Page 4450 - Week 14 - Thursday, 28 November 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
South Wales or Victoria. The regulations required any organisation or community group handling food more than five times a year to appoint at least one of its members as a food safety supervisor who would need to be trained at a cost of up to $150. They had to be contactable while the barbeque was going on or the canteen was operating, and they had to be able to communicate with public health officials.
Of course, the community outcry was to be expected. What was the government thinking? Did it not realise that sausage sizzles and other activities are run by volunteers trying to raise funds for sporting clubs, for their school or to send young athletes to a competition or other worthwhile activities.
And not satisfied with killing sausage sizzles outside Bunnings on a Saturday morning, the food safety bureaucrats moved their attention to school fetes, telling them that quiches were no longer a safe food. Anyone who has been to the Telopea Park School fete would know that quiches have been their staple seller for years—well before quiches were mainstream Australian fare. But quiches were not alone on the food police list. They were among a number of high risk foods, including spring rolls, casseroles, custard cream and rice dishes. In fact, any dish that contained meat, dairy or moist cereal products or ingredients.
Let me just point out, this was a list produced for schools and other groups in a modern Australian city; it was not for a food stall in a Middle Eastern market. I cannot recall any story in the media about widespread deaths from food eaten at a sausage sizzle or a school fete or even people attending hospitals in large numbers because of a dodgy cake at the local cake stall. So the motivation of these overzealous bureaucrats and the directorate or minister that approved them is curious, to say the least.
Perhaps those same food police had been encouraged to go further down this track after their success in controls over the sale and availability of sugary drinks, the restrictions on what school canteens could sell, the controls over what supermarkets could put at their check-outs, and, of course we have the plastic bag bans, the phasing out of caged eggs, and how many chairs a cafe can put out on the pavement for their customers.
The ACT government has form in all of these areas. The examples are endless and, sadly, for many who live outside Canberra, they only serve to perpetuate the stereotype bureaucratic, soulless city that Canberra is known as by those who do not live here. So we spend millions on a campaign to smarten up our image while telling our good citizens—who, I might add keep getting told they are the best educated and highest paid in Australia—what they can and cannot eat, where they can and cannot walk their dogs, what size and colour of fence they can or cannot construct on their properties and how they should conduct their street parties and be licensed to do so.
But it does not just stop at lifestyle issues, and it is not just about creating inconvenience for hardworking volunteers. There is a serious financial downside to all this overregulation. The ACT Master Builders Association only recently issued a release that said that the ACT government was gouging builders on a grand scale. It pointed out that its members were paying the highest fees and charges in Australia.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video