Small English cancer detected in Western Australia

This article in WA Today includes some errors which are not just annoying, but because they appear in print in Australia they actually chip away at the common English language we use.

The first which leaps out of the page is the use of "highly-risky" in this paragraph:

It is understood the man was engaging in a BASE jump, a highly-risky practise in which people engage in extreme jumps from elevated locations and then deploy a parachute before reaching land.

I've heard highly-risky a lot in some countries in Asia so it's not new to me, but it's just bad English nonetheless. That's OK for people using English as a second language in Asia - if they want to say that then go ahead - but it's just not on in an Australian newspaper.

The second error you may have noticed in the paragraph above seems quite minor: "before reaching land". Hmmm, that would be OK if the BASE jumper was, say, jumping from a boat at sea during a triathlon, but if this kind of error passes through unchallenged to the keeper it undermines our English because new Australian immigrants reading this in the paper are going to be confused or even learn the wrong thing and if enough people learn that it changes the meaning for the rest of us and English becomes less precise and clear.

So WA Today should do better as this is