Australia fires live: NSW and SA count cost of bushfires after Balmoral and Cudlee Creek devastation – latest

Cudlee Creek fire revealed to have destroyed 86 homes, as residents in South Australia and New South Wales wait to discover the extent of devastation from the weekend’s fires. Follow today’s events live

10.16pm GMT

Dear Santa, Australia is burning. We need rain. #drought #NSWbushfires #fires #qldbushfires #AustraliaFires pic.twitter.com/nLyWaagHoO

10.02pm GMT

Devastating interview with Captain of the Balmoral fire brigade, Brendan O’Connor, on @RadioNational Breakfast just now. They ran out of water while fighting the blaze. He says no government officials, of any level, has visited. Feeling very overlooked.

9.59pm GMT

Speaking of emissions, Guardian Australia’s environment editor Adam Morton reports that Australia’s actual emissions are “significantly higher than previously believed for the years when Labor was in power, and no longer rise each year since the Coalition repealed the carbon price”.

Related: Australia changed its historical carbon emissions data: what happened?

9.56pm GMT

SA premier Steven Marshall said rapid damage assessment teams began working on Kangaroo Island on Sunday and are moving through fire-affected areas, which means that the number of homes and buildings confirmed destroyed or damaged is likely to increase.

As of 8pm last night, Marshall told ABC 24, the number of homes destroyed were at 86, with 500 outbuildings and “hundreds of vehicles” also destroyed.

That is my opinion and that is the opinion of, I think, the the vast majority of scientists that exist. We have got to do everything we can to make ourselves more climate resilient and that is what we’re doing in SA.

9.45pm GMT

We start the day’s live coverage of the bushfire crisis with the news that the number of houses destroyed in the Cudlee Creek bushfire has been revised up to 86.

South Australian premier Steven Marshall said on Monday that the full extent of the damage to the Adelaide Hills was still being assessed, but that a significant proportion of the 25,000ha burned included vineyards and apple and pear orchards.

We won’t engage in reckless and job-destroying and economy-crunching targets which have been seeking to be postured to us at the moment, taking advantage of natural disasters because no Australian would think that the direct policies of any single government in the world is directly linked to any fire event, that is not true.

These fires have been a huge challenge and a disaster for so many, but it will rain again and the fires will go out. (And there’ll be bushfires again, as there always have been.) We must pull together in times like these – not politicise or finger point – and that is my fundamental message as we go into Christmas.

Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?
Because we still fail to make the connection between the climate crisis and increased extreme weather events and nature disasters like the #AustraliaFires
That’s what has to change.
Now. https://t.co/DQcZViKJQz

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