Joel Cauchi, who stabbed and killed six people and hospitalised another 12 people was a known mental health patient from Queensland. 

With a long history of schizophrenia, Cauchi was living an itinerant lifestyle with deteriorating mental health and apparently not being adequately medicated or monitored. 

How could this disaster have been prevented? Significant questions remain unanswered.

Who was responsible for managing his mental illness while in the community?  

Had he been considered safe to be in the community and how could that decision have been so wrong? 

Had he been lost to the system and fallen through the cracks in the system? 

Was this because the Queensland mental health system is severely under resourced with insufficient trained staff and not enough mental health beds in a failed public health system? 

Was this tragedy a result of the closing of mental health facilities and a foreseeable consequence of a policy of treating mentally ill patients within the community? 

Was Cauchi being treated in Queensland under a Treatment Authority receiving enforced treatment and had he moved interstate to NSW to avoid treatment? 

Did the Queensland mental health system know he had moved out of the state to NSW? 

When was the last time his mental health had been assessed in Queensland? 

Fixing this broken system may help prevent a repeat of this horror story.