The very word "adventure" carries with it a frisson of uncertainty and excitement. The Collins Concise Dictionary's first entry proposes it to mean "a risky undertaking".
People tackle adventures for a variety of reasons, but it is safe to say that they do not do so because they wish to participate in an event from which all possibility of risk has been eliminated.
So it is with adventure tourism. It is in no small part the excitement, the unpredictability, the "adrenalin rush" of physically demanding and emotionally challenging activities that attract people to it.
And the Department of Labour which, this week, has published the final report of its "Review of risk management and safety in the adventure and outdoor commercial sectors in New Zealand 2009/10", has the good sense to acknowledge that at the outset.
"The review team observed that people should not expect that all accidents in these sectors can be eliminated," it states in its executive summary.
"Rather," it continues, "it should be expected that all practicable efforts are made to effectively manage the risk and minimise accidents as much as possible."
With this rider attached, the broad sweep of the report is to be welcomed and has been so greeted by the major players in the industry. It was initiated by concerns about a number of serious incidents, including fatalities, in the "adventure and outdoor commercial sector".
It has been widely publicised that Chris Jordan, the father of 21-year-old English backpacker Emily Jordan, tragically killed during a Queenstown river-boarding trip, wrote expressing his deep concerns to Prime Minister John Key.
There will have been other relatives of deceased or badly injured adventure tourists who, on top of the grief and anger occasioned by such seemingly needless tragedies, may have had difficulties coming to terms with the safety and risk environment in this country.
Some, for instance, will hail from jurisdictions in which pecuniary recourse is available through the courts to a far greater degree than is the case under New Zealand's no-fault accident legislation - should operators be found in some measure at fault.
Penalties are available and imposed here - particularly under the Health and Safety in Employment Act - but not necessarily of the scale that might put culpable "cowboys" out of business. As the report says, while penalties might act as a partial deterrent, they might also be "seen as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, when what is really needed is a fence at the top".
The review team, led by the Department of Labour but including senior officials from a range of government departments and Crown entities, local government and the tourism industry, came to a number of conclusions.
It found that there does not appear to be a fundamental problem in the sector's ability to develop appropriate safety measures, but identified the existence of "gaps in the safety management framework" which allow businesses to "operate at different standards than those generally accepted".
In plain English, existent safety regulations do not prevent the aforementioned "cowboys" from plying their business.
The report then deduces that while such gaps remain "there is insufficient assurance that preventable accidents will not occur", which, needless to say, "could result in harm to individuals and their families" and damage New Zealand's reputation as an international visitor destination.
The logic is hard to fault. The question is, what is to be done about it without either strangling the industry with red tape, or suffocating it in the cotton wool of risk aversion attendant of regulation in so many other less "adventurous" spheres of contemporary life?
The review team contemplates a number of broad initiatives: industry codes of practice, government regulation, qualification requirement, and administrative enhancement, but primarily it recommends the introduction of a registration scheme with a requirement for "up-front and ongoing external safety audits" of the safety management provisions of operators.
This makes good sense, as long as there is some flexibility and common sense applied - and that the long arm of any resultant new laws do not impinge on the freedom of individuals (in a country which has always allowed people to make their own accommodations with the rugged outdoors) to enjoy their own private adventures.
