What on earth have you been eating?

 

• Mice in kitchen? No worries, stay open for five months

The Age Article on which I agree with Glen Eira’s Council viewpoint 100 per cent:  That is should even be a matter for discussion and debate is totally incomprehensible.  What of the diners rights to expect sanitation laws to be in place even as they eat their food!  As a person who eats out on a regular basis it is enough to make one stay home and allow businesses to go broke regardless because we have no way of knowing what’s going on behind the wall.
 Michael Bachelard and Richard Baker
June 23, 2007
VICTORIA’S food regulation is a shambles, with councils unable to warn the public about restaurants and takeaway outlets that fail health inspections, and reluctant to prosecute unhygienic premises.

One Glen Huntly restaurant, now closed, filthy and mouse-infested, continued serving food to customers for five months last year, despite failing seven council inspections. The Glen Eira council was powerless to shut it down or inform the public until after it was prosecuted in court in August.

An Age investigation has found that there are no standard rules for prosecutions, with each council operating its own policy.

Only about four councils regularly take food outlets to court over unsafe practices, while a number of metropolitan councils, including Yarra, Whitehorse and Brimbank, have not launched a single prosecution since January 2003.

The City of Dandenong, in contrast, has prosecuted 117.

A Health Department spokesman has told The Age the department is “concerned that some councils are not adequately meeting their responsibilities” to police the Food Act.

The potential for unhealthy venues to remain open unbeknown to the public is leading to growing pressure for the State Government to introduce “name and shame” powers so councils can identify outlets that regularly breach safety standards. NSW is to introduce similar laws. The investigation also found that:

■The Health Minister has no power to issue directions to councils over food safety and councils are under no obligation to pass on information to the Government about what their inspectors find.

■The Government plans to downgrade the qualifications for health inspectors from a science degree to a two-year technical qualification to solve the critical shortage of council environmental health officers.

■The state’s Competition and Efficiency Commission is pushing to ease the regulation of some food premises, adopting a “risk management” approach to save $38 million per year.

■Some councils refuse to name the restaurants they have prosecuted, citing privacy reasons.

In Victoria, councils are responsible for inspecting the state’s 33,000 food outlets. Each must be inspected annually and registered, making sure they comply with cleanliness, temperature, food handling, labelling and other rules.

The Victorian president of the Institute of Environmental Health, Geoff Fraser, said the result was that Victoria’s 79 councils had 79 ways of approaching food safety. Many councils opted for a policy of educating wrongdoers rather than prosecuting them.

But, as the chief Environmental Health Officer at the City of Dandenong, Mr Fraser uses prosecution as a key deterrent.

“Dandenong has its issues, but don’t tell me that the other 78 municipalities don’t have similar issues. Some of them really have to look closely at some of the risks they are taking.”

Where public safety was endangered, Mr Fraser said he had been able to get the Department of Human Services to close a premises within 24 hours.

He said some councils refused to take food outlets to court because they feared alienating their rate base, and also feared that exposing dodgy operators would give their area a bad name.

But Glen Eira spokesman Paul Burke blamed the department, saying the food laws prevented councils from acting in the best interests of the public. “Councils can seize food … but cannot seize accumulations of dirt, rodent faeces, pests, grease or cigarette butts,” he said. And, even if food was taken away, “other food can be brought into the unsanitary environment immediately“.

Serious breaches of food laws occurred in all kinds of food businesses, from big-brand takeaway franchises, restaurants, nursing homes, child-care centres and food manufacturers. Department figures show the most dangerous venues are restaurants, commercial caterers and Asian bakeries. Because councils are not required to report on their findings, reliable figures are unavailable.

Among the councils surveyed by The Age, Yarra, Hobsons Bay, Brimbank and Whitehorse have had no prosecutions of Food Act breaches since January, 2003.

In the Magistrates Court, this week, the City of Dandenong demonstrated the educative power of prosecution, the council reaping a $30,000 fine, plus costs, for taking on tofu manufacturer Kang Kang Food Company, which supplies to Asian grocery stores.

Photographs presented to magistrate Barry Docking show that, in the four months after council inspectors said they intended to prosecute, the proprietor spent $10,000 to fix up his premises. The black slime next to the sink was gone, the mouse and rat infestation eradicated, the mildew, residue, cobwebs, rust, milk crates, mattress and foul odour cleaned up, and the lighting improved.

The Efficiency Commission is contemplating major changes in the regulation of food safety, including giving the health minister power, for the first time, to tell councils how to operate under the Food Act.

But the Municipal Association of Victoria opposes this “on the grounds that local government is a tier of government in its own right”. The commission is also considering on-the-spot fines for breaches, a tactic strongly supported by some councils.

But its main recommendation is to focus more on the high-risk food outlets, and less on others. Such a change could save $38 million of the total $138 million in regulatory costs.

The MAV is sceptical of this figure, and Mr Fraser said many councils were not up to the job of identifying which food outlets in their areas were high risk.

He argued the law changes should go further, and that councils should be able to publish the results of health inspections so diners could check out the restaurant they were contemplating eating in. “The ‘name and shame’ approach works in reverse: the companies that understand food safety can communicate it to their customers, and then self-regulation really works,” he said.

The state Health Department is suggesting a more limited approach: giving councils the power to name premises that have been successfully prosecuted.

Overseas studies have demonstrated the health benefits of naming foul premises. After Los Angeles introduced a public grading system for restaurants in 1998, the number of food-borne hospitalisations

and

Richard Baker
June 23, 2007

Latest related coverage

• What on earth have you been eating?

A DEAD mouse in a home-made trap, rodent droppings, cigarette butts and uncovered food in a filthy refrigerator were just some of the things City of Glen Eira cadet environmental health officer Lachlan Northey found when he inspected Glen Huntly’s Gourmet Inn last year.

Following up on two complaints from the public about the state of the Chinese restaurant in March last year, Mr Northey wrote a report that also noted broken wall tiles, an abundance of grease and dirt in the kitchen, a microwave covered in food scraps and a hand basin without liquid soap or paper towels.

He issued Gourmet Inn’s proprietor, Chang Rong Wang, with an order to clean up. Two days later, Mr Northey returned with senior council health officer Tammy Goodwin to check Mr Wang’s progress. They were not impressed, finding the kitchen and store room full of dirt, grease, mould, food scraps and home-made rodent bait.

The health officers also discovered an old dog chained up at the rear of a shed at the back of the Gourmet Inn. It did not have food or water and was surrounded by its own faeces. A formal complaint was lodged with the RSPCA.

Ms Goodwin and Mr Northey then told Mr Wang it would be a good idea for him to close for the weekend and thoroughly clean his restaurant. He agreed. But follow-up inspections on March 31 and April 7 found rodent droppings, another dead mouse and fresh meats stored above ready-to-eat vegetables and fruit.

It was clear the Gourmet Inn should not be selling food to the public, but for various reasons the restaurant remained open until September last year — more than five months after the first council inspection uncovered a litany of filth.

Victoria’s food laws also meant the council was unable to warn the public about the condition of the restaurant due to privacy restrictions preventing local government publishing the results of food-safety inspections.

Glen Eira council decided against asking the Department of Human Services to use its power under the Food Act to close the Gourmet Inn on the basis that the department had recently rejected its request to shut down another restaurant its health officers had deemed unsafe.

“The only absolute way to stop unsafe food handling is to close the business,” Glen Eira spokesman Paul Burke told The Age. “Only DHS has the power to do that. DHS’ practice has been not to consider closure before council undertakes a prosecution.”

So with that in mind, Glen Eira set about trying to achieve a successful prosecution of Mr Wang. It is a process, according to Mr Burke, that can take more than three months.

Human Service’s spokesman Bram Alexander disputed the claim that the department required councils to prosecute before it would shut food businesses. Just this week, he said, the department had forced a Chinese restaurant in Moe to close without a prosecution.

But Mr Alexander said not every breach of the Food Act justified closure and the department encouraged councils to seek prosecution for multiple food safety offences.

“But if we know of illness associated with a premises, we will move to make sure no one else gets ill,” he said. “We are unaware of any cases where problems serious enough to justify closure of a food premises have been allowed to persist for such a long time.”

In the case of Glen Huntly’s Gourmet Inn, it was not until August 31 last year that Mr Wang appeared before Dandenong Magistrates Court, where he was fined $56,000.

Just three days earlier, the Gourmet Inn faced its seventh and final inspection. Court documents show the council officers judged the state of the premises to be “marginally worse” than when they first inspected it back in March.

On September 1, the Department of Human Services issued an order to close the Gourmet Inn. It has yet to reopen.

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