2011 Christchurch Earthquake Day VII

1651: An initial support package for employers and employees has been announced. Employers will get $500 gross per week per FT employee and $300 per PT employee, to be paid to their employees. If an employer ceases business, then employees will get $400 a week net FT and $240 a week net PT paid directly to them. This is backdated to the quake and initially is for six weeks.

1005: Have not blogged previously on this, but huge kudos to Owen Glenn for his personal $1m donation to the earthquake recovery. Despite his appealling treatment by some, he has remained a good friend to New Zealand.

Just noticed that Stuff has a nice page of profiles on the victims known to date. They seem determined that no victim will be just an anonymous death, which is great.

At a macro level we deal with numbers such as 150 dead and growing. At a family level, every death is a tragedy which leaves a family with an emotional burden they never will fully recover from.