Food safety showdown

The city's chief health inspector has produced pictures of an old toilet seat used as a lid on a bucket of flour, a bowl of meat stored at 38 degrees, and food infested with cockroaches as just some of the examples of some of the appalling food standard breaches his staff had uncovered in restaurant kitchens in the city.

Director of the Health Safety Services John Woollard has told an Assembly committee that claims of restaurants or cafes being closed for minor breaches were ''a nonsense'' and that each of the 16 Canberra establishments his inspectors have closed this year all posed a clear and present danger to public health.

Food safety in Canberra restaurants has been constantly in the news since early 2011 when an investigation by The Canberra Times exposed the secrecy surrounding kitchen hygiene investigations.

The ACT government has since agreed to ''name and shame'' filthy restaurants and is still looking at other ways to provide diners with information about the hygiene standards.

Mr Woollard told the multi-party Budget Estimates Committee that he brought the photos to the hearing because he was frustrated at the sniping from the industry about his agency's crackdown.

''I though the photos were useful in case we did get onto this subject,'' Mr Woollard told the MLAs.

''It is frustrating for the inspectors out there on the frontline often getting threatened with violence, certainly getting verbalised, to hear people in the media, sometimes high-profile people saying they close businesses down on a whim, that a business was closed down because the inspector had a bad day.

''Cracked tiles, that's a nonsense, we have never and will never shut a business down because of something as minor as a cracked tile.''

Mr Woollard said that his inspectors would only shut down a business if they saw serious or repeated food safety breaches and usually issued an ''improvement notice'' in the first instances.

''We've issued this year so far something like 16 prohibition orders and issued something like 130 or 140 improvement notices,'' he said.

''An improvement notice is for the more minor things we see in a business and a prohibition order is for when we see a dangerous situation, where the business has been run is such a way that it constitutes an immediate risk to the public and therefore requires closing.''

The chief inspector said the courts were backing the judgment of his inspectors.

''We've had eight prosecutions this year to date and they have all been successful, so the courts are finding in our favour that the prohibition orders were warranted and have given in some circumstances substantial penalties to the food proprietors,'' he said. The agency was moving to ensure that all food businesses were put on notice of their obligations, and shutting down those which knowingly broke the rules.

''There is this relatively small but troublesome sector of the industry that seems to either not understand food safety or not care,'' he said.