As the curtain starts to fall on 2024, I would like to take the opportunity to wish readers a very Happy New Year and hope that your Christmas Day was a good one.

This year may well have been an unprecedented one in human history in many respects.

Our community has had to weather a bit of a storm this year and we have largely come through it intact.

It has been a year in which one astute elderly mate rightly questioned when he saw me looking a bit glum, “Is anyone bombing you or shooting at you?” It was a reference to the Gaza conflict. To this I had to respond no, and he retorted emphatically, “then cheer up”. He was right and I knew it.

Let’s run through a bit of what we have been through in the couple of years that I have spent in office and during which I may have sounded to many like a bit of a doomer, both in my Beacon writings and mayoral reports to council.

I have talked about geopolitical tensions in the Ukraine and Middle East and how these might affect us, especially by limiting global oil supply with potentially severe consequences for the world economy and ours.

Although, for the sake of the planet, it would be the right thing to do to immediately cease the burning of fossil fuels, we cannot afford for this to happen abruptly.

We need to engineer an orderly transition to a clean energy system, not chaos. The oil has continued to flow, even as the wars in the Ukraine and Middle East have raged on. It is worth remembering that these combined regions produce a big chunk of world oil.

I’ve talked about the consequences of unprecedented monetary stimulus by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) especially in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

It is my belief that much of the new money created was allowed to further inflate the property bubble rather than being used to build public infrastructure.

The unprecedented monetary stimulus was a major driver of inflation, which then required abrupt tightening of the money supply to stamp it out.

The RBNZ said it would need to “engineer a recession” to bring inflation under control, and so it did. It appears, however, that their recession is going to be longer and deeper than they bargained for.

Now the RBNZ is once-again loosening its grip on the money supply in an attempt to resuscitate the economy. We aren’t doing anything novel here. It is an inherent feature of the current economic paradigm.

I have observed that central banks globally have been repatriating gold, and that the gold price has shot up. Gold is usually a defence against monetary system failure.

Other bad signs have been the inversion of the yield curve. These observations have caused me for several years to plead for council spending restraint.

This brings me into line with the more recent messages emanating from government.

Many pundits are warning of a financial melt-down as asset prices, especially in the United States, reach all-time highs.

What goes up, must come down?

Only last week I spoke about affordability constraints for ratepayers. I am very cognisant of that fact that, on average, our ratepayers don’t have infinitely deep pockets.

I’ve waxed lyrical about climate change for years and the implications for present and future generations. Things have certainly got no better this year.

Although there are some green shoots in terms of actions to address the problem, the pace has been too slow.

I note that in my term on the council, Bay  of Plenty Regional Council and the Government finally put the ribbon on the Matatā managed retreat and that now, a re-engineered BOPRC flood wall is beginning to rise in our down-town area.

The transition of power that will take place in the United States on January 20, 2025 is likely to be even more damaging to the environment and the climate if Trump is to be judged by his track record when previously in office and the appointments he is currently making.

In his first term, he rolled back by executive order more than 100 environmental rules and regulations.

Trump has called global warming a hoax. In November 2012, he tweeted the absurd statement that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.

I think we can say that the energy crisis I have been warning about for years is now here.

I don’t know how many times I have pointed out that a modern society doesn’t work without cheap energy.

Winston Churchill once quipped “never let a good crisis go to waste”, and I hope we don’t.

We need to get our A into G on this one because the development of energy infrastructure takes time.

The crisis in health seems to be deepening and apparently the Government will solve the infrastructure crisis by making sure, by some means that I have yet to understand, that “growth pays for growth”.

On this, I think they are missing some fundamental math.

We will always be playing catch-up if we don’t recognise that even low rates of growth have a compounding effect.

But don’t worry, AI will solve everything.

I reckon it won’t be long before your Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) chatbot or even a humanoid robot will come to the rescue.

Simply provide a list of symptoms and any diagnostics, answer any additional questions the AI might have for you, and it will spit out a number of possible diagnoses and a request for further diagnostic testing to narrow down the diagnosis.

Try typing “I have a headache and sore throat” into ChatGPT and it comes up with some pretty good stuff.

I have typed “how do we solve climate change?” and the AI comes up with some pretty sensible stuff.

It’s important to note that the public version of ChatGPT is just AI light.

While AI seems great, even developers are scared of where they are heading with it. It would seem that they don’t even know how it works.

Of the many problems with this technology, one is that it requires computational power (compute) and data and that requires energy-hungry data centres.

I would say that we should use our actual intelligence in the deployment of AI.

A few years ago, I signed an open letter warning of the dangers of AI that was initiated by the very people developing it.

Most recently, I addressed the potential for nuclear war and even wrote a letter to our prime minister to ask him to do what he could to avert it happening.

Of course, I wasn’t expecting a response and didn’t get one. Perhaps our PM has faith that we have developed the moral capacity to prevent it. That somehow rational dialogue will take the place of the vacuum that currently exists.

I too would like to believe in our ability for rational dialogue and morals and hope that future generations are wiser than the current generation has been. Our youth are going to be key.

Thus, given that we are in the festive season, I want to sound a note of optimism by reminding readers that just as easily as we have got ourselves into a bind, we can get out of it.

Come what may, we should stop, consider how fortunate we are, do a bit of thanksgiving and be good to those around us.

We in Aotearoa are lucky to live in a relatively small geographically- isolated country with a temperate climate and plenty of capacity to grow food.

Whakatāne district is situated in a wonderful area that abounds in beaches, bush, lakes and everything we need to prosper.

We are very lucky indeed, and especially when you look at the tragic events that are unfolding in certain parts of the world.

Oh, that we could only have “peace and good order” everywhere in the world and that we could improve on what we have.