“Natural disasters are a sad part of life: sometimes they hit close to home as we experienced when many of our people were directly affected by the Victorian bush fires and others by the recent floods in South Queensland.

As you know we support our Australian based customer care centres with a small centre based in Manila. Now, people working for our partners in Manila call centres have been impacted by the floods caused by Typhoon Ondoy.

The typhoon has resulted in fatalities, injuries and homes lost, affecting an estimated 500,000 people. At present we are aware of over 250 people who work with our partners who have lost their homes and all of their belongings.

As part of the wider Optus family, our partners and their people need our help through this difficult time and so Optus will be providing immediate funds and assistance to our partners who have lost their homes. This will help them with basic essentials such as food, clothing and ensuring they have temporary shelter.

We are also setting up the Optus Manila Flood Appeal for our people across Optus who would like to make a pre-tax donation. Optus will match these contributions dollar for dollar, maximising your contribution to the relief effort. All donations will be directed through our partner charity World Vision.”

True to their word, Optus announced the facilty for pre-tax donations in the Optus payroll system today. Optus will match each employee donation for this disaster, dollar for dollar.

I was very happy to see that the company that I work for has such a positive response to this situation in the Philippines.