Queensland bushfires: Two teens charged over devastating Peregian blaze - 7NEWS

Police have charged two teenagers following investigations into a devastating fire that ravaged the Sunshine Coast.

More than 5000 people from 2500 homes in the Peregian area were evacuated due to the fire, as firefighters worked tirelessly to protect properties.

Watch the video above

Queensland police allege a group of juveniles was spotted in bushland off Koel Circuit, where the massive blaze was deliberately lit.

The fire quickly spread in a south-easterly direction to Peregian Beach, damaging a significant amount of bushland before threatening housing and destroying one home.

Residents of some bushfire-affected Sunshine Coast suburbs have been allowed to return home.Image: AAP

Emergency Services battled the blaze for three days and were forced to evacuate residents from a number of neighbouring suburbs.

A 14-year-old Peregian Springs boy and a 15-year-old Coolum Beach girl have been charged with endangering particular property by fire.

Investigations are continuing.

Multiples blazes

Emergency services say children have ignited at least eight of the dozens of blazes which have contributed to a bushfire emergency across Queensland.

Some of the thousands of hectares burnt out by the Peregian bushfires on Tuesday afternoon.Image: Dan Peled/AAP

The Youth Justice Act allows a child to be let off with a caution if they have no criminal history, with community service and restorative justice orders also available to authorities.

A 12-year-old boy was dealt with under the Act on Tuesday over a deliberately-lit fire which destroyed bushland and a section of a storage facility at Woodridge on Monday night.

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Three young boys were also arrested for lighting a fire in a stormwater drain at Pimpama on the Gold Coast.

Three teenagers were questioned on Tuesday after allegedly admitting online they were responsible for a bushfire which has destroyed two homes and forced hundreds to flee the Sunshine Coast's Peregian area.

Two girls were also questioned following an alleged deliberately-lit fire in bushland at Ormeau on the Gold Coast.

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https://7news.com.au/news/disaster-and-emergency/queensland-bushfires-two-teens-charged-over-devastating-peregian-blaze-c-447981

2019-09-11 09:52:00Z
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Behrouz Boochani Is One of Australia’s Most Celebrated Writers, But He Can’t Step Onshore - The New Yorker

In his acceptance speech for the Victorian Prize, the largest literary prize in Australia, Behrouz Boochani said that he had imagined himself as “a novelist in a remote prison” while writing “No Friend but the Mountains,” which has swept Australian literary awards this year. (Its most recent honor is the National Biography Award, received last month.) Boochani indeed wrote the book in a remote prison, on Manus Island, where he has been for six years. But the romantic image conjured by the phrase “a novelist in a remote prison”—a solitary man cast out of society—is different from Boochani’s reality. He wrote surrounded by hundreds of other men, never in solitude. And Boochani is by no means an outcast from Australian society—he is one of the most celebrated cultural figures in the country. He just can’t come onshore.

Boochani, who is Kurdish, was born in Iran in 1983. Educated as a political scientist, he worked for a Kurdish magazine that came under attack from the authorities. Many of his colleagues were arrested, and Boochani fled Iran, making his way to Indonesia. He then made two attempts to get from Indonesia to Australia by sea. His second harrowing journey is described in “No Friend but the Mountains.” The smuggler’s boat sank; Boochani watched some of his fellow-refugees drown. The survivors were picked up by an Australian Navy ship. They thought they were saved. The asylum seekers were first taken to Christmas Island, where they were held for a month, then transported by plane to Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. They couldn’t have known this when they were boarding the boat in Indonesia, but Australia had just entered a new stage in its war on immigrants, which was then a decade old.

It began with extreme anti-immigrant sentiment in what seemed like the very far-right fringes of Australian politics—a political party called One Nation, founded by the parliament member Pauline Hanson, who had split from the (conservative) Liberal Party, in 1996. In a few years, Hanson’s rhetoric—she railed against the danger ostensibly posed by asylum seekers coming to Australia by sea—had gained enough traction that the leading political parties found it necessary to court the anti-immigrant vote. In 2001, a Liberal government refused entry to a Norwegian freight ship that was carrying more than four hundred rescued refugees. Within months, both of the leading parties had signed on to a policy known as the Pacific Solution: migrants who came by sea would now be detained offshore. Following a 2013 election, the policy was militarized, in both rhetoric and implementation. It was now known as Operation Sovereign Borders, and it deployed the Australian military to enforce a zero-tolerance policy toward maritime arrivals.

In a 2016 piece in the Times, the Australian journalist Julia Baird called the offshore detention centers “Australia’s asylum gulag.” It would have been more accurate to call them concentration camps. Before being transported to Manus, Boochani and other asylum seekers were issued identical oversized T-shirts and shorts and issued an identification number. In his description of being transported to Manus, Boochani writes:

And then they call out my number: MEG45. Slowly but surely I must get used to that number. From their perspective, we are nothing more than numbers. I will have to forget about my name. My ears start ringing when they call out my number. I try to use my imagination to attribute some new meaning to this meaningless number. For instance: Mr MEG. But there are a lot of people like me.

These people would be piled into corrugated-metal hangars, which were partitioned into tiny rooms with ineffectual giant fans. Some of Boochani’s most vivid descriptions concern the smells of the camp: the unrelenting odor of men’s bodies in extreme heat, the inescapable smell of foul breath in close quarters. The highest number of men—it was all men, many of them separated from their families—in the camp at one time was more than thirteen hundred, in January, 2014.

The offshore detention centers on Manus and Nauru islands were closed in 2008, under the Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, then reopened by the next Labor government, in 2012. Politicians framed the camps as both a deterrent measure and, consequently, a humanitarian one: in 2015, Prime Minister Tony Abbott claimed that the Pacific Solution saves lives at sea. Rudd returned to the office of Prime Minister in 2013, and he announced that no refugee arriving by boat would ever be allowed to settle in Australia. The language Australians used to describe people in need of international protection changed from “asylum seekers” to “illegal maritime arrivals.” (International law guarantees the right to seek asylum, regardless of the mode of transport or exact location of arrival.) Another phrase crept into Australians’ vocabulary: “queue jumpers” (based on the myth that asylum seekers are cutting in front of other immigrants).

In 2016, the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court ruled that Manus was illegal because it violated the constitutionally guaranteed right to liberty. In 2017, the United States accepted its first group of refugees from Manus—twenty-five people, which was far fewer than had been initially negotiated—and early last year took fifty-eight more. Also in 2017, the camp at Manus was officially closed: electricity and water were disconnected and the guards left. But hundreds of the men remain on the island, in what the Australian government calls “guarded centres,” in legal limbo.

Boochani’s book contains many descriptions of the varied tortures of waiting. Early on, describing the boat trip, he writes, “Living in anticipation vexes me sorely, it has always vexed me. The sense of cessation and inertia. It’s even worse when one’s own anticipation is compounded by that of others. At this particular moment we are all staring fixedly at one point, all desiring the same thing.” Later, about to be taken to Manus, he writes, “I have always despised waiting, always despised glancing at whatever is around me, staring for hours while I wait for something worthless. . . . I want the fate that awaits me. I want it to arrive immediately.” There is still no end in sight to Boochani’s waiting.

Boochani tapped his book out in text messages to his friend Omid Tofighian, who translated the book from Persian. Before the book was published, Boochani filmed a movie, “Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time,” which was shot in secret, on his cell phone. He has written many articles and essays for Australian and international media. He now holds a non-resident appointment there. In a different place, or at a different time, these professional recognitions, to say nothing of his many literary awards, would have signalled that Boochani is integrated into Australian society, and valued by it. But Australia’s extreme anti-immigrant turn, which preceded that of the United States by several years, has created a stark disjuncture between what the culture values and what the state allows. In an era when simply being a person in need of international protection makes a man a criminal, he cannot live in the society that has showered him with praise.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/behrouz-boochani-is-one-of-australias-most-celebrated-writers-but-he-cant-step-onshore

2019-09-11 09:01:00Z
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Some Queensland bushfire evacuees allowed to return home - 7NEWS

Thousands of people forced to flee a bushfire on Queensland's Sunshine Coast can now return to their homes as conditions ease.

Milder temperatures are giving bushfire crews across Queensland a brief opportunity to get blazes under control before the fire danger spikes again on Friday.

Watch the video above

Almost 80 fires are still burning from the southeast corner to Lockhart River in the far north and have destroyed 33,000 hectares of bushland since the crisis began late last week.

The most dangerous blaze at Peregian on the Sunshine Coast was downgraded overnight on Wednesday but thousands of Sunshine Coast residents were still displaced as the day began.

More than 5000 people from 2500 homes were evacuated within 24 hours after Monday's fire, which could have been deliberately lit, broke out.

By mid-morning Wednesday, police told residents of Peregian Beach, Marcus Beach and Castaways Beach – areas east of the National Park – it was now safe to go home. People evacuated from Peregian Breeze, Weyba and Weyba Downs cannot yet go home.

A destructive Sunshine Coast fire has been downgraded overnight but unfavourable weather is forecastImage: AAP

The fire is still not contained despite the help of a 737 aircraft that dumped 15,000 litres of fire suppressant on the flames on Tuesday. The region received some brief showers overnight but not enough to extinguish the fire. Little rain is expected anywhere in the state in the foreseeable future.

The Bureau of Meteorology says cooler temperatures and lighter winds on Wednesday and Thursday will be favourable for firefighters. However, the fire danger will spike again on Friday and Saturday when temperatures rise again.

Queensland Fire and Emergency Services said at least 17 homes and five commercial properties have been destroyed by bushfires since Thursday, with many more damaged. A special police task force has been established to investigate whether any of the fires were caused by arson.

Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said detectives had so far established ten fires - in Brisbane, Stanthorpe, the southeast and central Queensland regions - were deliberately lit. Eight of those were set by juveniles.

"Some of these have just been kids playing with fire; some deliberate and some repeat offenders," she told Seven's Sunrise program, adding some had been cautioned and others would be dealt with by the courts.

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"We had a circumstance where a child is playing with fire and got away.

"Every circumstance has been different but all dealt with in different ways. All have been acted on."

Acting Premier Jackie Trad renewed calls for parents to reinforce the message about the devastating effects these fires can cause.

"The really important thing is that parents ... make sure that they get very clear messaging across to young children who might be a little bit fascinated at this stage by all of the coverage around fires," she told Sunrise.

"This is, you know, just playing with fire can get really out of hand really, really quickly."

Ms Trad also said the government was honouring its commitment to boost the number of firefighters in Queensland, with 100 currently undertaking the recruitment process. Fire crews from around the country will arrive on Wednesday to lend more support to those on the ground.

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https://7news.com.au/news/bushfires/sunshine-coast-residents-evacuated-for-second-night-as-bushfire-rages-on-c-446298

2019-09-11 00:54:00Z
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Australia Bushfires Arrive Early, Destroying Historic Lodge in ‘Omen’ of Future - The New York Times

SYDNEY, Australia — The conservationists who built the secluded Binna Burra Lodge in Australia’s lush mountains more than 80 years ago hoped to protect and share the natural beauty of the surrounding rainforest.

But over the weekend, a bushfire destroyed the beloved getaway, one of Australia’s oldest nature resorts — drawing tears from neighbors and alarm from officials who warned that climate change and drought threatened to bring Australia its worst fire season on record.

“This is an omen, if you will,” said Andrew Sturgess, who is in charge of fire prediction for the state of Queensland, where the lodge had stood in Lamington National Park.

What is happening now “is a historic event,” he said at a news conference. “Fire weather has never been as severe this early in spring.”

Experts and some state officials, agreeing with that dire assessment, have been quick to identify climate change as a major cause — a controversial argument for some people here in a country that is heavily reliant on the coal industry, with a conservative government that has resisted making climate policy a priority.

But the recent flames spreading not just through the country’s dry middle but also into its rainforests are one of many data points that make the patterns and problems undeniable.

Fire season itself has become nearly a year-round trial, according to fire officials. Independent studies have also shown that the number of hot days in Australia has doubled in the past 50 years, while heatwaves have become hotter and longer. Extreme weather events, such as flooding and cyclones, have intensified in frequency and strength, as well.

“We’re seeing records breaking left and right,” said Robert Glasser, a visiting fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the former head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction

“This isn’t the new normal,” he added. “We’re going to see much worse — the pace of the change is going to accelerate.”

Image

A bushfire near a house in the rural town of Canungra in South East Queensland, Australia.CreditRegi Varghese/EPA, via Shutterstock

Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University, warned that Australia’s experience “is a sign of things to come.”

She said she was especially alarmed by the losses near the Binna Burra in the Gold Coast hinterland.

“It is devastating to see these usually cool and wet rainforests burn,” she said. “Although these remarkable rainforests have clung on since the age of the dinosaurs, searing heat and lower rainfall is starting to see these wet areas dry out for longer periods of the year, increasing bushfire risk in these precious ecosystems.”

Some experts believe an especially horrific fire season could be enough to push Australia to make climate policy more of a priority, at least in terms of planning for climate disasters.

In a radio interview Saturday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison promised continuing support for the affected areas and he said the federal government has been adding resources to help.

But already, the current fire season is straining firefighters and raising questions about whether Australia has the equipment and capacity to handle such extreme events.

On Monday, fire officials in Queensland and New South Wales identified dozens of bushfires still burning across both states.

Hundreds of firefighters are combating the blazes, and at least 20 structures have been destroyed over the past three days, including the Binna Burra Lodge. A volunteer firefighter was critically injured on Friday with burns to his hands, arms, legs, back and face.

And conditions do not seem likely to improve: Roughly 65 percent of Queensland and 98 percent of New South Wales is currently affected by drought, Ms. Gergis said, and meteorologists are predicting dry windy weather for the next few days, which threatens to spread the fires far and wide.

“It hurts many people of different generations, we all feel the pain,” said Steven Noakes, the chairman of the Binna Burra Lodge. Though his house was still intact, he said, many of his neighbors had lost their homes to the blaze and more destruction was expected.

“It’s a devastating impact and it generates a range of emotions,” he said. “It’s difficult.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/world/australia/bushfires-wildfires-climate-change.html

2019-09-09 05:12:00Z
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As U.S. and China Squabble, Australia Seizes Trade Opportunities - Wall Street Journal

A BHP freight train carrying Australian iron ore to port. Australia ships around a third of its overall exports to China. Photo: Ian Waldie/Bloomberg News

By

Rhiannon Hoyle and

Rhiannon Hoyle
The Wall Street Journal
• Biography
• @RhiannonHoyle
• rhiannon.hoyle@wsj.com

James Glynn

Sept. 8, 2019 8:00 am ET

SYDNEY—Luckily for Australia, the U.S.-China trade war happened.

Australia faced a personal-credit crunch, housing slump and weak business confidence, threatening to derail the longest-running growth streak in the developed world. Then it got a trade boost as U.S.-China relations soured.

Australia ships around a third of its exports to China, mostly commodities such as iron ore and coal that are used by heavy industry and in the building of apartments. Those exports are in demand as Beijing accelerates construction spending to head off damage caused by Washington raising tariffs.

Trade has been so buoyant that Australia logged its first current-account surplus—a measure of trade and financial flows with other countries—since 1975 in the second quarter of this year. That has provided some much-needed juice to Australia’s economy, on a 28-year run without a recession, as other headwinds to growth intensify. Australia’s gross domestic product expanded at its slowest pace since the financial crisis in the second quarter.

“It seems like a contradiction,” said AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver. “We are hearing all this talk about trade wars, which should obviously affect trade, and yet we have a record trade surplus that’s been far greater than anyone expected.”

Australia’s trade experience is unusual for a U.S. ally, some of whose economies have become collateral damage in the trade dispute. Germany’s exports in June fell 8% on a year earlier, and its current-account surplus has declined.

Global trade volumes grew 4.4% in the first quarter of 2018, when the first U.S. tariffs were imposed, from the same period a year before, according to the International Monetary Fund. But growth had slowed sharply by year’s end, with trade up 1.6% in the fourth quarter from the prior year. Trade volumes fell 0.4% in the second quarter of 2019 versus the same period a year ago.

Investors are skittish, evidenced by a global selloff of equities last month and the yield on the U.S. 30-year Treasury bond falling to a record low.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you think the U.S.-China trade war will cause lasting changes to global trade? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.

The trade war continues to take twists and turns. Chinese and American officials last week agreed to meet next month for high-level trade talks, although expectations for a breakthrough are low. The U.S. is in the process of introducing additional levies on clothing and other imports from China, while China is retaliating with its own measures.

To be sure, a sharper slowdown in global growth would hurt Australia. Businesses could become more reluctant to invest, consumers unwilling to spend and foreign demand for Australian goods could weaken.

Much depends on Beijing’s response. “The domestic stimulus in China to offset the trade dispute has contributed to a short-term boost to the Australian economy and significantly mitigated the impact of the trade disputes on us,” Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Guy Debelle said on Aug. 15.

Australia has logged a 30% rise in nominal exports to China since early last year, around the time the U.S. tariffs were first imposed, said J.P. Morgan, which thinks Beijing would again turn to stimulus rather than risk a deeper economic slowdown.

Adding ballast to that view is how Australia’s economy behaved during the financial crisis a decade ago. China’s huge economic-stimulus program drove up prices of iron ore—Australia’s No. 1 export—and helped to prevent a recession Down Under.

The iron-ore price has surged again this year. It rose 74% in roughly six months to a peak in July, as Chinese mills churned out steel at record rates to support the national economy and the market adjusted to supply cutbacks in Brazil.

While iron-ore prices have fallen by almost a third since then to US$88 a metric ton, some forecasters think they won’t decline much further, and might even rebound.

Investors fearful of global recession risks have also been buying gold. That is good for Australia, which counts the precious metal among its top exports.

Meanwhile, Australia appears to be benefiting from tighter U.S. visa procedures for Chinese students. Growth in higher-education enrollments by Chinese students in Australia far outpaced the U.S. in 2017-2018, said Australian education provider Navitas.

The question is whether Australia’s terms of trade have peaked. Many economists think the drop in iron-ore prices means it won’t be long before Australia returns to a current-account deficit.

Australia is also vulnerable if Beijing calibrates its trade response to hurt Washington’s allies.

For months now, Australian coal cargoes have struggled to pass Chinese ports quickly—a headache for miners and widely viewed as a political maneuver by Beijing. Australia irked China by tightening laws on political interference, and banning Huawei and ZTE from its 5G telecommunications network.

Australia faces bottlenecks that restrict its ability to displace U.S. exports to China. A severe drought means Australia can’t quickly add production of many farm goods. Most exports of liquefied natural gas are locked into 20-year contracts with other Asian customers.

There are also questions around the limits of China’s ability to stimulate its economy.

“People shouldn’t take China stimulus for granted,” said IBISWorld senior industry analyst Jason Aravanis.

Write to Rhiannon Hoyle at rhiannon.hoyle@wsj.com and James Glynn at james.glynn@wsj.com

Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-u-s-and-china-squabble-australia-seizes-trade-opportunities-11567944000

2019-09-08 12:00:00Z
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GDP is in the gutter and the rest of the economy is soon to follow - Crikey

It's increasingly evident that we've reelected a PM and government who have delivered the slowest economic growth in a decade. Not that you'd know it from listening to them.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Image: AAP/James Ross)

A year ago this week the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that GDP had grown by 3.4% in the 2017-18 financial year. With inflation hitting 2.1%, there were calls for an interest rate rise in The Australian Financial Review, The Australian and the various newsletters and notes from business economists and analysts.

Josh Frydenberg had just taken over the role of treasurer from Scott Morrison (who had knifed prime minister Malcolm Turnbull the previous month). The jobs boom, which had started in 2016, wasn’t slowing and the economy was surging.

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https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/09/05/gdp-2018-19-economy-morrison/

2019-09-05 02:18:04Z
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Australia's economy fails to fire - Sky News Australia

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEToar4Xdf8

2019-09-04 07:22:07Z
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