Latest issue

by Joseph Mooney - Queenstown’s MP (Southland constituency)

A very warm welcome to 2025.

I hope the festive period has been exactly that and you have had a chance to connect with family and friends and recharge those batteries.

Summer is the busiest time of year for many, so I also want to acknowledge everyone who has been hard at work over this time.

For me, the holiday period has provided a chance to get deep into the mountains of this wonderful place we live in.

This is also a time of reflection and a time to focus on goals for the year to come. 2025 is shaping as a year of significant change. Big technological change as well as global political change beckons this year.

Just last week Mark Zuckerberg has announced significant changes to his social media platforms emphasising a return to a focus on free speech.

This made me think of a very interesting speech by Prime Minister of Estonia Kristen Michal, who attributed the most important contributions of his party helping lift Estonia out of a communist backwater to building it into one of the world’s most advanced small states has been their focus on freedom.

He says “a 21st century state of free citizens trusts its people” and “life will improve only when solutions are in the hands of citizens, not dictated by the state.”

The rapid development of technology such as artificial intelligence is another theme for 2025 - one that could be seen as a concern - or as a significant opportunity. Queenstown, as a place with a long history of innovation and with a developing interest in technology, is well placed to lead in this space if it chooses to.

It’s also led me to a fascinating article by American technologist Marc Andreessen, who argues that technology and markets have lifted humans out of poverty for hundreds of years, and presents an opportunity to do so in an unprecedented way going forwards.

He makes a compelling argument that intelligence is the birthright of humanity, and we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can. He points out we are now literally making sand (silicon) think, and poses the question of what more we are capable of.

Technology is a big part of the solution to environmental degradation. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment, a technologically stagnant society ruins it.

We will need much more energy, but energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment with technologies that we have either already available to us or in development.

It is a profoundly positive vision, and worth considering as we look to the future and what we would like to see in it.