Before there is an accident and the finger pointing starts...In aviation there are no short cuts. It is black or white...it is safe or it isn't!
Um, no. The world isn't black and white at all. Every single time you fly, there is some kind of risk involved. Someone, somewhere, has to decide if any given choice is "safe enough"
It obviously isn't a great idea to fly paying passengers overwater in an aircraft with a single engine - if that engine quits, things get ugly. Two engines are better. Four engines are better still. However there are diminishing returns, and an aircraft with 10 engines would not be economical. So we end up approving ETOPS operations and consider it "safe enough".
You _have_ to compromise somewhere. You just have to decide where to draw the line. We could, for instance, ban all VFR flights from entering controlled airspace at all. This would lower the risk of midairs but hurt a lot of people. We could go further, ground anything without a transponder or with a piston engine, ban all private flying, then charge all aircraft a $5000 tax and use the money to make all of Australia class C. This would be a lot safer for RPT with the cost of virtually killing GA.
If we ended up insisting on absolute 100% safety then aircraft would never leave the ground.