Christchurch Earthquake bulletin edition 152

new-zealand-labour-party

Tue Nov 29 2011 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)

Christchurch Earthquake bulletin edition 152

Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 2:41 pm
Press Release: New Zealand Labour Party

Christchurch
LABOUR MPs

29 November 2011 MEDIA STATEMENT
Christchurch Earthquake bulletin edition 152

A regular bulletin started by the Labour Party’s Christchurch electorate MPs, Clayton Cosgrove (Waimakariri), Ruth Dyson (Port Hills), Lianne Dalziel (Christchurch East) and Brendon Burns (Christchurch Central) to keep people in their electorates and media informed about what is happening at grass roots level.
The announcement of the semi-finalists for the 2012 New Zealander of the Year Awards highlights one of the features of a disaster that is recognised in the international literature and that is of the emergent community leader. Student Volunteer Army founder Sam Johnson who has been nominated for Young New Zealander of the Year, is one of those individuals. He displayed the true characteristics of leadership – he was prepared to think outside the square and to take responsibility for doing something that needed to be done. He also enabled university students to be seen in a positive light. The hordes of students pouring into the streets of the eastern suburbs was a heart-warming and inspiring sight. Sam is also up for a Local Heroes award, alongside Morgan Perry from Student Volunteer Army and John Hartnell, from Federated Farmers and the Farmy Army. The amount of fresh water and hot meals that were brought in from the country has probably never been fully calculated, and its value could never be counted in dollars. Those nominated for Community of the Year Award, include Project Lyttelton, a group that became the heart of the quake-hit town after February 22 and the Christchurch Charity Hospital, which set up a counselling service within 4 days of the February quake. Their inclusion in these awards as semi-finalists recognises how important their contribution has been to the response effort and now to our recovery as a city. We wish them well. But in addition to these awards we must as a city build on the platform for recovery that they represent. The success of our recovery as a city is dependent on resourcing communities to be actively engaged in their own recovery. We are seeking an opportunity to feed into the CERA Recovery Strategy on behalf of the affected communities, because there are lessons that need to be learned from the international experience and how that has translated here. The draft misses the mark, but with some work it can become the blueprint for our future.

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