Speaking as a Queenslander...
...it's heartening to see so many people willing to donate items to those that need it. Your old tat box running XP sitting unloved and collecting dust in a cupboard is as good as a brand new PC to someone that has lost everything.
At the same time it's not easy to find out what's really happening as the media and some government mouthpieces are hyping up the impact to really stupid levels.
There have been so many patently false claims about the area that has been affected. I've seen one tweet that claimed the flooding was "bigger than hurricane Katrina" and "1 million sq miles of Queensland was under water". People retweet this nonsense without giving it a second thought when a couple of moments of research would show that the state is about 660k sq miles in total. There are plenty more similar examples doing the rounds.
A quick peek at NASA's satellite images for the flood period show the true extent of the flooding (I'll let you draw your own conclusions from those) but a lot of the media has been reporting floods of ark-building proportions.
I guess the moral of this story is one we should always consider: check the facts, check the sources, don't believe everything you see on TV or read in the papers (and their digital equivalents) and certainly take anything you see in "user-generated content" with a vast pinch of salt.
Web 2.0: it's made from wet kangaroo paws.