for in the Chairman of a public company is good judgment. I have made it clear that I think Mr. Perkins exercised very poor judgment on the particular issue regarding Tasmanian Salmon when he engaged in discussions with the Chair of Coles on that matter. That has been raised in the public. I raised it with the ACCC, as did other people.
The ACCC decided not to proceed with an examination, with an investigation into that, as they frequently do when they do not think they can find enough evidence and so on. That is all on the public record. What is not on the public record, which should interest everybody here in listening, and hopefully the people sitting on the stage, is that the Chair of the ACCC, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, rang me regarding that matter and asked me for various documents and so on, which I sent.
I said to her, "I know you cannot tell me how or if you will proceed, but can you tell me whether I am wasting your time and my time in raising this matter?" Her response was, "You were right to bring the matter to us.
" The point is this, the wisdom of Mr. Perkins in, according to the report that Woolworths gave, just spontaneously engaging with the Chair of his biggest competitor on this issue. He could not have known whether, A, there would be a complaint to the ACCC, and B, whether the ACCC would or would not proceed with it. In my view, it was an extremely unwise thing to do. I come from, in part, a telecommunications background, both as a CEO at Optus and then a long-serving Director on Telstra.
The concept that the Chair of either of those companies would have engaged in any sense with the Chair of the biggest competitor on a subject of extreme industry interest was inconceivable to me. Mr. Perkins personally confirmed to me that that is what had happened. Then you get the question of transparency because Woolworths Group dismissed that contact as accidental and inconsequential.
I am not in any way sure that that was a transparent response, and my colleague, Mr. Verwey from SIX, who will speak immediately following me, has some very interesting evidence to produce on that. These are not questions that will go away, and you have to ask, why does the board of this company, and particularly its Chairman, just continually push back and say, "No" to any reasonable suggestion that it gets on how to solve these continued issues?
I have seen this before, where long-serving Chairs suddenly start to think they run the show, and they do not need to refer to anyone, and quite clearly, Mr. Perkins did not get the approval of his board to speak to the Chair of Woolworths Group because they said it was on the spur of the moment. I am not sure it was, but that is what they said.
Mr. Perkins will be reelected. They always are. At this point, we ought to know, how long are you going to stay there, sir? When are you going to make some proper succession plans? When is this board going to get a more responsible attitude towards these important issues? Thank you.
Thank you. I will deal with the specific question that you raised at the end, which is that this board has instigated a process for Chair selection. So there will be a time during the course of the next three years when you will get an answer to that question. Scott, is there anything else you wanted to add to the comments from earlier?
No. Thank you, Phil. I think all the comments have been addressed in other places. It is the fact, ladies and gentlemen, that every once in a while, with absolutely appropriate oversight and approvals, the industry needs to come together to solve problems that it cannot be solved by itself. The industry has come together to solve fuel problems.
The industry has come together to solve flexible plastic problems. It may well be that the industry needs to come together to solve certain salmon problems if extreme scenarios play out. But it has not, no discussions have taken place, and so it is not at all surprising the ACCC saw that there was nothing to be followed up on that informal comment that was made. So, that is the only comment I would make to set that record straight.
Yes, I will-
Perkins
have to respond to that, if I may. There is a process, as you well know, Scott, for doing that. You go to the ACCC. You have done it before at Woolworths, so you are aware of it. There is a proper protocol for doing that, which you need to follow. That was not followed here. Also, as Mr. Verwey will illustrate very shortly, it was not just a one-off event. Let us listen to what he has got to say, and then let us see what the people in this room and those listening think about it. Thank you. Can we go to microphone number two, please?
Chair, I have a question from Alan Golden from ASA.
Thank you.
Thank you. I thank Mr. Perkins for talking with us about this matter and offering further discussion. I respect that. Though I agree with a lot of what Mr. Cousins said, I would like to make it very clear that ASA is not voting on this because of any meeting that Mr. Perkins and the Chair of Coles had.
That is not a factor at all. Our feeling is part of what Mr. Perkins said, or Mr. Cousins said, and I can show them directors who have been on a board for 15 years. I was a monitor of Harvey Norman for many years. I can show you a number of directors who would never leave. I just find it very hard to understand, or ASA finds it very hard to understand, why you want to stay after 12 years.
More and more of our boards now have a three-term limit, so you go and move after nine years. Some will go and then say, "If you want to stay on, you have to stand for election every year." You are getting too close to the company.
There is an independent. So we find that very hard. We also find, at the same time, that a key job of the Chair is to ensure that there is a smooth succession. You folks have talked about that. You have a process in place. Our contention is that process should have been in place before. You have and will be asked to appoint another American to the board today for four American directors.
I am not saying that they are not good people, that they do not have a lot of qualifications, but if you are appointing Americans in the past, you know that they are not going to be suitable as a Chair of this company. You should have been looking for who is going to be taking over. We also ask the same question, how long and when are we going to know? We know that our vote is merely a protest vote. We understand that entirely, but we are making that protest. Thank you.
Thank you. I will just pick up on one point of that. I think, while we all understand that Scott has been on the board a long time, I would stress that in voting Scott in as Chair four years ago, it would have been shortsighted of the board to have made such an appointment if we had expected it to be just for a short period of time, and that time has included the transition to a new Chief Executive.
Now that our new Chief Executive is not only in place but clearly performing well, it is the right time for the board to start focusing on this issue, and I would say that the view of the board has been exactly that. But thank you for raising that point. Any further comments?
Chair, we have a question from shareholder Adam Verwey.
Thank you.
Hello, board members, and hello, shareholders. I am Adam Verwey. I am the CEO of SIX. We represent around 200 Woolworths shareholders, and we co-filed the Macquarie Harbour Salmon shareholder resolutions that last year were supported by 35% of Woolworths shareholders.
Today, I lodged complaints with the ACCC and with ASIC, asking them to investigate the conduct of Woolworths and Coles on this matter. In the notice of meeting, the board told shareholders that claims of improper communications between the Chair and Coles were unfounded. That is not what Woolworths told us. Over many meetings with senior Woolworths executives, Coles came up again and again.
As far back as January 2025, following our globally significant shareholder votes at both the Woolworths and Coles AGMs, we were told that Coles was on the same page and that supermarkets need to take the same actions and work in unison. On March 17, 2026, we were told Macquarie Harbour Salmon had been an agenda item for talks between the Chairs of Woolworths and Coles.
We were also told that this executive had spoken to his counterpart at Coles, and that Woolworths' action needs to be aligned with Coles. On April 1, 2026, we were told that once its salmon packaging was changed, what Woolworths was doing would exactly match Coles. Then on July 2 this year, the Chair himself told me that all meaningful change requires an industry-wide response. That is more than 15 months of the same message.
Nor is it only our word. In April, Coles publicly confirmed that the two Chairs had met on at least two occasions. What was the outcome? Supply from Macquarie Harbour is unchanged. The only change is to the labels, and Woolworths now exactly matches Coles. So, either the board's statement to shareholders is wrong, or what Woolworths told our shareholder group repeatedly over 15 months was wrong. Both cannot be true.
It matters because that statement shaped this vote. At least one major proxy advisor relied on it in recommending that institutions support the Chair. As far as we can find, no authorization was ever sought from the ACCC for any collaboration with Coles on salmon. The ACCC's guidance is clear that collaborations between competitors on supply can carry real legal risk. Woolworths already carries an extinction risk in its salmon supply chain.
The Chair has told us it is a risk the company has chosen to take on. Why would the board add the risk, or at the very least the perception, of coordinating with its main competitor? My question to the Chair: before telling shareholders these allegations were unfounded, did the board know about these meetings with Coles, and did it authorize them?
Thank you for the question. Was there anything you wanted to say on that one, Scott?
I just will restate for the record that any communication between ourselves and Coles, and we have investigated that, has been entirely proper. There has been absolutely no collusion at all. The two times I ran into the Chair of Coles were at social events, and I will repeat what I have said already to this meeting. Under certain circumstances, if extreme risk scenarios play out, the industry will need to address that in terms of salmon farming, just as we have in other situations. That was the substance of the conversation. Nothing more, nothing less. The ACCC investigated it.
These are comments made to us in meetings over a period of 15 months, referencing multiple meetings, not just between the Chairs, but between the executives of both companies.
Thank you. Thanks for the comment. Are there any further questions in the room?
Chair, we have one further question from shareholder Natasha Lee.
Thank you. Hello, Natasha.
Hello, Philip. Good to see you. I told Scott earlier that I'd give him my support. During my interactions with him, I have appreciated his engagement, and I continue to support him as Chair, even though he has 90% approval rating already. The main point I wanted to make, it sort of ties in with succession overall of the board, is that I do feel that the board does need to consider a greater level of diversity beyond gender, not necessarily for the Chair, but overall, so that the composition of the board does better reflect the community as a whole. I just make that point for future board nominations.
Thank you. I think that's well made. If there are no other questions on the floor, do we have any questions online?
Chair, I have an online question from shareholder Stephen Mayne. The chair suffered the biggest protest vote today, with 8.9% against his re-election. What are his reflections on why this occurred? It is very rare for a top 20 company to have their chair face a campaign which achieves such support, particularly when none of the proxy advisors or top 20 shareholders recommended or voted against.
Is it correct that on the head count metric, more shareholders voted against than for today? What percentage of our shareholders voted before the proxy voting deadline, and what sort of campaign did you run to get out the vote? Did you even achieve a 2% turnout?
Well, I think as you would appreciate, Mr. Mayne, that all company votes are based on share counts, not numbers of shareholders. It is not something that we regularly track. But I will leave it there. In terms of the campaign, I think all companies, and I can speak with some authority here, all companies actively engage with proxy holders and significant shareholders in the lead up to an AGM, and I am not aware that we were engaged in anything fundamentally different on this occasion. I am looking for assurance from Scott that that is true, and that appears to be the case. Thank you.
Could I ask a follow-up question from Mr. Verwey's comments, please? Because I think it does-
Sorry. Can we just take a moment of protocol here?
Yes.
You can ask a follow-up question if you are introduced by the microphone attendant.
Oh, I am sorry. My apologies.
Do we have further questions on the floor?
Chair, we have one final question from shareholder Geoff Cousins.
Thank you.
My apologies for that. I did not mean to interrupt you at all. You do see the substance of what has just been said, I hope, members of the board, and now the Chair of this meeting. Following the original complaint to the ACCC, or a couple of different complaints, one of which was made by me, comment was made from the company, from the corporation, not from any individual, that that contact was accidental and inconsequential, and there are only ever two contacts.
That statement is clearly untrue on the basis of the list of meetings that Mr. Verwey has just enumerated for you. As he said, he has just filed a further complaint based on all of that information with the ACCC and also with ASIC. Is there really no response from this board to that? That is a pretty serious situation, I would have thought. I cannot believe that you, sir, now chairing it, and Mr. Perkins and the other board members are just going to remain silent. What is your response, please?
My response is that I have heard an allegation aired at this meeting, and I have no evidence that any of it is true. I am sure that somebody in due course could provide that. Thank you.
I will include it in the minutes, to be sure.
Thank you. Are there any further questions online?
Chair, there are no further online questions for this item.
Fine. Thank you. That concludes the discussion on item 3A. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you haven't yet lodged your vote for this item, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen, and open proxies will be voted in favor of this item. Thank you. I'll now hand back to Scott Perkins as Chair of the meeting.
Thank you, Phil. I will now move to agenda item 3B, the resolution to elect Warwick Bray as a Non-Executive Director. Warwick retires by rotation at this meeting and offers himself for re-election. Before turning to questions, I invite Warwick to say a few words in relation to his re-election. Warwick.
Thank you, Scott, and welcome to all shareholders and team members joining us today. Serving as a Non-Executive Director of Woolworths, an Australian icon which has been part of my life since I was five years old, is a responsibility I take extremely seriously, and I am grateful for your consideration of my re-election. Over my three and a half years on the board, I have been impressed by the commitment of the Woolworths team to continuous improvement for shareholders, customers, team members, and all stakeholders.
This capability for improvement will be even more important in the coming years as we face challenges of existing and new forms of competition, technology threats and opportunities, and inflation and cost-of-living challenges. I aim to bring to the Woolworths board experience and expertise in strategy, governance, finance, technology, and customer outcomes.
If re-elected, I will bring rigorous, independent discipline and scrutiny to all decisions on your behalf. I can confirm that I have adequate time and considerable energy to bring to the Woolworths Group board role. Thank you for considering my re-election.
Thank you, Warwick. I now invite questions on Resolution 3B. Are there any questions in the room? Are there any questions online?
Chair, there are no online questions for this item.
That concludes the discussion on Resolution 3B. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you have not yet lodged your vote for this item, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. I will now move to agenda item 3C, the resolution to elect Jon Alferness as a Non-Executive Director.
Jon was appointed as a Director on 1 March 2026, and accordingly seeks election by shareholders under the ASX Listing Rules and the company's constitution. Before turning to questions, I invite Jon to say a few words in relation to his election.
Thank you, Scott, and good afternoon, fellow shareholders. It is an absolute privilege to stand before you today as a candidate for election to the Woolworths Group board. My background is technology. At Google, over 13 years, I helped build its advertising businesses across search, mobile, shopping, and travel. In 2015, I championed an early AI shopping assistant built hand-in-hand with retailers. It was well ahead of its time.
Since then, I have watched too many tech companies build for retailers rather than with them. Most recently, as Chief Product Officer for Walmart US, I helped bring artificial intelligence into everyday work, from product search to the tools that store associates use every shift. I hope to bring a view from the leading edge of artificial intelligence. I advise several AI startups and see firsthand how agentic commerce is changing the way that people shop.
Leading large product and technology teams taught me that transformation only succeeds through collaboration when people come along with it. I look forward to helping Woolworths adopt these shifts responsibly with customers at the center, including through my work on the People and Risk Committees.
Some of my best days since joining the board have been in our stores and on the farms that supply them. I was inspired by our strawberry and stone fruit growers and their deep care for the land through sustainable farming.
I have seen that same care in our stores in how each of our teams look after each other and our customers. I can confirm that I have the time, capacity, and energy to fully meet my board and committee obligations and to give this role the attention it deserves. I take seriously the trust that shareholders, customers, and team members place in the board. With your support, I look forward to continuing that work. Thank you.
Thank you, Jon. I now invite questions on Resolution 3C. Are there any questions in the room? Are there any questions online?
Chair, there are no online questions for this item.
That concludes the discussion on Resolution 3C. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you have not yet lodged your vote for this item of business, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. I will now move to agenda item 3D, the resolution to elect Terry Bowen as a Non-Executive Director.
Terry was appointed as a Director on 1 October 2026, and accordingly seeks election by shareholders under the ASX Listing Rules and the company's constitution. Before turning to questions, I invite Terry to say a few words in relation to his election.
Thank you, Scott, and good afternoon, everyone. It is a real privilege to be asked to join the Woolworths board. Few companies in Australia and New Zealand are trusted as Woolworths is. Be that by customers, by our employees, by suppliers, and by our shareholders, whether that is through direct shareholdership or through superannuation.
Maintaining that trust is obviously a huge responsibility, and as a Director, I will apply myself diligently to this role, keeping our shareholders always front of mind and bringing independent judgment, management support, and at times challenge to the long-term interests of Woolworths.
I bring to this role more than 30 years senior executive experience in some of our largest companies, generally in finance and general management roles, and often in the retail and consumer-facing businesses. My expertise centered on finance, but also covered complex commercial decisions, capital allocation, portfolio management, and business transformation.
I spent 21 years at Wesfarmers, including Coles Finance Director when we acquired that business, and then the Group Finance Director for many years thereafter. Previously, I have been Jetstar's founding CFO, and more recently the President of Rokt, which is a U.S.-based, as we heard from Scott, e-commerce leader, where I today am a board advisor.
I also have more than 15 years listed board experience, both at Wesfarmers, but also BHP, Transurban, and for three years, Coles. I retain great respect for those organizations and the people I worked with over this time. Outside of Woolworths, my only listed board currently is Northern Star Resources. I can assure you, I have the time, I have the energy, and if elected, I will work very hard with Scott, the rest of my fellow Directors, Amanda, and the rest of the executive team, to deliver for you, our shareholders. With that, I thank you for your support.
Thank you, Terry. I now invite questions on Resolution 3D. Are there any questions in the room?
Chair, I have a question from shareholder Jess Coughlan.
Thank you. I've noticed this is the third re-election agenda item for members of the Risk Committee. I'd just like to ask you, if the Maugean skate does go extinct this summer with the rising sea surface temperatures brought on by the El Niño weather pattern impacts, how satisfied are you that your committee and this company has successfully mitigated the risks associated with extinction?
I will answer that question. Thank you, shareholders and-
The question was directed to-
Yeah, and that is my responsibility to answer questions.
Okay
The issue of risk and Macquarie Harbour is well documented in our nature report. We outline the risks, and I think I have spoken at length to the process by which we assess those risks. We also are mindful of the fact that the Maugean skate has not yet been, and may never be, uplifted to critically endangered. But were that to be the case, that would also be a significant development that we would take into account in terms of our overall risk assessment.
That listing decision was a data issue, as I am sure you are aware. What my question was how confident are you that you have mitigated the risk?
To the best extent that we can, we are confident that those risk mitigants are in place.
We also do note that the Maugean skate has not been uplifted to critically endangered.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. There are no more questions in the room. Are there any questions online?
Chair, there are no online questions for this item.
That concludes the discussion on Resolution 3D. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you have not yet lodged your vote for this item of business, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. The next item of business is seeking shareholder approval for a grant of LTI rights to Amanda Bardwell as Managing Director and CEO for FY 2027. The proposed FY 2027 LTI grant to Amanda is 91,606 performance share rights.
This is the maximum number of performance share rights that will be granted and represent the LTI component of her FY 2027 remuneration package. Details of these performance metrics and the other key terms of the performance share rights, including a voting exclusion, which applies to the resolution, is set out in this notice of meeting.
I now invite questions on Resolution 4. Are there any questions in the room? Are there any questions online?
Chair, I have an online question from shareholder Stephen Mayne.
Thank you, Stephen.
Thank you for disclosing the proxy votes earlier to the ASX following the agenda today and offering both online questions and voting at today's best practice hybrid AGM. All you need to do now is join the top 10 best practice list, is to embrace headcount voting disclosing in the poll results, like with the scheme of arrangement.
If the likes of Stockland, ASX, Qantas, Tabcorp, Suncorp, BlueScope, Computershare, and many other companies all do that, why don't we? You've got the data, so please let the sun shine in so we can see how many shareholders voted for and against this proposed LTI grant. By doing so, retail shareholder voting sentiment is made public, along with the chronically low retail shareholder voting rate since the move away from paper voting after COVID.
Thank you, Stephen. We'll take the compliment. We'll bank the compliment, and thank you for, again, and you've been assiduous on this. We continue to look at best practice. We look at market practice. We will continue to review whether we provide additional disclosure around it. So we will take that on notice. Thank you. If there are no more questions, that concludes the discussion on Resolution 4. If you have not yet lodged your vote for this item of business, please do so now.
The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. A voting exclusion applies to this resolution, as set out in the notice of meeting. I will now move on to the next item of business. The next item of business is seeking shareholder approval for the approach to termination benefits.
The law in Australia restricts the benefits that can be given without shareholder approval to team members who hold or have held within the previous three years a managerial or executive office as defined in the Corporations Act on cessation of their employment with Woolworths Group Limited or its related bodies corporate. Under Section 200B of the Corporations Act, a company may only give a relevant team member a benefit in connection with their ceasing to hold a managerial or executive office if approved by shareholders or if an exemption applies.
The group's position in relation to grants of equity securities under current or future Woolworths Group share plans is to treat departing team members having considered the relevant circumstances in which the relevant team member is ceasing employment and in accordance with applicable laws, market practice, and group policy.
To allow this policy to be achieved, the board has determined that it is appropriate to seek shareholder approval of the approach that it proposes to take to these benefits now in advance of any such potential benefits being provided. Approval of this approach was previously granted by shareholders at the 2023 AGM. I now invite questions on Resolution 5. Are there any questions online?
Chair, there are no online questions for this item.
That concludes the discussion on Resolution 5. If you have not yet lodged your vote for this item of business, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. A voting exclusion applies to this resolution, as set out in the notice of meeting. I will now move on to the next item of business.
The next item of business is seeking shareholder approval to grant non-executive director rights under the Australian Non-Executive Director Equity Plan and U.S. Non-Executive Director Equity Plan to eligible non-executive directors in office from time to time.
Grants of non-executive director rights under the Australian Non-Executive Director Plan and the U.S. plan were last approved by shareholders at the 2023 annual general meeting for a period of three years, and there have been no changes to the terms of the NED plan since that annual general meeting. I invite questions on Resolution 6. Are there any online questions?
Chair, there are no online questions for this item.
That concludes the discussion on Resolution 6. If you have not yet lodged your vote for this item of business, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. A voting exclusion applies to this resolution, as set out in this notice of meeting.
I will now move on to the next item of business. The next item of business is seeking shareholder approval for an increase in the maximum aggregate amount of remuneration, which may be provided by Woolworths Group to non-executive directors for their services in a financial year. Shareholders last approved this fee pool back in 2010, and we are seeking approval today to increase the fee pool by AUD 600,000 to AUD 4.6 million per year.
The approval is to accommodate orderly board renewal, increasing the number of directors for a seamless transition period, and to continue to attract and retain directors of the highest caliber to oversee the strategic and operational priorities of Woolworths Group. I now invite questions on Resolution 7. Are there any online questions?
Chair, there are no online questions for this item.
That concludes the discussion on Resolution 7. If you've not yet lodged your vote for this item of business, please do so now. The proxies received for this resolution are now shown on the screen. I intend to vote all open proxies in favor of this item. A voting exclusion applies to this resolution, as set out in the notice of meeting.
That concludes the formal items of business for today's meeting. I would like to remind all shareholders who have not yet cast their votes on the resolutions to do so now. I now declare the poll closed. As mentioned earlier, the results of the AGM will be announced to the ASX later today and published on our website. A recording of the meeting will also be available on our website.
I would like to thank all of my board colleagues, Amanda Bardwell, the group executive team, and all of our team members for their dedication and commitment over this last year. Finally, I would like to thank our shareholders for your ongoing support of Woolworths Group and for attending today's meeting. That concludes the 2026 annual general meeting. I now invite you all to join me, my fellow Directors and senior management in the foyer outside for refreshments. Thank you very much.