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The body of a woman who fell overboard from a cruise ship off the South Australian coast at night has been found.

Crew members aboard the Pacific Explorer discovered the 23-year-old passenger was missing about midnight on Tuesday.

The vessel was 70km in a two-metre swell off the coast of Cape Jaffa in the state's southeast when the incident was reported to authorities.

An aircraft coordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and the ship searched through the early hours of the morning in windy conditions.

They were joined by two helicopters at daybreak on Wednesday and the woman's body was found in the water just before 7am.

"This tragic discovery comes after an overnight search and rescue operation," a spokeswoman for the ship's operator, Carnival Australia, said in a statement.

"We continue to provide care and assistance to the family member this guest was travelling with and extend our deepest condolences to their loved ones."

The company said the death had also "deeply impacted" other guests and the crew.

"We thank all involved who supported this distressing and challenging search operation," the spokeswoman said.

The ship, which can accommodate about 2000 guests, left Victoria on Tuesday for a four-night return voyage from Port Melbourne to Kangaroo Island.

The visit to the island has been cancelled and the ship is returning to Melbourne.

Victoria Police will conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death.

© AAP 2022

A pair of junior Queensland police officers who survived a shooting ambush that claimed the lives of two fellow constables are grateful to be alive as investigators probe motives for the deadly attack.

Constables Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, along with 58-year-old resident Alan Dare, were killed in a hail of bullets at a rural property at Wieambulla in the western Darling Downs region on Monday.

Constables Randall Kirk and Keeley Brough, both 28, escaped but the former was injured in the intense gunfire.

Const Kirk, who is expecting his second child with wife Bree next month, was due to be released from hospital on Wednesday after recovering from surgery to remove shrapnel.

The couple said they were overwhelmed by the messages of support from the public and "everyone from the prime minister down".

"I'm feeling fine, just a little sore. My main thoughts are with the other police families at this awful time," Const Kirk said in a statement released by the police union.

"It means a lot to know the community cares for us all."

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on Wednesday laid flowers at the Botanic Gardens Police Memorial in Brisbane to honour those killed in the attack.

"The constables were so young and brave, and Alan Dare, an innocent bystander," Ms Palaszczuk tweeted.

"We want the Queensland Police family to know that we respect and appreciate what they do for us. If you see an officer, please offer them a kind word as they grieve the loss of their colleagues."

Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said constables Kirk and Brough were doing as well as could be expected and they were grateful to be alive.

"For them, it's very difficult ... they were there when their partners were killed," Ms Carroll told ABC TV.

Their killers - former school principal Nathaniel Train, his brother Gareth and sister-in-law Stacey - died in a firefight with heavily armed tactical officers after the attack on the four officers.

Hundreds of rounds were exchanged before the trio were shot and killed.

All three members of the Train family were considered active shooters and died with their weapons clutched in their hands, a police source told AAP.

One shooter was killed as he fired directly at the bulletproof windscreen of an armoured police vehicle as it approached the homestead.

Investigators are probing the motive for Monday's attack, including whether the officers were lured to the property after following up on a NSW missing person report for Nathaniel Train.

They will also examine how the brothers were able to stockpile a cache of lethal weapons, including high-powered firearms, knives and axes.

The weapons had been legally obtained but were registered in NSW, a source said, prompting calls for changes to national gun registration.

Queensland Police Union head Ian Leavers called for weapon licensing protocols to be reviewed, including how the national database functioned when people crossed state lines.

Investigators are also explore the killers' motivations and possible extremist links after a series of posts under the name of Gareth Train were uncovered on conspiracy theory forums.

The posts include references to anti-vaccine sentiments and claims high-profile shootings were hoaxes or false-flag operations.

"We'll investigate their families, their friends, everything they've done in the last six months to a year," Ms Carroll said.

"We will get to the bottom of this because we need to know what happened and why."

The commissioner added that four officers attending a missing persons call was not unusual in remote parts of the state.

"They did their risk assessment and they were quite comfortable with that," she said.

Reports the perpetrators were dressed in camouflage and whether the attack was premeditated will form part of the police investigation.

© AAP 2022

Former prime minister Scott Morrison says he was focused on tackling welfare fraud and not privy to departmental discussions over the legality of the disastrous robodebt scheme.

While giving evidence to a royal commission into the scheme on Wednesday, Mr Morrison had to be told several times to stay on topic and listen to questions.

Robodebt involved using individuals' annual tax information provided by the ATO to determine average fortnightly earnings and automatically establish welfare debts, an approach ruled unlawful by the Federal Court in 2019.

Mr Morrison was grilled over why the changes to welfare debt protocols were adopted despite concerns about their legality when he was social services minister in 2015.

Records show the then-minister signed a departmental document which stated legislative change could be necessary, a note that was absent when the policy was later presented to cabinet for consideration.

Straying well off script as the inquiry progressed, Mr Morrison delved into the ins and outs of departmental process and brought the inquiry to a standstill over concerns he was violating parliamentary privilege.

The frustrated commissioner, Catherine Holmes SC, asked the former prime minister at one point: "Are you listening at all?"

"I do understand that you come from a background where rhetoric is important," she said.

"But it is necessary to listen to the question and just answer it without ... unnecessary detail if you can."

Former Labor leader Bill Shorten described Mr Morrison's conduct in the commission as "triggering", when taking into account the hundreds of thousands of Australians affected by the scheme.

"Scott Morrison had an opportunity today to attend the royal commission, to personally apologise, to accept personal responsibility," Mr Shorten told reporters.

"Instead, what we got was ... lecturing, hectoring, not answering questions, splitting hairs on simple yes-no questions.

"It is a defensive lecture about why everyone else is wrong and he's right."

Mr Morrison told the commission he was not privy to communications between the departments and he assumed the concerns had been settled.

"It was not uncommon that at early stages in my experience of new policy proposals that departments would flag potential issues and that's what I simply noted that to be," Mr Morrison told the commission.

"By the time of the submission going to cabinet, that view ... had changed and advice was given that legislation was not required, by the department."

Ms Holmes questioned why Mr Morrison was not then interested in inquiring how the legislative issues raised by his own department had been resolved.

"How is it that you were content to just see 'no legislation required' and leave it at that?" she asked.

Mr Morrison replied, "because commissioner, that is how the cabinet process works".

"I was satisfied that the department had done their job."

Mr Morrison said he took on the social services portfolio with the express aim of overhauling the welfare system and reducing rorts.

As well as the legal concerns, early proposals for the scheme identified potential savings to the federal budget of $1.2 billion by more efficiently identifying welfare discrepancies.

Mr Morrison conceded the government had a strong desire to balance the budget and that it faced a hostile Senate, creating roadblocks for legislation.

Between 2015 and 2020, the robodebt scheme wrongly recovered more than $750 million from 381,000 people and led to several people taking their lives while being pursued for false debts.

Former human services minister Marise Payne told the royal commission on Tuesday she had no knowledge of why the legal issues flagged in earlier briefings were omitted from the final policy proposal.

When asked who held responsibility for advancing any concerns, Senator Payne said ministers were always ultimately responsible but they received advice from their departments.

© AAP 2022