As it happened: Brisbane on February 26

Almost two weeks on from the Kangaroo Point car crash that saw her car hit by another vehicle, whose driver will face court next month, Amy MacMahon has given her first public update.

In a social media post, the South Brisbane Greens MP said while she was still very sore, with injuries still healing, she was now able to walk around and do small trips to the shops.

She thanked the healthcare workers who have been looking after her in hospital, and who have told her to take the “next few weeks to properly recover”.

“Sadly, this means I’ll be largely out of action for the next little bit while I do this. But my team is still in my office keeping everything ticking along until I’m back on board,” she said.

Thanks for joining us today. That’s where we’ll leave our live updates until tomorrow. Here are the headlines you might have missed:

• Bruce Lehrmann, who has been charged with two counts of raping a woman in Queensland in 2021, will face a committal hearing in June, with his lawyers to cross-examine witnesses.
• A Gold Coast man was chased by a car of people “brandishing weapons” before his suspected murder in 2002, police have revealed.

The white Ford Laser or a white Toyota Corona sedan police are seeking; Inset: Hogg (top) and Rosson.Credit: QPS

• The number of Australian children abducted in Japan has jumped by almost 10 per cent in the past year as families urge the Japanese parliament to pass laws making parental abduction illegal.
• The police watchdog raised concerns about poor tracking of police guns little more than six months before a senior constable allegedly used his official Glock pistol to murder two young men, including his former partner.
• Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has slammed the Coalition for advocating nuclear energy as the way to modernise the electricity grid, calling the idea “bulldust” and warning it is too expensive compared to wind and solar power.
• A $20 million annual buyback program for flood-prone Brisbane properties has been added to the Greens’ plan to ban all new housing and commercial development on the most high-risk land.
• Large parts of the Great Barrier Reef have been bleached as ocean temperatures soar above average as scientists fear conditions will worsen in coming weeks.

Scientists monitored 27 sites in the Great Barrier Reef and found moderate to severe coral bleaching.Credit: James Cook University, Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research

• Former constable Zachary Rolfe arrested a child hiding in a bin by pushing it over and dragging him from it, a year before killing Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker.

A Gold Coast man was chased by a car of people “brandishing weapons” before his suspected murder in 2002, police have revealed.

Iain Stewart Hogg disappeared in 2002.Credit: Queensland Police

Police say a witness has come forward with new information about the cold case suspected murders of Iain Hogg and Frederick Hugh Rosson, also known as Slim Johnson.

Investigators believe Hogg was shot and dumped in the Tweed River in northern NSW more than 20 years ago, but his body has never been found.

Detective Inspector Mark Mooney on Monday said a witness reported seeing Hogg being chased by three or four men in a white sedan into the underground car park of a Gold Coast apartment complex where the 45-year-old lived.

“The males were hanging out of the vehicle, verbally threatening Mr Hogg and brandishing weapons,” he said.

Read more.

Premier Steven Miles has spoken to journalists at the government’s 1 William Street offices in Brisbane after the regular Monday meeting of his cabinet.

The main takeaway is the group of Labor government ministers has signed off on moving ahead with proposed changes to media and victim access to Children’s Court matters.

Miles says consultation with the courts and other stakeholders will take place over the next week or so, with a bill to come before parliament “as quickly as we can”.

Here’s how he described what the government intends to do.

Our proposal is that the courts will be more open to media, victims, the family of deceased victims, and victims’ representatives.

It will clarify that the family of a deceased victim can attend court, it will provide a power for the court to direct only media representatives to leave and include a continuation of the prohibition on the publication of a child’s identifying information.

With the Greens seeking to ban new development on the highest risk sites for flooding across the city, and the LNP labelling that refloated plan “nonsense”, Labor’s City Hall campaign is trying to walk the middle.

Tracey Price spoke to reporters outside City Hall this afternoon.Credit: Matt Dennien

Tracey Price, Labor’s lord mayoral candidate, held a media conference in King George Square this afternoon to spruik her party’s platform on the issue which, like the Greens’, also proposes a return of a council buyback scheme – but at $5 million a year, not $20 million.

“The policy announced by the Greens today is extreme, and then we’ve got on the other hand the LNP allowing 90-odd storeys down in Kurilpa,” she said of the council plan also supported by the state Labor government.

“These are two very different, extreme policies and we are wanting a sensible approach.”

While Labor’s platform seeks to “restrict” development, Price said this was more about making sure drainage and infrastructure for new projects in high-risk sites was appropriate than stopping it.

Summer will not end without delivering a blast of scorching weather to Queensland, with maximum temperatures in Brisbane forecast to stay in the 30s.

Brisbane is facing a “low-intensity” heatwave this week, said Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Livio Regano, who noted the bureau is yet to issue a formal heatwave warning.

Brisbanites will be sweltering through 31, 32 and 33 degrees this week, before the temperature is expected to rise to 34 degrees on Saturday.

It will be even more uncomfortable in Ipswich, with 34 degrees forecast for Thursday, 35 degrees on Friday and 37 degrees on Saturday.

Such high temperatures are not unheard of at this time of year, but “what’s unusual is the persistence of this”, Regano said.

The long-term average maximum temperature for February is 29 degrees.

“Now that we’re at the end of February, it should be more like 27 or 28 degrees,” Regano said.

Large parts of the Great Barrier Reef have bleached as ocean temperatures soar above average, with scientists concerned that it will worsen in the coming weeks.

While the summer outlook had concerned scientists a mass bleaching event could occur, they breathed a sigh of relief when two tropical cyclones occurred.

Scientists monitored 27 sites around the Keppel Islands, in the Great Barrier Reef, and found moderate to severe coral bleaching.Credit: James Cook University, Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research (TropWATER)

But during routine surveys, James Cook University’s Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research scientist Dr Maya Srinivasan and her team noticed moderate to severe bleaching around the Keppel Islands.

“Once we were in the water, we could instantly see parts of the reef that were completely white from severe bleaching. Some corals were already dying,” she said.

Other parts of the reef are also showing signs of bleaching. More than 1000 kilometres away on Lizard Island, bleaching is the worst it’s been in five years.

Read more here.

There might be election billboards on the highway, and corflutes in the suburbs, but 40.5 per cent of voters in Moreton Bay City Council area won’t get the opportunity to exercise their civic duty on March 16.

Moreton Bay Mayor Peter Flannery – one of the politicians with a billboard on the highway – will be re-elected unopposed because no other candidate has nominated.

The councillors in divisions 1, 4, 7, 9 and 11 will also be re-elected unopposed.

“We won’t need to open polling booths in those five divisional areas, so have made the decision to close 25 booths that would have catered to electors in those divisions, along with one early voting centre at Bongaree,” said Electoral Commissioner Pat Vidgen.

“Unfortunately, it also means that we don’t require as many temporary election staff and have had to undertake the difficult task of informing around 148 people who had been already hired for this event about this.

“Over the next week or so we will be looking at how we can re-deploy those staff in other areas.”

To some business news now: Suncorp chief executive Steve Johnston says the impact of six severe weather events across November and December made for a challenging six months for its customers.

The Queensland-based insurer said average premiums for home insurance jumped by 9.9 per cent compared with the same half last year, while average premiums for motor insurance rose 15.9 per cent.

But in Suncorp’s first-half results announcement on Monday, the insurer reported cash earnings of $660 million, a 14 per cent jump from the same time last year.

Suncorp chief executive Steve Johnston said the insurer continued to grapple with the effects of inflation.Credit: Louie Douvis

“We remain acutely alert to the affordability challenging facing customers and continue to focus on driving greater efficiencies in our business,” Johnston said, noting the need for policy reform and mitigation investment to reduce the risk of extreme weather for communities and reduce insurance premiums for consumers in high-risk locations.

Johnston said price increases reflected ongoing supply chain inflationary pressures resulting in higher repair costs for cars and homes, an elevated level of natural hazards and higher reinsurance costs, effectively insurance for insurance companies.

Continue reading here.

Almost two weeks on from the Kangaroo Point car crash that saw her car hit by another vehicle, whose driver will face court next month, Amy MacMahon has given her first public update.

In a social media post, the South Brisbane Greens MP said while she was still very sore, with injuries still healing, she was now able to walk around and do small trips to the shops.

She thanked the healthcare workers who have been looking after her in hospital, and who have told her to take the “next few weeks to properly recover”.

“Sadly, this means I’ll be largely out of action for the next little bit while I do this. But my team is still in my office keeping everything ticking along until I’m back on board,” she said.

An Australian tourist has gone missing in Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls National Park, home to one of the world’s natural wonders, the country’s parks spokesman said.

Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority spokesman Tinashe Farawo said that the tourist went missing in the vast rainforest on Friday.

The Australian has been missing in the Victoria Falls National Park since Friday.Credit: istock

“We have a fully-fledged team that includes the police looking for the tourist. We have deployed sniffer dogs, drones and trackers on the ground,” said Farawo.

He said the tourist was 67 years old but did not share further details.

Such incidences are rare in Victoria Falls, a destination that attracts thousands of tourists from across the globe for its majestic water curtain that tumbles down more than 108 metres from the mighty Zambezi River to a gorge below, sending up a mist visible from kilometres away.

A few cases have been recorded in other parks. A German tourist who went missing in Matusadona National Park which teems with wild animals in northern Zimbabwe was found alive and in good health three days after he was reported missing in October last year.

AP