By Christine de Kock
MARIBYRNONG City Council will not join the call to name and shame food outlets that do not comply with the Food Act.
Maribyrnong City Council’s community planning and advocacy manager, Nick Matteo, said the council had a “developmental approach” to breaches of the Food Act.
He said this approach was not consistent with a call to “name and shame” traders in breach of the act. This differs from the attitude of other councils, such as Moreland City Council, which submitted a recommendation to the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission inquiry in January.
The Moreland council suggested in its submission that improved levels of food safety compliance could be achieved, if the result of inspections on food premises was made public.
Section 54 of the Food Act prohibits such information being made public.
Moreland council’s report says: “There is an argument that in an open society and the marketplace the public has a right to know the compliance performance of any food premises before deciding to eat at such a premises.”
Mr Matteo said it was a “very rare occurrence” to find food traders in serious breach of the Food Act. “So from our point of view there’s no real evidence to suggest that we go down this track of naming and shaming,” he said.
He said a couple of years ago there was a “pork roll scare” with concerns raised about salmonella poisoning.
“If we were forced to name and shame in that particular instance, I think a lot of traders would have lost their livelihoods.”
He said the council instead worked with all food outlets that provided pork rolls.
“What we did was work in a developmental way with the traders, assisted them with their food handling skills,” he said.
“A lot of it was about them not understanding the regulatory issues.
“There were language problems and those sorts of things and what we found by taking that developmental approach that we actually now have excellent compliant restaurants and customers who are very happy to keep going to that particular trader.
For the council it achieved “that really difficult balance to ensure that we have the livelihood of traders protected as well as the customers”.
