The restaurant inspection system in Brisbane is hopeless beyond belief.
For a cow town that wants to profit from tourism rather than coal and cattle, they are beyond stupid about it.
At least we got good folks to coach the little kids in hockey.
The disclosure system is voluntary. If a restaurant gets two-stars-out-of-five, for example, they don’t put up the sign.
How is it that Toronto, LA, NYC and hundreds of other places figured out how to make restaurant inspection disclosure mandatory, yet Brisbane and most of Australia go on a faith-based system – which usually involves someone blowing someone.
According to the Courier Mail, the parents of a Brisbane city councillor have admitted breaking food safety laws enforced by the council, with inspectors finding cockroaches “happily living” in the carvery they run in a city foodcourt.
Paddington councillor Peter Matic’s parents Milovan and Milena Matic were slapped with fines after a council health inspector unearthed issues with cleanliness, maintenance and cockroaches at their Carvey and Seafood in the Myer Centre in January last year.
The couple were fined $3000 each after pleading guilty to failing to ensure the business complied with the food Act.
The company, Nano Investments Pty Ltd, also copped a $29,000 fine for five counts of failing to comply with the food standards code.
Kevin Cartledge, for Brisbane City Council, said officers inspected the eatery on January 19, 2016, and issued an improvement notice.
So a whole bunch of people ate at that shitshow after the Jan. 19, 2016 inspection, but no one bothered to tell customers.
It’s some perverse British legal system thing, that potentially puts consumers at risk for months after the failings are discovered.
When they returned two days later, the officers discovered the business was still breaching food safety laws, triggering a suspension the following day.
He said the most concerning element was the presence of a large number of cockroaches.
“You have, essentially, the perfect circumstances for cockroaches to live and breed,” he said.
“Given that there were adult and juvenile cockroaches in the premises, it clearly suggests that there was a life cycle and these cockroaches were happily living and feeding.”
He pointed out the company has had compliance issues in the past, and infringements notices had been served.
“This is a company that has been put well and truly on notice yet has still failed to comply with their requirements under the Act,” he said.
So why the fuck wouldn’t you make it public to warn unsuspecting consumers that the place was a shithole?
Too much monkey business.
Going public: Early disclosure of food risks for the benefit of public health
NEHA, Volume 79.7, Pages 8-14
Benjamin Chapman, Maria Sol Erdozaim, Douglas Powell
http://www.neha.org/node/58904
Often during an outbreak of foodborne illness, there are health officials who have data indicating that there is a risk prior to notifying the public. During the lag period between the first public health signal and some release of public information, there are decision makers who are weighing evidence with the impacts of going public. Multiple agencies and analysts have lamented that there is not a common playbook or decision tree for how public health agencies determine what information to release and when. Regularly, health authorities suggest that how and when public information is released is evaluated on a case-by-case basis without sharing the steps and criteria used to make decisions. Information provision on its own is not enough. Risk communication, to be effective and grounded in behavior theory, should provide control measure options for risk management decisions. There is no indication in the literature that consumers benefit from paternalistic protection decisions to guard against information overload. A review of the risk communication literature related to outbreaks, as well as case studies of actual incidents, are explored and a blueprint for health authorities to follow is provided.