 Well, we're coming to the end of one of the most extraordinary fortnights in Queensland's history. In that time, we've seen three-quarters of our state devastated and torn apart by raging floodwaters. Tragically, those floodwaters have seen loss of life. Very sadly, I can advise you that this morning the search and rescue teams located another woman who was found deceased near Grantham. This brings to the total numbers of deaths this week to 16. We send our sympathies and our condolences to her family and we say to the community of Grantham, we mourn your loss. We've not only seen people lose their lives, we end this week with many people still missing and unaccounted for. Some 53 people today are missing or unaccounted for and 12 of those we continue to hold very grave concerns for. We've also seen the devastating loss of homes, of businesses and of communities and a massive dislocation of people across the state as roads were cut and as people were taken out of their homes. The number of communities in total that have been affected either by inundation or by being cut off and isolated by this event over the last fortnight across our state now numbers 86. Included in that number are some towns that were evacuated or experienced flooding on more than one occasion. A number of towns twice and a couple three times in that time. We've seen towns for the first time in our history whole towns evacuated. Theodore, the very first town in Queensland to have a full evacuation of the town. Condomine joined shortly after and of course condomine has been totally evacuated twice in the last fortnight. The number of people who have been, who are currently living in evacuation centres, emergency accommodation numbers 4,436. But we've seen a further, we've seen in addition to that 7,502 people in total register as being out of their homes. And we know that there are many thousands more who haven't necessarily registered but are out staying with friends and family because they haven't been able to stay in their own homes. So as I said, thousands of people out of their own homes and very dislocated at the end of this week. The evacuation, those who have been evacuated are being accommodated in 50 operational evacuation centres. Those centres are being staffed by volunteers and those 4,400 people are receiving food, shelter, counselling and a range of other assistance including working through the entitlements that they now have to emergency relief. This is a massive exercise right across the state and one that is set to continue for a very long time. The number of houses affected are still being tallied but the current estimate across Queensland sits at somewhere around 17,500 homes, affected by flooding in this crisis. They've also been joined by more than 3,000 businesses that have been affected by the flood waters. We've seen highways and railways cut and many of them are unlikely to return for some time. I'm very pleased that we've seen the rivers, what seems to be very steady at the moment in Gundawindi and we no longer hold the concerns for Gundawindi that we held this morning and we're very relieved along with the town of Gundawindi that it is not going to join those 86 towns and cities that have experienced the devastation of these flood waters. Can I say today that I have spent quite a bit of time in the Lockyer Valley and a lot of that in the town and with the people of Grantham. What we saw start on Monday night or Monday afternoon into Woomba and the havoc that it has wrecked in the whole of that Lockyer Valley without doubt is absolutely devastating. What I saw can only compare to a war zone or perhaps a cyclonic hurricane. The way that the town has been literally picked up and turned around and deposited in fields and roads is going to be very difficult for people to come home from the evacuation centres and see some of their precious possessions and the things that matter to them strewn across highways and across fields. There's going to be a lot of heartache in the Lockyer Valley for a long time and we're working very hard to ensure that we can get those people back into their homes as quickly as possible. As we end this week I wanted to say a very special and very sincere thank you to my fellow Queenslanders, to everybody who cooperated with the emergency services and made their job that much easier, to everybody who chipped in and lent a hand to their neighbours, many of them putting their own lives at risk. We've got hundreds of local heroes out there and we're going to identify and recognise every one of them when the time comes. To everybody who has sent donations, who has in some way reached out to lend a hand to others, the ability for our community to endure this experience is helped by what other Queenslanders have done. I also want to thank our fellow Australians. We have been overwhelmed by the support that we've had from other governments, from other non-government agencies, the additional staff that we've been provided with and we've been overwhelmed by the messages of love and care from people all over Australia and their donations to our appeal. It certainly helps to endure an event like this when you know that you're not alone and the people of Australia this week have certainly made us know that we are not alone. I'd also like on behalf of all Queenslanders to say to our emergency workers on the front line, to our police, to our emergency workers, to our fire and rescue teams and to all of those in the Army who are out there helping. This has been an extraordinary fortnight for you and we understand just what job you've done on our behalf. Thank you. We are all very, very proud of you. You've done a job that does us credit not only nationally but internationally and we know you've got many, many weeks and months of hard work ahead of you. As we end this fortnight of devastation, we end it with a determination to begin the process of cleanup, then recovery and then rebuild. We are on the job out there right now putting plans in place across three quarters of our state to recover from this event and to put Queensland back on its feet right where she belongs. So I thank you all for the effort so far and I hope and pray that Mother Nature is leaving us alone for us to get on with the job of cleaning up and recovering from this event. Did you want to add anything? Premier, the only message I would add is that in this next week I would just ask the community not to be complacent. We still have a lot of water out there in particular areas of the state. It is dangerous and I would ask that we want to do everything we can to avoid any single tragedy. So please be careful, don't be complacent about this flood and the situation we find ourselves in. Thank you. Any questions? There's not really any, you know, ultimately our economy, our industry, tourism all those things and it's very, very wide reaching. Absolutely. People have not only lost their homes and they've been and in some cases tragically their loved ones. Many people have lost their livelihoods. The agricultural sector is reeling from what this flood waters have done to that sector out in the Lockheer Valley today which is the food bowl of Queensland and in fact the food bowl for many parts of Australia. Projeuze for example is shipped out of there every day to Darwin. People have totally lost their crops and it will take a very long time to get them back on their feet but that's what we're going to do. One of our big industries, the mining industry equally, some 32 mines in the Boan Basin, all big export mines currently non-operational with volumes, vast volumes of water in their pits that will have to be pumped out. Again we will work with that industry but we understand that that's going to be a problem as is the destruction that's been caused to the rail network that links our produce and our minerals to port and the export chain. This is a very human tragedy and I'm very focused on the people side of this but part of that people side is making sure that we can get people back to work as quickly as possible and we can see an industry functioning normally and that means we will be putting priority particularly on getting those export rail lines back and operational for both the agricultural and the mining sector. One message I would send to Australians is our tourism industry needs you to come and support it. Sometime in 2011, make Queensland your holiday destination. I know many people want to know how they can help Queensland get back on our feet. One of the best things you can do for us is bring your family to one of the great holiday destinations. That is a way of coming injecting some support into the communities and the local economies right across our state. All of those people who have experienced floods in this last fortnight would love to see people from the rest of Australia bringing their families here and having a holiday. There is also devastating loss of many small businesses. One of the great backbones of the Queensland economy is the small business sector and if you get a chance to have a look anywhere across the Brisbane Ipswich, Rockhampton and Emerald you'll just see business after business that's had all of its stock lost, all of the shop gone through with water and their staff not able to get to work so some of them not able to open their doors. It is going to be a very difficult time wherever you look and as I said yesterday many people have not only lost their homes but they've also lost their business or their workplace has been destroyed so wherever they look on whatever part of their lives they're on very uncertain ground. So it is a very fragile time I think and I expect that over the coming weeks we're going to see people who are grieving who have suffered terrible loss feel the process of grief. They're going to feel angry, they're going to feel hurt, they're going to feel frustrated. We are going to need to wrap our arms around them at a personal level, at a community level and at a government level and that's what we intend to do. Is there a concern that people might be trying to get in the way of the reconstruction and the tourism industry with you know a vital industry would suffer as well as all the other industries? Well I wouldn't want, when we say that three-quarters of our state have been affected that doesn't mean that we still don't have beautiful beaches and places like Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, the Whitsundays, Gold Coast all of those places have not been flood affected and they'd love to see you come and visit. I am as keen to find answers to some of the questions particularly about the Toowoomba event and to get a better understanding of this entire flood experience as well as have a look at a comprehensive review as we always do after every disaster but of course this is of a significantly different magnitude. How the response was what can we learn from it, what did we do very well, where did we make mistakes, what could we do better next time and we'll certainly be giving thought over the coming days to the best mechanism to do that. Right now as I said this morning we are still getting basic essentials, clean water, electricity and food to people and until that job is done that's going to be my number one focus but yes looking into all of the background of this event is something that we'll be doing and we'll be doing in a public, transparent way so that people can participate and people can understand what has happened. Are you happy with the way that the Dam has been managed exactly in the way it's meant to be and it has worked in the way that it was originally envisaged but I'm not a hydrological engineer and I don't pretend to be, these are the sorts of questions that we would look at in any review. The Dam has never experienced the pressure that it was under this week so this is a first time for a Dam that's almost 40 years old so of course we're going to go and have a really good look at everything that happened, all the procedures, the decision making points because that's what this Dam was built for and we want to go and see how it functioned and again whether there's any lessons. You said it's safe now, was it not safe before? What was not safe? You were speaking about the Dam at one point and you said the Dam is now safe, this is the last day I saw it. I just wondered was there a point at which it wasn't safe, did you receive a briefing that suggested the Dam, there might be some concerns about its safety and its ability to hold it for you? No, there was some, I guess when I did try to talk about this earlier it is a bit technical but I'll give it a go. Basically the Dam has a series of gates and the operators of the Dam open those gates in controlled ways to let out specific amounts of water on a formula that they calculate to protect the Dam wall. At a certain point if the Dam exceeds a certain bulk the Dam will operate those gates itself and so it becomes what's known as an uncontrolled release. We came very close to an uncontrolled release but it didn't actually get there so that's the sort of thing that technical hydrological engineers will do an assessment of on behalf of government. But of course we were worried about that, you'd much rather be in control of your Dam than the Dam being in control of itself. Premier, you visited Grantham today, was that one of the hardest things you've had to see so far? I've spent a fortnight witnessing some pretty tough stuff. A lot of people, it doesn't really matter where you are, whether you're in Rockhampton or Emerald or Jericho down in places like Condomine, wherever you are, if you've lost your home, if you've lost your business, if your community is devastated it feels terrible. And when you have a whole city going through the same thing at once, you can really feel the weight of their loss. I think the difference in the Lockyer Valley and in Grantham is that unlike many other parts of Queensland where this floodwater, these floodwaters came up with a degree of notice and everyone knew they were coming and could make some preparations, not only moving their furniture but prepare themselves mentally for what was a potentially very scary event. For the people of Grantham, no warning, this came out of the blue, this was like a bomb descending on them from the heavens. And so I think there's still a lot of shock, disbelief, people wanting to tell me their stories, I think because they wanted to know that people believed them because what they saw for them was so unbelievable. And there is no other part of Queensland that has experienced what that community experienced and the whole community experienced it. This is a tiny place. So everybody in that community went through a deeply shocking traumatic event. And they're still very early in the process of absorbing that and understanding it. And we're going to be working with them very carefully for a long time. What are some of the things that they were saying to you today? Well, I think you've seen some of people talk for themselves and, you know, I'll let them tell their stories in their time and in their way. And some of them are ready to talk publicly and some of them aren't. But just to say that the stories they told me certainly made me much more aware of the experience that they'd been through. And I have a much better understanding of the absolutely terror that they have lived through. I understand the Deputy Premier has put out a release on this, but we're very pleased. The East Bank part of the Mount Crosby Water Treatment Plan has not suffered quite as much damage as we originally had thought. And we're much more confident now that the water balance will make it through this event. But there is a very clear message to everybody in Brisbane and in Ipswich. There are thousands of our fellow members of these communities who have a big job to do over the coming week and that's to clean their homes, to clean their streets. And that means they're going to be needing to use a lot of water. And we want them to use that water because we want those places clean. So for those of us who haven't been flooded, and we might just have a little bit of dirt on the driveway, now is not the time for us to be using water unless we really need to be. So obviously, where there's plenty of supply for basic needs, bathing, drinking, but for those of us who haven't been flooded affected, one of the best things you can do over the next couple of weeks is not use water that you don't need to use because we need to make sure that those people who have got a big water task in cleaning up their homes can get on and do that. Public, not only because we want them to have the best chance of recovering their lives, but from a public health perspective, we want this mud gone out of our city as quickly as possible. It's a health hazard. Let's get rid of it. Is that just because of so that the water treatment plans can keep up with the process? Yes, that's right. The treatment plans are able to supply what we need. But if everybody started using more water than they currently are, at the same time as we will see a spike in some suburbs because they're doing massive cleanups. And let's just manage our water carefully and we'll all be fine. Do you feel somewhat medicated about the desalination plan? You may say that, Sue. I couldn't possibly comment. It has been great to have that desalination plan there. It certainly wasn't built to get us through a disaster, but it's helping in doing that. So to have that bit of insurance in our back pocket has been very helpful. We are continuing to deal with supply. I thought you might be just in terms of other interesting things that have happened. We've seen the Australian Defence Force on aircraft and heavy duty vehicles now supply 340 tonnes of food to towns and cities around Queensland in the last week. So 340 tonnes of groceries have been flying around Queensland because the roads that would otherwise supply them have been cut. They've also been on the back of heavy duty vehicles called unimogs, which I might get the major general to explain, but they are basically capable of all terrain and going through water. And they've been getting out into the moggle suburbs. I think some 13 tonnes are out there already. So a very big supply effort and it's going to continue for as long as it needs to. We're very hopeful that we'll see the highway at Rockhampton restored sometime in the next couple of days. And if that happens, then we can see all that normal supply route into places like Mackay, Townsville and Cairns restored. So while those towns weren't affected by any direct flooding, they were affected in the sense that all their normal supply from them south was cut off. Oh, that's been an issue they've been juggling for weeks. You know, that's why they've been doing releases. They're always wanting to make sure that they keep within a reasonable band. So as I said, these are highly technical issues. I'm not going to pretend to be the hydrological engineer, but they needed to keep the balance in the dam, keep releasing it so it could keep coping with floods that were coming behind the dam. And they had to release it at a sufficient rate to ensure that the dam didn't effectively open its own gates to protect the dam wall. So they should have released more water prior to all of this? That's a question for someone with the technical expertise. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.