A 25 year old Cairns Northern Beaches resident was killed when a stolen ute hit her RAV4 and another car in a head-on collision on Wednesday, August 5.
The driver, a 36-year-old man who was on bail at the time has been charged with a string of offences including manslaughter.
The family of Savannah Spence Paige, 25, who was killed at the scene of the crash on the Smithfield Bypass say they are “beyond devastated.”
Cairns Mayor Amy Eden says she has had enough of out of control crime in Queensland’s largest northern city, an internationally respected tourist hot spot on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef.
“The death of 25-year-old Savannah Spence Paige has shaken our community. It has caused grief, anger and, understandably, some very difficult questions about whether our justice system is doing enough to protect the community from serious and repeat offending,” Mayor Eden said.
She has issued this statement aimed at the Queensland LNP Government which this week is toughening the state’s bail laws:
“Those questions deserve answers.
When an experienced Cairns police officer publicly expresses his frustration with the system he has worked within for almost four decades, we should listen. Our frontline police see the consequences of crime every day. They see the victims. They see families devastated. They see people cycling repeatedly through a system that sometimes seems incapable of breaking that pattern.
Peaceful Public Assembly for Safer Streets on Saturday 22 August 2026
Fogerty Park – organised by Shinae Paige.
Photo Credit: Cairns Post.
I believe community safety must come first. Where a person is accused of serious offending and presents an unacceptable risk to the community, our bail laws must provide adequate protection. That should not depend solely on whether it is their first serious offence or their twentieth.
The presumption of innocence is fundamental to our justice system. So too is the responsibility of that system to properly assess risk and protect the community. If there are weaknesses in our bail laws, the Queensland Government should address them.
Bail is only part of the answer
But changing bail laws alone will not solve this problem. By the time we are arguing about bail, we are already at the expensive end of failure.
The cost is measured in police resources, court time and public money, yes. More importantly, it is measured in damaged lives, traumatised families and victims who should never have become victims.
We need to protect the community from people who present an unacceptable risk today, while doing the work that reduces the number of people who present that risk tomorrow.
That means looking at what happens once someone enters the justice system, but also having the courage to go further upstream. Why are people becoming entrenched in offending? What happened between a young person’s first interaction with the system and their fifth, tenth or twentieth? Where were the opportunities to change that trajectory? Which ones did we miss?
Are we making meaningful use of the time someone spends in the system to address the behaviour that brought them there? Are families receiving help when warning signs first appear? Are mental health, drug and alcohol, education, housing and family-support services available when they are needed? When authorities identify someone at high risk of repeatedly offending, are all parts of the system communicating and responding effectively?
These are not arguments for being “soft on crime”. They are arguments for preventing crime. We should not have to choose between accountability and prevention. Cairns needs both.
Going upstream
Before entering local government, I worked for the Department of Youth Justice as part of the Cairns Safer Streets Task Force. It was a different way of working. Police and officers from different government agencies were brought together, co-located and able to share information so we could see more of the picture around a person or family, rather than each agency seeing only its piece.
The work was concentrated in Manoora, Manunda and Mooroobool, but the experience taught me something I have never forgotten: by the time someone is deeply entrenched in the justice system, opportunities to intervene have often already come and gone.
There comes a point where pulling people out of the river isn’t enough. We have to go upstream and ask why they keep falling in.
Some of these questions aren’t new. They were being asked when I worked in Youth Justice years ago. If we are still identifying the same gaps today, then we need to ask another uncomfortable question: are we listening? And if we are, why aren’t we fixing them?
Not another talkfest
That is why I want the people who see different pieces of this problem around the same table: Police, Youth Justice, Government, Health, Education, victim support, First Nations organisations and frontline services. Not another talkfest, but a room focused on where the system is failing and what we are going to do differently.
We already know there is a cohort of repeat offenders cycling through the system. What are we collectively doing with that knowledge? Where is intervention occurring too late? Where are services missing or overwhelmed? Where is information not being shared? What happens when warning signs are repeatedly raised? Most importantly, what are we going to do differently next time?
Cairns has also been identified for the Queensland Government’s Risk Response Bail program. We should welcome that investment while ensuring it delivers what our community needs. What will success look like? How quickly can agencies intervene? What happens when bail conditions are repeatedly breached? What support and intervention will be available? How will we know whether the program is actually reducing offending?
The answers cannot come from one politician, one police officer, one government department or one level of government.
Turning anger into action
There will understandably be anger following Savannah’s death. But anger alone will not make another family safer. The challenge for government is to turn that anger into action.
We cannot promise that government can prevent every crime. But our community is entitled to expect a system that protects them when the risk is unacceptable, uses every opportunity to intervene and learns when warning signs have been missed.
We need to listen to our frontline police, protect the community from serious offenders who present an unacceptable risk, intervene earlier and break the cycle of offending before there is another victim.
We owe that to our police, to victims of crime and to the Cairns community. We owe it to Savannah, and to every victim who should never have become one.”#
All of the Government agencies and the NGO’s the Mayor has mentioned have little impact, they have failed, because they haven’t addressed the problem. Inequality creating social class structures intentionally so that the globalist can profit. government work for these globalist whether they know it or not. I have no doubt that they could work in the system for a life time and never recognize that they are the problem as intentionally created. Some agree to it and we call them Farcist/communist/socialist/dictatorship and of late democratic capitalist. I’m sure they mean well but they are part of the problem. The banking elite, military, oil barons, pharma and tech have all of these Mayor type people on the payroll. They will continue the same failed path though as modern day existence can attest to. Our history illustrates the doomed approach that the fearless leaders always follow. The pattern remains and the top tier ensures that it will remain, oblivious. If an electrician goes to a job and when he leaves the house burns down he gets stopped from doing any more jobs. The Doctors, pollies, bankers, bureaucrats, always get to burn down more houses. The world economy, environment, human health, technology, religion, and every other ology and ism is non functioning and evident by its current track record. They are failures. The Mayor will never name the cause. Neither will ON or Trump.
A poignant message from Cairns Mayor Amy Eden 3 days ago on Facebook
_____________
This afternoon I’ll be joining the peaceful public assembly for Safer Streets at Fogarty Park, organised by Shinae West following the tragic death of Savannah Spence Paige.
This isn’t about pitchforks or politics. It’s about people coming together peacefully, listening and sending a clear message that we expect a justice system that protects the public and puts victims at the centre.
Victims first. Safer streets.
📍 Fogarty Park
🕒 3pm today
🪑 Bring a chair. Come and be counted.
What has EVERY single young body that has major criminal histories have in common? Repeated childhood “vaccines”. These didn’t exist before and whilst some were damaged by the irregular ones given at the school in years past, (myself one, hearing impaired within days of the shot), the majority escaped unscathed while there were a few who went “delinquent” shortly after (an older brother was one, now deceased), seeming unable to learn etc. Since when did a body ever need pharma’s lethal cocktail of toxins in their human body? Only after having these injections does one get chronic illnesses and a really huge one, mental illness. I never knew anyone with mental illness until more recent times and it is onlyi the yuong whohave been injected with pharma’s toxins. I have closelywatched to little kids of my neice. Both injected sine less than ONE HOUR after they entered this realm. BOTH are now damaged!
Liberals do actually need Sharia Law for their own good. They are incapable of understanding human nature and the laws required to temper its excesses.
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Most liberals need a good public flogging to rewire their brains. This may be sooner than the dolts imagine?
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Why has no-one pointed the finger at the Judiciary, who are obviously captured and letting too many offenders slip back into society too easily?
criminality is one of our major industries and is heavily protected and its growth supported across all levels of government. they need organised crime syndicates, unions and the children in training for next the generation of violence to operate freely and continue unhindered thru the revolving door of courts so the washing machines can keep running and the taxpayer money flowing..
There is no intention to fix the system.
Manslaughter means he gets to continue to live for the death he has caused while the victims families cry themselves to sleep every night of their life missing their loved one ; Punishment for taking the life of another is worthy of execution in the most dreadful manner to send a clear and precise message to anyone else , that is what they can expect will happen to them whatever their age is .
The people responsible for letting this career criminal out on bail should be charged with accessory to man slaughter
The highest obligation of both the government and the police i s “to protect life and property.”
So to see a bunch of QLD Parliamentarians celebrating joyfully at the passing of the post term abortion-which is essentially infanticide legislation one might correctly guess that the protection of life is not a high priority of the QLD Parliament.
Our young are the ones who need our greatest protection, and the Parliament scotched that need and obligation emphatically, that day.
As they say, the fish rots from the head, and that head is the Parliaments.
That is about as far up river we need to go, because a beneficial Parliament, state and national, can ensure that everyone has an equitable existence.
Instead, the Parliaments have run this country into the ground, with the attendant anger and want that entails.
The QLD Parliament gave up its right to govern when it sentenced those newborn children to death.
Need one say any more?
It’s time for the parents to be held accountable for the damage their children are doing.
We cannot trust the Qld Gov to give a damn or to care at all. They shed only crocodile tears & wish only to continue receiving their illicit paychecks. The Gov will never sincerely attempt to fix the problem because they are beholden to follow the orders of their evil bureaucratic bosses who wish only to destroy Australia in any way they can. The Premier of Qld is a very non caring man buried in selfishness.
My sincere condolences to this 25 yo & her relatives.
Because of progressive lawyers we are too soft on crime. The whole society was built on hard work with whippings and chain-gangs for criminals, now jail is a hotel and you’re lucky to go there for winter, might even smash a window to get yourself in.
Why are cars treated differently to guns, when individuals want to go and do some thrill-killing with a car they only get a couple of years, with a gun they might get 20. The end result is the same. The murderous drivers should go in a chain gang and not be allowed a car ever again. The “accidental” murderous drivers should be punished properly including paying for all the damage and wearing a thing like a P plate, but an M plate for murder, manslaughter or how you like. Make sure you’re showing your M plate or your car gets confiscated and sold.
But the authorities don’t want things to change, or they might lose revenues, from speed cameras in the desert catching people doing over 100 km/h on a straight road with nothing on it for miles and miles, or some desolate road in the night with a tricky lowered speed that nobody notices because it’s too slow for the conditions. That’s how you make money and that’s more important. The entire system revolves around revenues and you get no credit if you never crashed into anyone. You get no reduction in insurance and no reduction in “demerit points” even though if you never crashed into anyone you are already at maximum merit.
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