Bondi Junction stabbings: lack of mental health care ‘a problem that is fixable’, inquest told

Significant reform of the mental health sector is needed to keep people safe, the coronial inquest into the Bondi Junction mass stabbing has been told as it draws to a close. Joel Cauchi, 40, killed Ashlee Good, 38, Jade Young, 47, Yixuan Cheng, 27, Pikria Darchia, 55, Dawn Singleton, 25, and Faraz Tahir, 30, and injured 10 others at Westfield Bondi Junction on 13 April 2024 before he was shot and killed by police inspector Amy Scott. In May, a five-week coronial inquest into the seven deaths heard how the “extremely unwell” man from Queensland slipped through the healthcare net and stopped taking medication for his schizophrenia five years earlier. Cauchi, who was homeless at the time of the attack, developed a fixation on violence, knives and serial killers, and with some “rudimentary planning”, inflicted a mass stabbing similar to those he had searched for online. Related: Cauchi’s mass murders put harsh spotlight on failings of mental health and police systems Final submissions were made at the New South Wales coroners court on Tuesday, with the senior counsel assisting the inquest, Dr Peggy Dwyer SC, asking: “Why did Joel Cauchi perpetrate the attack, how did he get so unwell, and were there opportunities to prevent his decline into psychosis?” Dwyer said that in both Queensland and NSW there was a serious lack of adequate community-based treatments and housing for people who were seriously mentally ill. “It’s not a political statement to say that we need significant investment in those areas to keep people safe,” she told the court. As a stark example of the inadequacy of the current services, she said in 1991, there were about 1,150 short-stay beds in four main inner-city hostels in Sydney. People who were homeless could eat, sleep and receive psychiatric care and onward services in those hostels. Today, there were fewer than 300 temporary beds, and walk-up psychiatric care was only available at two sites in Sydney. “That is a finite problem that is fixable,” she said. Dwyer said defects in the mental health system reached back to the 1960s, when deinstitutionalisation began, shifting mental health policy and service provision away from asylums towards services delivered in community settings. She suggested NSW Health should act as the lead agency advising the government on the decline in mental health services and lead major reform of the area. “It is imperative that this results in action, not just another report,” Dwyer said. Building housing for homeless people who were mentally unwell would save money in the long term and reduce the risk to the community, she said. It was “not a stretch” to say that if those people could be accommodated, it would alleviate the strain on police. Dwyer said families of those who died had assisted in the “challenging” process of preparing written submissions.