Brisbane

A man has been shot dead by police at Burpengary East, north of Brisbane.

Key points: An investigation is underway and those involved are being provided with support Police said the man "confronted" officers before being shot The 29-year-old man was known to police Police say they were executing a search warrant at a Margaret Street address just before 5:30pm when the shooting occurred.

Paramedics attended the scene but the man could not be saved.

Police said there was no threat to public safety and no-one else was being sought.

"Upon attending this address, police have encountered a 29-year-old man," Detective Superintendent Ben Fadian said.

"This man has confronted police, as a result police discharged their firearms."

Detective Superintendent Fadian said other people who were at the home at the time are providing statements and assistance to police.

He would not confirm details on who the people were but said the 29-year-old man was known to police.

No police sustained any physical injury but the officers involved have been offered support.

Others present at the address are also being offered support, he said, and extended "our condolences to the dead man's family".

Neighbour Graeme Thompson told the ABC the area is generally a quiet one.

"You occasionally get a bit of hooning ... doing a few donuts and things because it's so quiet out here," he said.

A crime scene has been declared over the entirety of the address and an investigation by the Ethical Standards Command is underway.

It will be subject to oversight by the Crime and Corruption Commission.

Thinking of subscribing for when the 14 days free ends. I just don't want to miss out on national stuff, but the Qld state coverage is sorely needed.

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It’s that time of week again! Share your favourite photo you took around Brisbane over the last week, and give encouragement and constructive feedback to others sharing their photos.

Dodgy backyard "rental" gone wrong, or something more sinister?

> Officers found a person deceased inside the trailer.

> Detectives have declared a crime scene and are working to confirm the identity of the occupant.

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> The draft South East Queensland Regional Plan, being released on Wednesday, reveals 900,000 new homes, units and townhouses will be needed to accommodate another 2.2 million people by 2046.

> Based on the items and chemicals located, it will be alleged the lab was used to produce methylamphetamine and psilocybin (magic mushrooms).

Closed Trapdoor From Living Room To Garage !

Open Trapdoor From Living Room To Garage !

Lab Set Up With Extractor Fan !

Inside Lab !

Chemists Processing !

Chemists Decanting !

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> An Uber driver was attacked with hammers in Brisbane's inner west during the early hours of Wednesday morning, police say. > The incident occurred when the 51-year-old man drove to Robertson Park at Taringa at 3:20am to pick up a passenger. > Police said a man approached the car and confirmed he was the pick-up client then got into the car and started assaulting the driver. > It is alleged two other men then got into the car and began attacking the driver with hammers. > Police said the trio pulled the victim out of the driver's seat and then stole his car. > The driver was taken to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital with serious head injuries where he is undergoing surgery. > Police are seeking help from the public to find the man's car, a 2020 white Toyota Camry with Queensland registration 775 CJ9. > Anyone who witnessed the attack or has relevant footage is encouraged to come forward.

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Those numbers are not a typo 😬 😬 😬

> A former childcare worker has been charged with 1,623 child abuse offences against 91 children, police have revealed.

...

> The AFP alleges the abuse occurred at 10 childcare centres in Brisbane between 2007 and 2013 and also between 2018 to 2022, at an overseas location between 2013 and 2014, and at one centre in Sydney between 2014 and 2017.

Set comments to sort by "new" to see them in the right order.

I work fairly close by and have never noticed any smell from this joint, but the local Facebook groups are always complaining about it. Possibly it only comes during some sort of production run they do overnight.

There's complaints about it going back 10+ years so not real sure what the latest action group expect to achieve. Also slightly unfortunate that the organiser of the action group's name is "Karen" what with the implications.

Cool acronym though.

> Karen Ruse says she has to choke back the urge to vomit whenever she is hit with a stench reminiscent of cat urine in Brisbane's south. > The Moorooka resident said she was regularly woken at night by a pungent odour she believed was wafting from the nearby EGR plastics factory on Evans Road, Salisbury. > Ms Ruse recently founded the Salisbury Moorooka Emissions Limitations Lobby, or SMELL, after previous lobbying attempts to reduce the smell failed.

As the saying goes, the bird who dares to fall is the bird who learns to fly.

But that’s not always the case in Australia’s high-risk property development sector—particularly in these turbulent times.

The Aviary, one of inner-city Brisbane’s biggest developments, is the latest major project to fail to take flight, succumbing to the prevailing headwinds of soaring construction costs and volatile market conditions.

It is understood the approved $450-million mixed-use precinct at Toowong—about 5km from the CBD—has been abandoned.

Touted as a “visionary new town centre set to become the beating heart of Brisbane’s inner-west”, speculation about the development has been rife with its cleared site sitting dormant for months.

“My understanding is it’s over … the building prices are so high it’s no longer viable,” an industry source told The Urban Developer.

An off-the-plan buyer in The Aviary’s sold-out 25-storey luxury apartment tower confirmed the development’s demise, saying he had been informed the project “was being cancelled” and all contracts were being terminated and deposits refunded.

“A real pity. It had great potential … I suspect there will be many more such projects doomed to failure.”

The Urban Developer also has been told The Aviary’s developers—State Development Corporation and White & Partners, the investment arm of the founders of Australia’s largest real estate group Ray White—are in the process of quietly offloading the shovel-ready site.

According to a local property industry insider, the prime 9000sq m holding fronting Sherwood Road and High Street is already under contract.

“We’ve been asking and we’ve been told that it's under due diligence to someone,” they said.

[Pictures]

However, parties involved in the deal remain tight-lipped. The buyer has not been disclosed or whether they intend to proceed with the approved development.

The Urban Developer attempted to contact State Development Corporation founder and managing director Ross McKinnon for comment but at the time of publication there had been no response.

The high-profile Brisbane project joins a growing list of major off-the-plan developments across the country being dumped before they get out of the ground in the face of multi-million cost blowouts.

A crippling barrage of escalating construction costs, labour shortages, rising inflation and interest rates is putting the crunch on projects, making an increasing number no longer feasible to be delivered.

In an early sign of what was to come, Daydream Property’s sold-out $140-million, 76-apartment Alegria residential tower project at Palm Beach on the Gold Coast was cancelled in June last year due to spiralling costs.

The following month, Melbourne’s most prolific high-rise developer Central Equity abandoned plans to build a $500-million luxury apartment tower at Surfers Paradise.

It blamed “turmoil” within the Queensland building industry for its decision to shelve its 56-storey, 486-apartment Pacific One tower development on the beachfront at Garfield Terrace.

Only a couple of days later, developer Sirona Urban pulled the pin on its $165 million luxury residential tower 28 Lyall in South Perth, citing surging construction costs and a dire shortage of labour for the decision.

The 38-storey, 98 apartment development near the Swan River in South Perth, a joint venture with Singapore-listed property giant Chip Eng Seng, would have been one of the tallest residential buildings in Perth.

In April this year, developer Keylin mothballed the $140-million apartment tower in its Oria development at Spring Hill on the Brisbane CBD doorstep despite holding sales contracts for more than 80 per cent of its 121 units.

Its shelving came just six months after the other half of the twin-tower development, which was to house the city’s first Movenpick Hotel, was scrapped.

‘Catalyst for revitalisation’

Across the road from the landmark Toowong Village—a retail and commercial complex built in the mid-1980s—The Aviary had been heralded as a catalyst for revitalisation, creating a lifestyle destination that would “reshape” Toowong and “change Brisbane’s western suburbs”.

The precinct’s scheme was designed by Nettletontribe and inspired by lauded US outdoor shopping mecca The Grove in Los Angeles.

It was to have comprised a 150-apartment tower, 30 curated retail spaces anchored by a Harris Farm Markets grocery outlet, a 20-level office tower, cinema and an outdoor dining quarter.

[Pictures]

The Aviary was given the green light by the Brisbane City Council in October 2020. Construction was initially scheduled to start the following year and completion was slated for later this year.

The last construction update posted on the development’s website in March 2022 noted it was “anticipating the builders commencing on site in the third quarter [of 2022]”.

“The development team is working closely with a builder and will provide more detail on the successful building company construction commencement date in the near future,” it said.

In early 2019, State Development Corporation and White & Partners paid Stockland $40 million for the Toowong site—then a 1.3ha amalgamation. Later the following year, the new owners carved off a 4000sq m portion occupied by a five-level office complex in a $25.15-million deal with an offshore investor.

“It’s disappointing The Aviary isn’t going ahead but at the end of the day the apartments were going to cost more to build than they had sold them for,” the industry insider told The Urban Developer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGAfKelQM10

“At the moment, if you’re not selling your units for about $14,000 per square metre the project’s not going to proceed … you’ve got no chance of getting it up.

“I think when they first went to market they were only $8000 per square … and they bumped it up a bit after going back to the buyers with price increases but it was still not enough to make it viable.”

The off-the-plan buyer who spoke to The Urban Developer says he put down a deposit on a $2.9 million, three-bedroom “sky villa” in The Aviary two years ago.

Since then, he says the developers had asked for a couple of extensions and incremental price increases, starting with an initial rise of about 15 per cent.

“But with the extra delays the cost escalations have gone even higher.

“And I think that's what killed them in the end. They just delayed it so long, with all the cost escalations they couldn't build to that price and make a decent profit out of it.

“I’m disappointed, certainly,” he says.

“To be fair, however, the time for development is not easy. We can all understand that. It's naive to think otherwise. It's a struggle for all these guys to try and make something happen.

“So, I didn’t begrudge paying extra from what we signed on for. That’s all fine, the costs have gone up … it’s just a fact of life, isn’t it?”

[Pictures]

Labour rate nation’s highest

Brisbane now has Australia’s highest hourly building labour rate, according to the latest construction market report by quantity surveying firm Turner & Townsend.

As a result of skilled labour shortages and strong infrastructure investment in preparation for the 2032 Olympics, Brisbane’s construction wages have overtaken Sydney and Melbourne, reaching an average of $100.42 per hour.

This compares to Sydney’s $98.30, Melbourne’s $96.80, Adelaide’s $91.20 and Perth’s $87.15.

Overall, however, Sydney is the most expensive city in which to build with an average total cost of $4439 per square metre followed by Perth’s $3962, Brisbane’s $3854, Melbourne’s $3823 and Adelaide’s $3585.

But according to Turner & Townsend property head Matt Billingham, with the ongoing challenges facing the industry and sheer volume of work expected to hit the Queensland capital's market during the next few years, Brisbane was at risk of becoming the country’s most expensive city in which to build.

“Brisbane’s market is impacted as a direct result of major investment in public infrastructure projects across health, transport and in preparation for the Olympic Games,” he said.

“It will be some time before high labour costs dissipate and the return of immigration eases shortages. With the housing slowdown, labour is shifting to major infrastructure and renewable projects as well as developments that are being planned for the Olympics in 2032.”

Given the uncertainty as well as economic and market turbulence continuing to batter the development sector, there is another avian-related saying with perhaps some more fitting words of wisdom.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Last day of trade today and it was surreal seeing so many empty racks when I went through earlier

I swear some of the people buying the $1 and $5 dresses will put them on marketplace later today for a healthy mark-up

It's going to be weird going through the myer centre and seeing myer closed.

> The authority investigated 549 alleged offences by landlords, owners and agents in 2021-22, and upheld 392, or about 70 per cent with no prosecutions launched during that time.

> It also handled around 40,000 disputes between renters and agents or landlords over the past two financial years.

> The RTA has not successfully prosecuted a single case or issued any fines for bad behaviour by landlords and agents over the same period.

Am I reading this wrong, or is the RTA basically just sending strongly worded emails and hoping for the best?

Seems if you're a landlord its best to just rip everyone off and gamble on getting away with it... with zero prosecutions in 2 years the worst that seems to happen is someone asks you politely to do the right thing :-\\

Righto, who was it?

It’s that time of week again! Share your favourite photo you took around Brisbane over the last week, and give encouragement and constructive feedback to others sharing their photos.

I may just be yelling at clouds here, but it seems to me like Discord is just IRC with pictures added. Or Skype with text added. Whatever analogy it is, what it isn't is a suitable replacement for a threaded forum like Reddit / Lemmy. Or you know... proper old-school forums like phpbb and invision and what not.

If you're a gamer and you want to talk some shit and type some shit and maybe share a funny meme (pronounced "me me" I believe) with your mates then Discord is great. But for a group of people who don't know each other randomly dropping in over the course of days and weeks to throw their 2 cents in about a topic? Utterly terrible. The conversation is current. If it happened more than 8 minutes ago it's old news. If you want to reference something its searching a wall of text full of inane chatter. And there's always some dickhead who thinks they need to reply to every single person commentating so its just a wall of their platitudes (lol! i like that! XD so random! Zxy likes this! Thanks for the update! Hey bby asl?).

Why are people constantly pushing to move communities to Discord? I see /r/Brisbane is trying to shuffle people there but ffs it's a chat room. Its MSN. Its AOL chat rooms. Its middle aged men chatting up 16/f/cali who are also middle aged men. Its a permanent stream of lightweight small talk that is like standing in a perpetual supermarket checkout line except you don't even get anything at the end. It makes me so mad I want to steal candy from a baby and take a dump in a policemans hat.

I use Discord for work cause I have a "Discord Bot" (its a bit of script and an API m8, lets not oversell the damn thing) which sends a message when people are ringing my office with their name / phone number / contact info and a bit of info about them to remind me who the heck it is. It's great for that cause I get a real time heads up that Jenny from accounts is chasing my TPS report again or whatever and I can ignore the call. Or its my Uber Eats driver out front with my kebab and I need to hurry up and disconnect from my pesky customer to I can give old mate the nod to bring me my large mixed with tabouli.

But you know what its not great for? Replying to a news article from a couple of days back with an update. Or adding some helpful extra information to someone answer to a query so future internetters will find it and not go on a wild goose chase like you did. Or adding your own hot take to a conversation that happened a few hours ago while you were at work and didn't get to interact with at the time but now you're on lunch eating a mixed kebab with tabouli and you want to throw your comment on top but TOO BAD loser, Zxy has commented 600 times since then and it's now 84 pages of scrolling back past stupid GIFs and bad me-mes and "hey bbys" from the thirstybois.

I forget why I started this now, but mostly I just wanted to rant about Discord being terrible for everything except the things IRC was good for and also pose the query: How to generate more local content? I can scroll Lemmy in general and see heaps of content... But I want my BNE me-mes. I want to know who's stuck under a bridge now, or why the trains are stopped, or to see some bad rental advice, or see another sweet Ibis photo (no seriously I do love those), or to hear someone lie about how the northside is better than the southside.

I will try and be the change I wish to see in the world too but I am but one man. Just one handsome, charismatic, charming, and humble man who only has so many hours in the day.

(PS - I stole this photo from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsDvyKdikPc, but I haven't watched it yet to know if its any good. It was just one of the first results for an image search of discord sucking and I CBF opening photoshop to make my own).

For anyone thats around, the ferny grove line has been deenergized from Bowen Hills to ferny grove

Expect delays of 60 minutes is the message.....

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