Category Archives: Extreme weather

AFP foil plan to import $1.6bn of liquid meth in coconut water bottles – as it happened

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People have been cleared to return to their homes as flood threat eases in Victoria, but the Bureau of Meteorology is warning of renewed flooding in parts of NSW. This blog is now closed

Chalmers on the size of government debt and making it ‘sustainable’

The treasurer is asked whether the government will consider rethinking taxes like GST and PRRT.

We have already found $22bn in savings, $28.5bn in budget improvements overall. We kept real spending growth flat across the forward estimates. We have got the debt down over the forward estimates. We have let 99% of the temporary revenue surge from higher commodity prices flow through to the budget.

That is good progress when we have shown in doing that … you can move sensibly on all fronts, restraint, trimming spending, sensible tax reform, you can make the budget more sustainable and that will be the task of the two or three budgets remaining in this parliamentary term as well.

We need to work out how do we maintain a focus on Australians with a disability and their families, how do we put them front and centre, and at the same time make sure that spending on the NDIS is sustainable and important part of that is making sure we get value for money for every dollar that is spent in what is a really important, really, really important service that we provide to Australians.

I do understand there is a substantial part of the community that would prefer that that PRRT take was higher.

We haven’t been working up an option to do that to change the PRRT arrangements but the treasury has been commissioned by my predecessor and by his predecessor to do some of this work around the taxing point in the PRRT.

We do want to make sure Australians get a good return for their resources. We need to balance that against the investment that’s been made into the sector. When I get that advice from I will engage in it a meaningful way and I will listen to it.

We have seen I think as you acknowledged in your first question, on this topic, company taxes are up quite substantially. That’s a good thing and we have let that flow through to the budget. The PRRT, there’s a modest increase. I will wait to see what the treasury advises us on the conclusion of the review that my two predecessors put in place.

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Storm Nalgae: floods and landslides in Philippines kill at least 45

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Officials revise death toll after fast-moving waters sweep away entire families and damage almost 500 houses

The Philippines has significantly revised down the death toll from a tropical storm ravaging the country, saying only 45 people have been killed.

The civil defence office had earlier reported 72 dead, 14 missing and 33 injured, but civil defence officials acknowledged rescue teams sent to the country’s flood-hit south on Friday had erred in their reporting, leading to some deaths being counted twice.

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Lismore residents can take their homes with them under $800m buyback program

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If residents choose not to move their home or if it is not possible, they will be sold or stripped for materials

In the nine months since floods gutted Harper Dalton’s South Lismore home, he has been waiting for two things: a land buyback and the ability to pick up the redwood home and move it to higher ground.

On Friday it emerged that northern rivers residents eligible for buybacks under a new joint federal and state $800m housing scheme will be allowed to do just that.

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Federal budget 2022 reply speech live: opposition leader Peter Dutton to respond to Labor’s October budget – latest updates

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Leader of the opposition to give his reply to the treasurer Jim Chalmers’ first budget. Follow the day’s news live

The Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi will give notice of a private senator’s bill she will introduce today aiming to halt the indexation on student loans and increase the repayment threshold to above the median wage.

Faruqi says it is one way which would help ease the cost of living burden on people with student debt:

Student debt is no small problem. About three million people in Australia have the burden of student debt.

At a time when the cost of living is biting hard, governments can no longer ignore the student debt crisis and its impacts.

What we have said all the time is that we want wages to grow, and we want them to stay growing. Not to have a short-term growth and then have at the expense of potentially higher unemployment.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is we’ve got to get an IR system that drives productivity. That’s not about working harder for less, it’s about working smarter. It’s about creating the environment where people use new technology, where they innovate, where they share ideas, where they open new markets, where they have more skilled people.

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Treasurer says Taylor’s fingerprints ‘all over’ energy policy chaos – as it happened

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Over on Sky News, the questions were all about the next budget:

Host: Joining us live now in Canberra is the prime minister, Anthony Albanese. Prime minister, good morning to you. So, a safe budget to pay for your election commitments. Are tax increases and spending cuts next?

Hang on, Pete. We’ve just had the budget last night. You’re now talking about future budgets. Let’s talk about what we did last night. What we did last night was to fulfil our election commitments, provide cost-of-living relief with cheaper childcare, cheaper medicines, more paid parental leave, more support for affordable housing. And we want to get wages moving again. We did all that without putting pressure on inflation by targeting our investments in things like infrastructure, improving the National Broadband Network, making sure that there’s that growth in the economy without putting pressure on inflation. That was our focus last night. And we managed to achieve it.

Look, we inherited a trillion dollars of debt, Peter, as you know. We inherited a trillion dollars of debt with not much to show for it. What we did last night was to make $22bn of savings. We took the revenue gains that have come through, 99% of those revenue increases from the higher costs of fuel and energy, we put them straight to the budget bottom line, 99% of them. So it was a responsible budget that saw a significant drop in the deficit to $37bn from what was anticipated. That is a responsible thing to do. Because we want to make sure that we fight inflation because that is necessary if we’re going to get real wages moving in the way that we want them to.

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Cyclone Sitrang: 24 dead as Bangladesh seeks to restore power to millions

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Nearly 10,000 homes were destroyed or damaged by storm that flooded cities and forced a million to evacuate

At least 24 people have died and millions were without power after Cyclone Sitrang struck Bangladesh, forcing the evacuation of about a million people.

Most of the deaths were from falling trees, police and government officials said, with two dying in the north on the Jamuna river when their boat sank. A Myanmar national working on a ship also died by falling off the deck, an official said.

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Deadliest summer for heat-related deaths in Arizona’s biggest county

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Maricopa county’s 359 heat-associated fatalities this year outpace 339 deaths confirmed in 2021, figures show

This summer was the deadliest on record for heat-related deathsin Arizona’s largest county, with public health statistics this week confirming 359 such deaths just days before the end of the six-month heat season.

The jump comes amid a growing homelessness crisis in the area and raises questions about how to better protect vulnerable people in the desert south-west as temperatures soar.

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Narrabri evacuated as flood waters enter homes in saturated northern NSW

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Hydrologist says flood levels similar to last year but this time the water has nowhere to go, prolonging the disaster

About 1,500 residents in Narrabri, in the north-west slopes of New South Wales, have been told to evacuate as the flooding crisis continues across swathes of eastern Australia.

There were 121 current emergency warnings in place across NSW on Tuesday, including 22 directing people to evacuate or move to higher ground, as swollen rivers threatened homes.

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Australian budget forecasts heavy hit to economy due to floods and disasters

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Estimates growth will lose about quarter of a percentage point during the current quarter, or about $5bn in economic activity, because of flooding

The increasing frequency of weather disasters will take its toll on the economy in the near term and force the government to fork out hundreds of millions of dollars to build resilience for more to come.

As Australia endures its third La Niña event in as many years, the budget estimates growth will lose about quarter of a percentage point during the current quarter, or about $5bn in economic activity, because of the flooding across the country’s south-east.

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Australia live flood updates: body found in search for woman swept away in NSW; Echuca locals watch levee as they wait for flood waters to peak

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Another low pressure system is moving towards Victoria down the NSW coast, which is likely to bring rain to Gippsland

Daniel Andrews says there will be a flood update at 11.30am

Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, is at a school in Seaford in Melbourne’s south-east, announcing $1.6bn to upgrade schools and kindergartens. Before he goes into the details, he’s providing a short flood update.

It’s not expected that they will go higher than the peaks that were recorded during the beginning of this flood event. But it is an anxious time out there.

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SES urges residents of several NSW areas to evacuate – as it happened

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Flood waters in Victorian border towns reach record levels as residents of several NSW towns are urged to evacuate. This blog is now closed

Taylor: potential inflation decrease ‘a good thing’

Taylor is now discussing inflation and says the Coalition believes inflation will be down to 2.5% in the next financial year according to Labor’s forecasts.

I’ve got to say many of the investments I’ve seen out in regional New South Wales have added to productivity, very significant impact.

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Australia and Japan sign new security deal; flood waters peaking in northern Victoria – as it happened

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Volunteers place 195,000 sandbags in and around Echuca, which could reach devastating 1993 flood levels. This blog is now closed

Australian ultrarunner on pace to break daily marathon world record

Did you know that you have the genes to be a long distance runner?

If you go back to our early genetics, basically, everyone has the genes to be a distance runner. Back 50,000 years ago, our survival depended on us being able to walk and jog long distances to be able to get food, and catch animals.

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Lismore residents warned of major flooding as heavy rain falls along the east coast

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Water is spilling over a levee in the Murray River border town of Echuca-Moama, as residents anxiously wait to see if it will hold back flood’s peak

Lismore residents have been warned to brace for another round of flooding as heavy rain falls along the east coast, and the Murray River town of Echuca-Moama anxiously waits to see if its levees will hold back the forecast peak on Sunday.

The Murray River at the Echuca Wharf gauge was expected to exceed the 1993 flood levels of 94.77 metres AHD on Saturday afternoon, and reach a peak of 95m on Sunday or Monday.

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NSW and Queensland brace for severe storms and flooding as wild weather lashes eastern Australia

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Large parts of both states put on notice as emergency services forecast large hailstones and heavy rain

Severe thunderstorms will bring large hailstones and a flash-flood risk to large parts of New South Wales and Queensland, with coastal regions in both states to be hit by heavy rain belts.

“We’re bracing for significant rainfall right across NSW,” the NSW flood recovery minister, Steph Cooke, said.

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Severe weather warning for NSW and Victoria – as it happened

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Victoria is expecting the worst flooding from Sunday as NSW braces for more extreme weather. This blog is now closed

Plibersek is asked to explain a little bit more about the funding. Labor pledged a similar amount before the election, so is this new money?

This is additional because it’s in our first budget, so it’s delivering on the promise we made.

We agreed with that billion dollars of spending and we’re saying that’s not quite enough.

We need to spend $1.2bn over coming years and it’ll mean things like a new research centre in Gladstone, employing scientists to do really critical work on coastal ecosystems.

Well, it means that we can do important projects like stabilising riverbanks, replanting mangroves, reed beds and seagrass meadows to improve the water quality that’s coming from the land into the reef.

It means that we can work with traditional owners who are controlling crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks.

Together we hope to these measures can start to turn around the health of the reef, it is a still a beautiful natural wonder of the world. We’ve got a little bit of a breathing space in the last couple of years. We’ve seen some of those corals come back because we’ve had cooler weather and we need to build on that to protect and restore.

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‘Nature is striking back’: flooding around the world, from Australia to Venezuela

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Heavy rain and rising waters continue to take a deadly toll in countries including Nigeria, Thailand and Vietnam

It has been a drenched 2022 for many parts of the world, at times catastrophically so. A year of disastrous flooding perhaps reached its nadir in Pakistan, where a third of the country was inundated by heavy rainfall from June, killing more than 1,000 people in what António Guterres, the UN secretary general, called an unprecedented natural disaster.

While floods are indeed natural phenomena, a longstanding result of storms, the human-induced climate crisis is amplifying their damage. Rising sea levels, driven by melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of water, are increasingly inundating coastal areas, while warmer temperatures are causing more moisture to accumulate in the atmosphere, which is then released as rain or snow.

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Storms and giant hail forecast for eastern Australia, raising risk in some flood-hit areas

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Bureau of Meteorology warns of heavy rain, flash-flooding and possible damaging hail in parts of Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia

Rain, thunderstorms and giant hail are forecast for much of the east coast, raising the risk of flash-flooding in areas already reeling from extreme weather.

The Bureau of Meteorology has warned of showers and thunderstorms from northern Queensland, down through New South Wales and into northern Victoria and eastern South Australia into the weekend.

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Floods and warm weather perfect storm for Japanese encephalitis outbreak in Australia, researchers warn

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Modellers say those within 4km of an infected piggery potentially vulnerable, meaning 740,546 people at risk of mosquito-borne virus

Warming temperatures combined with flood waters could leave almost 750,000 Australians vulnerable to Japanese encephalitis – a disease that until last year was confined to Asia and far-northern Australia.

The mosquito-borne disease was first detected on the Australian mainland in 1998, but its range expanded dramatically earlier this year. Cases were reported in dozens of southern piggeries (pigs are one of the main carriers of the virus) and there were also 31 confirmed cases in humans and six deaths.

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Severe drought torments British Columbia, a year after devastating floods

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Lack of rainfall takes toll on Canada’s ‘wet coast’ as experts warn of further extreme weather events fueled by climate change

Nearly a year ago, flood waters inundated swaths of south-western British Columbia. Mudslides destroyed sections of highways and swollen, turbid rivers washed away houses and bridges.

Now, the region has the opposite problem: months of drought have begun to take a toll on what was once dubbed Canada’s “wet coast”.

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Amount of ocean heat found to be accelerating and fuelling extreme weather events

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The rate of warming in the top 2km has doubled from levels in the 1960s, review finds

The amount of heat accumulating in the ocean is accelerating and penetrating ever deeper, with widespread effects on extreme weather events and marine life, according to a new scientific review.

One of the report’s authors said the devastating floods in eastern Australia had likely been made worse by warming oceans. The risks would continue to rise as the ocean took up more heat, the report said.

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