We use pyephem in some open source weather software I contribute to and find it very accurate. I am not aware of azimuth needing to be interpreted differently according to hemisphere, as far as I was aware it is always returned as degrees (or radians) East of North and is true not magnetic. I think you will find magnetic declination/variation is closer to 11.3 degrees for Surfers Paradise.
I just did a quick interactive pyephem compute of Venus viewed from Surfers Paradise at 1800 (local) today (7 July) and it gave the following:
Code:
Python 3.7.3 (default, Jan 22 2021, 20:04:44)
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import ephem
>>> o=ephem.Observer()
>>> o.lat='-27.9985'
>>> o.lon='153.4227'
>>> o.elevation = 0
>>> o.date = '2021/7/7 08:00:00'
>>> v=ephem.Venus()
>>> v.compute(o)
>>> print("azimuth=%s altitude=%s" % (v.az, v.alt))
azimuth=299:29:57.5 altitude=12:47:00.0
Which is pretty close to SkySafari which shows 299 deg 29' 55.1" and 12 deg 47' 19.6". Seems pretty close to me!
Gary