One of Queensland’s most senior police officers says the state’s mental health legislation should be amended to make it easier for police to intervene when a person’s mental health makes them a risk to others.
The acting deputy commissioner Mark Kelly told the New South Wales coroner’s court on Wednesday that Queensland’s Mental Health Act had caused “confusion”.
Kelly was speaking towards the end of a five-week inquest into the April 2024 stabbing attack at Westfield Bondi Junction.
Schizophrenic man 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 before being shot and killed by police officer Amy Scott.
The NSW coroner, Teresa O’Sullivan, has heard officers who attended Cauchi’s Toowoomba home in January 2023, after his father confiscated his knife collection, considered he had a mental disturbance but that it didn’t meet the threshold for intervention under the act.
Queensland’s mental health legislation differs from NSW in that emergency mental health interventions by the police are only covered when people pose a serious risk to themselves.
Kelly agreed on Wednesday with expert witnesses who appeared previously when he stated that the Mental Health Act should be changed so police could send people for emergency assessment if they posed a risk to others.
“It should be amended,” Kelly said of the act, which was changed in 2016 and included “very high” thresholds for emergency intervention.
“The legislation does provide some confusion for our police,” he said.
The senior counsel assisting, Dr Peggy Dwyer SC, said the inquest was likely to recommend that the legislation be amended.
Kelly said police were increasingly called to mental health incidents. The growth in cases was related to domestic and family violence, homelessness and increased awareness of the issue.
Queensland police service call-outs involving a person with a mental illness or disturbance averaged 51,000 a year over the past four to five years, he said.
That number had risen this year, with 21,600 calls in the first four months of 2025. “It is the burden of demand that is putting pressure on police,” Kelly told the court.
Dwyer said “we hear throughout Australia that police are increasingly asked to respond to mental health crises as part of their day-to-day work” and the “system is groaning” under that pressure.
Supt Kirsty Hales, the NSW police commander overseeing mental health, said that “would be a fair assessment”.
In NSW, police attend or record a mental health incident every nine minutes and there was a 40% rise in incidents between 2018 and 2022, the court heard.
Hales said the problem was “international” and the community needed alternatives to the police when someone was in mental health distress.
She said police officers were not clinically trained and were forced to make “a layperson’s assessment” of a person’s mental health when considering the Mental Health Act.
“It’s not necessarily just a police position that we shouldn’t be the main responding agency to community distress,” Hales said, adding that police officers could be an escalating factor in mental health incidents.
Police faced the consequences of discharging a firearm when “something goes wrong”, the court heard. They also faced the recognised phenomenon of “suicide by cop”.
NSW ambulance officers held broader powers than police when dealing with a person who was mentally ill or mentally disturbed, the court heard.
The court heard there were initiatives to help authorities cope with the rise in mental health incidents. Mental health clinicians attended mental health call-outs alongside police – known as a co-responder model – in both NSW and Queensland.
Queensland has a phone service connecting clinicians with police and a team of mental health intervention coordinators.
Referencing previous reports that recommended bolstering mental health support for police officers, Dwyer suggested some Australians were “frustrated” that recommendations were made without being acted on.
“Is there a risk we get stuck here for another four years … where there’s not the rollout of support?” Dwyer asked Dr Brendan Flynn, the executive director of NSW Health’s mental health branch.
Flynn said: “Everybody would like to make sure that the person who is distressed in the community is getting the correct … safe response. I understand some people may be frustrated. I can assure you that the ministry [is] very much engaged in these discussions.”
The inquest continues.
• In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org
