Brisbane News Live: Why Greater Brisbane’s centre shifted 80m in a year; One in 20 Brisbane units sell at a loss

Our top story today is about Brisbane and where the centre of our city actually is.

The centre of population in Greater Brisbane has moved 80 metres further south and is now in Highgate Hill, according to new data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

During the 2022-23 financial year, the population of Greater Brisbane increased by 81,200 people (3.1 per cent), the third-highest growth rate behind Perth (3.6 per cent) and Melbourne (3.3 per cent).

You can read more here.

Rarely a day goes by when the premier is not asked about the Olympics and his rejection of a new 55,000-seat stadium at Victoria Park.

This morning, Steven Miles said he was dissatisfied with former Brisbane lord mayor Graham Quirk’s review of potential Olympic venues.

“The task we gave the review was to either endorse the Gabba as intended, or come back with a cheaper option. They came back with an option that would cost a billion more and I couldn’t justify doing that,” Miles told ABC News Breakfast.

Fly-in “surge squads” of police will be deployed across Queensland to target youth crime and focus on offences including vehicle theft, robbery and domestic violence.

The “surge police” will first be deployed to Ipswich and Logan under a strategy codenamed Operation Whiskey Legion.

Premier Steven Miles was on breakfast television this morning spruiking the new police operation.

“This will be a dedicated flying squad. They’ll first be deployed to Ipswich and Logan, but then to other regional areas,” Miles told ABC News Breakfast. “The program has had some success already in a number of policing districts and they’re using really high-quality intelligence to identify where they should go and what the most appropriate intervention in that community will be.

“At the end of the day, this is about preventing crime, intervening early and intervening with offenders before their offending escalates, so that we can stop that offending in its tracks.”

Brisbane has been pummeled with 56 millimetres of rain since 9am yesterday, and there is more to come.

The Bureau of Meteorology predicts cloudy weather today, with a very high chance of rain, easing to showers in the afternoon and becoming less likely in the evening.

Brisbane could get up to 25 millimetres today, but only 1-2 millimetres of rain is expected over the Easter long weekend from Thursday to Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Seqwater flood operations centre moved to “lean forward activation” due to the heavy rainfall, and was closely monitoring dam levels, rainfall and inflows into dams.

Seqwater advised that gated releases may be required from North Pine Dam, while operational releases from Somerset into Wivenhoe Dam occurred yesterday and were likely to happen again today, to balance the storage levels across both dams.

Releases from Wivenhoe Dam were not expected, but several ungated dams were spilling excess water, with people downstream urged to stay away from fast flowing or deep water near waterways and flood plains.

Two people have been airlifted to hospital and 11 others have minor injuries after a tourist bus crashed into a creek in Queensland’s far north.

The Greyhound bus was travelling through Tully, 140 kilomtres south of Cairns, when it hit a guard rail and crashed into a small creek on Tuesday evening.

Paramedics assessed 13 people who were on board the bus for injuries.

Two people were airlifted to hospital including a woman in her 50s with a leg injury and a man in his 20s with back injuries.

Eleven other people were taken to local hospitals with minor injuries.

Police said they are investigating the crash and called for anyone with dashcam of the incident to come forward.

You don’t need us to tell you that it’s wet, wet, wet outside today. Here is the forecast for the rest of this Easter week …

University of Queensland researchers have developed a way to predict whether a child is likely to develop sepsis and go into organ failure.

Associate Professor Lachlan Coin, from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, said sepsis was a life-threatening condition where a severe immune response to infection causes organ damage.

Many childhood illnesses have similar symptoms, and sepsis is best treated when recognised early.

“Our research involved more than 900 critically ill children in the emergency departments and intensive care units of four Queensland hospitals,” Coin said.

“Blood samples were taken from these patients at the acute stage of their infection, and we analysed which genes were activated or deactivated.”

The scientists were able to identify patterns of gene expression that could predict whether a child would develop organ failure within the subsequent 24 hours, and whether the child had a bacterial or viral infection, or a non-infectious inflammatory syndrome.

Also in the news this morning:

And in culture, lifestyle and sport: