Bad-food coverup on the grounds of "privacy"!

They are made public in New York, London, Toronto, Copenhagen, Los Angeles and dozens of other cities, but Sydney has ruled that the addresses of restaurants caught breaching food safety regulations must remain secret. Clover Moore, the independent MP and the Lord Mayor of Sydney, has long fought for stronger laws to protect the public's right to know, but her chief executive, Monica Barone, has refused a Herald appeal filed under freedom of information laws for access to the addresses where staff issued 78 fines over the past year. The council has released a list with the date and amount of fines imposed, but has blacked out names and street numbers, defying a worldwide trend towards disclosing such information.

In customer-focused New York, a website carries the results of inspections and will send you for free the results of any five restaurants you nominate. In Toronto restaurants must display a sticker in the window that reveals the results of health inspections with similar systems operating across the US and increasingly in Britain. Ms Barone dismissed any relevance such overseas practices might have for Sydney on the grounds that any publication of results was done "presumably in accordance with legislation which is applicable in those places". In NSW, she said, the Privacy Act prohibited her from revealing the names of the individuals fined.

While the street address of restaurants are in the phone book and available to passers-by, they remain secret on the grounds they are "information concerning the commercial or business affairs of a person". Revealing them could "reasonably be expected to have an unreasonable adverse effect", she said.

Similar fears were expressed in Europe and North America before the names of offending restaurants were published, but there have since been reports that many restaurants now prefer these details to be public as it becomes another way they can distinguish themselves from competitors and attract customers.

But Ms Barone said she could not release the information as it would be "reasonable to expect that advertising of the locations of these food premises may give a false representation of the condition of each of the premises, which could lead to a downturn in custom, thus reducing income and causing possible hardship for the proprietors". [But would that not be deserved?]

Besides, the imposition of fines had fixed the problems permanently in a way that did not seem to happen overseas. 'I am informed that following the issue of a [fine], City [of Sydney] staff return to the premises to ensure hygiene standards are being complied with," Ms Barone said. "I am also informed . all premises were complying [with one exception, which was then prosecuted]."

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