Landlord ignored warnings on faulty alarms before fire killed father and five children

In the early hours of an August morning in 2023, six lives — a father and five young children — were lost to a house fire on Russell Island, Queensland, in circumstances that a coroner is now beginning to examine with quiet gravity. The home had been flagged for faulty smoke alarms, poor wiring, and electrical hazards, yet warnings went unheeded and the law's penalties proved almost ceremonial in their smallness. As a pre-inquest conference opens the formal record, the deeper question being placed before justice is an ancient one: what duty do we owe one another when we hold power over another