They are sad media cliches - the grieving parents pleading that their child's gruesome death in some foolish accident be made meaningful by lessons learned.
Christopher Jordan was a more formidable mourning parent than most. The UK businessman had the experience, resources and emotional grit to investigate, complain, and then make it stick, after his daughter Emily was messily drowned in a guided Queenstown river-boarding expedition that might more fairly be described as misguided.
The Department of Labour's Adventure Tourism controls announced yesterday are very much the result of Chris Jordan's lobbying, and an impassioned letter to John Key demanding New Zealand control cowboy adventure tourism operators.
Emily was an attractive, talented young woman - a 21-year-old legal first-class honours graduate. Chris Jordan, a successful Midlands publishing executive, flew to Queenstown immediately he heard she had died while trapped in the Kawarau River, thrill riding with the unfortunately named Mad Dog River Boarding.
Like him, many reasonable people standing on the Roaring Meg bluff looking down into the boiling white torrent where she drowned may have difficulty conceiving people could make a business boarding amateurs through it.
When Jordan looked more deeply into cases of New Zealand misadventure tourism, he was angered. Back home in Worcester, he continued media interviews, he established a strong memorial foundation for Emily, and he gathered evidence.
For example, he followed up when Cary, a website blogger, claimed she'd almost drowned in the same way with the same company.
Jordan chased her down: "Cary, I would like to speak to you by phone or by email," he wrote. "I am Emily's dad and for the last 18 months I have been trying to get the New Zealand authorities to realise how dangerous this activity is. They don't want to know ... Please, please contact me. I will keep it confidential ... Unfortunately, most people just walk away and put it down to experience. But people must speak out - if they don't, the next person will die."
When Mr Key announced the adventure tourism inquiry last year, he acknowledged Mr Jordan's role in bringing the issue to him. But that authorities had already failed in not recognising its threats far more quickly was shown when the inquiry identified 29 adventure tourism deaths and 450 serious injuries in the five years to 2009.
Many deaths are the result of foolishness or inexperience of the victims themselves. But, unfortunately, there has been repeated incompetence and even crass stupidity by tourism businesses.
In sworn evidence of recent court records, we see a woman killed during a bridge jump because the rope was too long; we have a dual hang-glider fatality where the scale of mess-ups is tragi-comic - the pilot was a repeat dangerous flying offender who, under company guidelines, should already have been sacked; equipment had no current warrant of fitness; and not only the glider failed, but the emergency parachute too.
An American hunter slipped to his death down a precipice because his guide and helicopter pilot foolishly dropped him on a small slippery slope too close to the brink. The coroner established no less than nine safety issues related to the accident.
We've already heard the one bad apple argument from the industry, but the size of its cowboy sector seems more than minor, and has developed because of things peculiar to New Zealand.
In many Western countries, it would have been sued out of existence, but it is able to survive, protected by our Accident Compensation Act, which makes damages litigation against operators difficult.
Industry newcomers are supported by something they haven't paid for - customers delivered to them by the great New Zealand outdoors brand. And financial entry barriers may be as small as: "Why not take people down the rapids in my kayak?"
Many business start-ups are inspired by people besotted with their adventure sport, rather than people with business background. Overall, the situation was an invitation to low-grade management, and No8 wire winging it.
Safety is made still harder by the reliance on seasonal casual staff, whose turnover offers training challenges to the most skilled managements. Casual staff may also create new cultures that sneak up on owners - it's easy to understand Chris Jordan's fury when, after Emily's drowning, he found Mad Dog Christmas Party pics on the web showing a laughing employee wearing a gift T-shirt emblazoned: River Kill Bar and Grill.
Our adventure tourism industry is economically important and innovative, and deserves applause. It has transformed the '70s summer image of places such as Queenstown from being tour-bus destinations for elderly Australians to come over to snap pictures of Milford Sound and buy a nice cardigan.
We don't need a suffocating blancmange of regulatory procedures to kill this entrepreneuring spirit. Most small businesses could no more take on the rigours of ISO 9000-type quality management procedures than row to the moon, through its overdone paper work. However, they can build straightforward and effective safety training systems if they're shown how and helped - and vigorously forced to comply or to be shut down unceremoniously.
And thank you, Chris Jordan.
• John Lapsley, an Arrowtown writer, is a former businessman.
