Yes and yes. I’m a health inspector.

Would absolutely not do it for free. There’s a lot more that I do than just inspecting restaurants and beauty premises:

• inspection accommodations (hotels, motels, rooming houses, student forms, hostels, camps)

• respond to environmental complaints (dumping, pollution of storm water, failing septics, installation of septics)

• residential complaints (the worst!! People don’t want to talk to each other and problem solve like adults so they threaten each other by dragging me in to sort their shit out for them. If they don’t get the result they want, it’s my fault 🙄)

• emergency response (we suddenly had importance when covid came around, but the nation still wouldn’t acknowledge us as important because we’re not in the “response” side like nurses and doctors. We’re prevention, and nobody cares about us; bushfires, floods, air quality)

• mosquito detection (for diseases they carry and treat the areas that we find have carrier mozzies for diseases like Japanese encephalitis, Ross River, etc.)

• pest control, hoarding, land use, subdivisions, swimming pools, drinking water quality, disposal of dead carcasses, cemeteries, exhumation, outbreaks like gastro, too many things to list. We’re pretty much involved in everything that affects human health.

But we’re underpaid, underappreciated, perpetually short staffed and quickly burning out, and mostly unknown to those who don’t run businesses that require council registration by law.