This is edition 2026/121 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Hi all,
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. The “Bits and Bobs” That Built Us
Chris Trotter — Writing from Left Field
- 🌳 Trotter revisits a Labour Party conference from about 20 years ago when Shane Jones, then a Labour Cabinet Minister, asked him what makes the Greens “tick.”
- 🌿 Trotter’s answer: for most Greens, nature is “a living presence… older and ultimately more significant” than any single species, including humans.
- 🗣️ He recalls Jones staring at him quizzically, saying he had “absolutely no idea” what Trotter was talking about, then walking away.
- 📝 Trotter says he is now offering a “considerably more coherent” version of that explanation than Jones received at the time.
- 🗳️ The piece is a warning to parties proposing to “pare back the conservation estate, even by ‘bits and bobs’” — they do so “at their electoral peril.”
- ⚠️ The full newsletter is paywalled; the publicly visible portion centres on the Green worldview and its electoral potency.
- 🎯 Takeaway: conservation politics is not marginal in New Zealand; a deep cultural attachment to nature protects even small pieces of the estate.
2. Is NZ First Recycling Career Politicians?
Grant Duncan — Politics Happens
- ♻️ Duncan asks whether NZ First has become “Parliament’s recycling bin” after Michael Laws joined its candidate lineup.
- 🗳️ He lists sitting MPs and candidates with former party allegiances: Winston Peters (ex-National), Shane Jones (ex-Labour), Eliot Ikilei (ex-New Conservatives), Alfred Ngaro (ex-National), Stuart Nash (ex-Labour), Michael Laws (ex-National).
- 🏛️ The list also includes four ex-mayors: Andy Foster, Jamie Cleine, Vince Cocurullo and Michael Laws.
- 🎤 Duncan disagrees with the Herald view that Laws’ “polarising comments and controversial history” risk damaging NZ First; he argues Laws’ Platform audience will attract many NZ First supporters.
- 📈 Recent polls suggest NZ First could double its numbers in the next Parliament, so recycled candidates could enter as list MPs.
- 🤔 The post poses a counter-question: “what is a career politician? People often deride them, but what, if anything, is wrong with being one?”
- 🎯 Takeaway: NZ First is running on experience and controversy in equal measure, and voters will have to decide which matters more.
3. The Unfinished Pursuit
A Halfling’s View
- 🇺🇸 A reflection on the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, framed as a response to Jonathan Ayling’s Herald article on whether the American Dream can survive.
- 🖊️ Jefferson’s decision to write “the pursuit of happiness” instead of Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” or George Mason’s “obtaining happiness” is parsed as a deliberate philosophical choice.
- 📜 “Happiness” in the 18th-century sense meant eudaimonia — flourishing, virtue, self-governance — not private pleasure.
- ⛓️ Jefferson’s original draft contained a strong anti-slavery paragraph calling the slave trade “war against human nature itself”; the Continental Congress removed almost all of it.
- 📜 Frederick Douglass, Lincoln and Martin Luther King are cited as heirs who treated the Declaration as a promissory note rather than a completed achievement.
- 🧭 Three diagnoses of American decline are offered: conservative/communitarian (atomised license), progressive (wealth capturing government), libertarian (state overreach).
- 🏛️ The author’s conclusion: there was no golden age to fall from; the task is to keep building the road toward the Declaration’s ideals.
- 🗣️ “Self-evident truths do not realize themselves… The Declaration is not a monument to a moment when Americans arrived. It is a summons to the work of arriving.”
- ⚠️ The argument is explicitly pro-American but not uncritical, acknowledging slavery, JFK’s assassination and Nixon as stumbles.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the piece reframes the American founding as an ongoing vocation, not a finished utopia.
4. Biden Knew Ukrainians Blew Up Nord Stream, Evidence Suggests
Michael Shellenberger — Public
- 🛢️ The September 2022 sabotage of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines from Russia to Germany was, Shellenberger says, “one of the greatest acts of sabotage in modern history.”
- 🇷🇺 Afterward, the Biden administration led many to believe Russia had blown up its own pipeline.
- 🇺🇦 Shellenberger claims that Biden officials who implied Russian responsibility knew at the time that Ukrainians had carried out the operation; a German court recently charged a former Ukrainian army officer.
- 🗣️ WSJ Chief European Political Correspondent Bojan Pancevski, author of The Nord Stream Conspiracy, said he spoke to senior National Security Council people who “of course… knew.”
- 🕵️ Pancevski says CIA director William Burns was notified of early intelligence in May or June 2022, before the attack happened.
- ⚠️ The rest of the post, including video, is behind a paywall; the free preview gives the core allegation.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the claim is that the Biden administration publicly blamed Russia while privately knowing Ukrainian actors were responsible.
5. Infectious Medical Council Māori Madness
John McLean — John’s Substack
- 🏥 McLean reports a conversation with a Ministry of Health doctor who was “furious and terribly distracted” by Health Minister Simeon Brown declining to reappoint Medical Council chair Dr Rachelle Love and deputy-chair Simon Watt.
- ⚖️ McLean notes Love and Watt were not fired; their terms expired and Brown simply chose not to reappoint them — a power the Minister holds under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003.
- 📻 He criticises RNZ’s headline as biased: passive voice, and the word “replacement” used to suggest active removal.
- 🏥 ASMS executive director Sarah Dalton is quoted calling the non-reappointment “a dangerous precedent in political interference with a regulatory body.”
- 🎓 McLean notes Dalton has no medical credentials; her background is English literature, history, teaching, and union work at the PPTA.
- 📜 He reproduces the Medical Council’s current 2019 Statement on Cultural Safety, calling it “woke whacky” and citing lines about colonial history, systemic bias, Māori health outcomes and the Treaty of Waitangi.
- ⚠️ McLean claims the Council’s proposed new statements on cultural competence, cultural safety and hauora Māori were so extreme they were buried after a backlash.
- 🐟 He also targets Simon Watt as a former Bell Gully partner who negotiated New Zealand’s confidential Pfizer COVID vaccine contract.
- 🎯 Takeaway: McLean frames the Medical Council controversy as a battle between democratic ministerial authority and an unaccountable, ideologically captured professional body.
6. Smaller Government and Less Bureaucratic Bloat — Yes, but How?
John Raine — John Raine on Substack
- 📉 ACT’s 2026 policy proposes shrinking the Government from 28 to 18 ministers and from 43 to 19 departments.
- 📉 National has already announced a public-sector reduction of 8,700 roles (~14%) by 2029.
- 📚 Raine cites Parkinson’s Law and Niskanen’s budget-maximising bureaucracy thesis to explain why bureaucracies grow regardless of workload.
- 🎓 He points to “administrative bloat” in universities, noting NZ’s 1.5:1 non-academic-to-academic staff ratio is among the highest in the Western world.
- 🇳🇿 The public service grew from under 49,000 in 2017 to over 65,000 by October 2023; Crown spending rose from $76 billion to $139 billion per year.
- 🌐 International comparisons: Singapore, with a similar population, has 21 ministerial portfolios; Ireland caps government at 15 ministers.
- 🦃 “Turkeys do not vote for Christmas” — MPs’ self-interest may block ACT’s plan even if the public supports it.
- ⚠️ Raine argues ACT should frame the policy around reducing fragmentation, improving accountability and cutting duplication — not ideology.
- 🤖 Samuel Thawley is cited predicting a “heavily resisted downsizing correction,” partly driven by AI.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the structural and political obstacles to shrinking the state may be harder than the policy rationale is popular.
7. Winston Peters Announces Citizens-Only Voting Policy
Matua Kahurangi
- 🗳️ Winston Peters announced in Warkworth that NZ First would change the law so only New Zealand citizens can vote in local and general elections.
- 📜 Current law: permanent residents who have lived continuously in New Zealand for at least 12 months can vote in parliamentary elections.
- 🌍 NZ First says New Zealand is unusual internationally; most democracies restrict national voting to citizens.
- 🗣️ Peters: “We’re announcing today that New Zealand First will change the law that only citizens of New Zealand can vote in local and general elections.”
- 📊 The post claims an estimated 150,000 non-citizens voted in the 2023 elections and accuses major parties of “immigration gerrymandering” to court migrant voting blocs.
- 💬 Commenters were largely supportive, with several saying they had not known non-citizens could vote.
- 🇦🇺 Some raised carve-out questions, such as Australian citizens who have lived in New Zealand for decades.
- ⚠️ One commenter noted the 1975 Electoral Amendment Act shifted the franchise from nationality to permanent residence.
- 🗣️ The author, Matua Kahurangi, declares at the end: “That’s why, at this stage, I’ll be voting for NZ First.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: citizens-only voting is being pitched as a sovereignty and fairness issue, with the current permanent-resident franchise presented as anomalous.
8. Parliament’s Assault on the Family Home
Rodney Hide — Brash & Mitchell
- ⚖️ Hide attacks the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 as “a direct, brutal attack on parental authority, free speech, and religious liberty.”
- 🗳️ The Act passed with overwhelming support from Labour, Greens, ACT, Te Pāti Māori and National; only eight National MPs voted no.
- 👨👩👧 Hide argues a parent who persistently guides a distressed child away from gender medicalisation “through conversation, prayer, or simply affirming biological reality” risks prosecution.
- 🏠 “The family dinner table has become a potential crime scene.”
- ⚖️ Prosecutions require Attorney-General approval; Hide dismisses this safeguard because the Attorney-General is a politician, not a neutral guardian.
- 🏫 Meanwhile, schools, counsellors and state-funded groups face no equivalent restrictions as they promote puberty blockers and “born in the wrong body” ideology, he says.
- 💰 Parents are taxed to fund “the very apparatus undermining their authority over their own children.”
- 🗣️ Hide: “This law does not protect vulnerable youth. It weaponises the state against the family.”
- ⚠️ He calls for repeal, arguing parents, not politicians or activists, should raise children.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the article frames the conversion-practices law as state overreach that criminalises parental dissent while leaving institutional gender ideology untouched.
9. Off the Record, Off the Hook
Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project
- 📜 Parliament passed the first reading of legislation that would kill Mike Smith’s climate lawsuit against Fonterra, Z Energy and other major emitters.
- ⚖️ The Supreme Court had allowed Smith’s case to proceed; the Government then proposed a two-sentence amendment to the Climate Change Response Act.
- 📧 Chief Ombudsman John Allen found the Prime Minister’s Office failed to release documents it should have released, including Fonterra and Z Energy briefings.
- 📄 One document was hand-delivered in hard copy; another was sent to a personal Gmail account — neither filed correctly.
- 🗣️ The Ombudsman called it “unreasonable” and “surprising” that former chief policy adviser Matt Burgess had “no recollection” of documents from “high profile companies” whose wording was later reflected in the legislation.
- 🏛️ Prime Minister Luxon accepted the findings, called it a “teachable moment,” and noted Burgess no longer works for the office.
- 🔍 The Ombudsman referred the matter to the Chief Archivist and expects follow-up.
- 📝 Audrey Young’s Herald column: “to have it happen twice suggests it was deliberate. And that suggests it is not an office that respects basic requirements of transparency under law.”
- 🌐 Danyl McLauchlan is quoted saying political and public-sector actors routinely route information through Gmail, Signal and WhatsApp to avoid transparency, knowing the chances of being caught are close to zero.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the Ombudsman’s report raises serious questions about whether corporate lobbying entered the Prime Minister’s Office through unofficial channels and then vanished from the official record.
10. The ‘Anti-Zionists’ Are Hounding British Israelis Through the Courts
Luke Gittos — spiked
- ⚖️ Westminster Magistrates’ Court ordered costs against the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians after a failed private prosecution of a British-Israeli IDF reservist.
- 📜 The ICJP used the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870, originally intended to stop British subjects acting as mercenaries in foreign conflicts.
- 🎖️ The proposed defendant was a dual national who reported for IDF reserve duty on 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas pogrom.
- ⚖️ The magistrate ruled the 1870 Act was never intended to criminalise dual nationals serving in the armed forces of a country of which they are citizens.
- 🕵️ The court criticised the ICJP for requesting anonymity then publicising the case on its own website, finding it “calculated to allow ICJP to control the narrative and enhance its public profile.”
- 🎓 “Expert” witness Dr Mandy Turner was a member of an ICJP WhatsApp group and a “campaigner and activist… rather than an independent expert.”
- ❌ Turner falsely blamed Israel for the al-Ahli hospital explosion, when a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible.
- 📝 The ICJP had also written to the Metropolitan Police in 2022 asking Counter Terrorism Command to investigate British citizens who joined the IDF, and failed to disclose that to the court.
- 🗣️ The magistrate found the application’s “dominant motive… to advance a political or ideological agenda.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: the court delivered a strong rebuke to a campaign group attempting to use private prosecution as a political weapon against British Israelis.
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