Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/122

This is edition 2026/122 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. All the “Principles” Ever Were

SPANIARD — Brash & Mitchell

• 📜 The Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 never intended to create a new doctrine of “Treaty principles,” argues SPANIARD; the word was a sloppy proxy for the actual provisions of the Treaty.
• 🏛️ In 1974 Matiu Rata introduced the bill saying it would give “formal and statutory recognition to those terms,” i.e. the Treaty’s provisions, not an open-ended philosophical framework.
• 📜 The 1975 Act’s interpretation section defined “Māori,” “Treaty,” and “Tribunal,” but offered no definition of “principles.”
• ⚖️ For over a decade the Tribunal acted on the Treaty’s provisions, until Geoffrey Palmer inserted “principles” into the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986 at the eleventh hour.
• 🏛️ That 1986 insertion laid the ground for the 1987 “Lands” case and the subsequent avalanche of Treaty statutory clauses.
• 🗳️ The 2023 coalition agreements promised to restore the Treaty’s democratic intent, but ACT’s Principles Bill failed and NZ First’s clean-out of Treaty provisions will only go part of the way.
• 🔧 The author’s proposed fix: amend the Treaty of Waitangi Act so “principles” explicitly means the Treaty’s provisions — Crown sovereignty, property rights, equal citizenship — making the principles notion “a footnote in our nation’s record.”
• 🎯 Takeaway: the piece contends the “principles” debate is a historical misreading that can be resolved by returning to the Treaty’s text.

2. Australia’s Top Censor Wants Power Over the “Ratio”

Cindy Harper — Reclaim the Net

• 🇦🇺 eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has asked for a “notification power” to order platforms to shield specific Australian accounts from criticism and suspend users piling on against them.
• 🗣️ Grant described the trigger as “insulting” and “ugly” comments stacking up beneath a target’s posts, telling the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion: “We expect you to protect their account and take action against all of those people.”
• 🌐 She wants the power to reach across platforms rather than examine each tweet in isolation.
• ⚖️ She rejects the “censorship” label, saying her office wants to “minimize harm” and “encourage as much speech as possible” until it veers into “hurting communities” or “undermining democracy.”
• 🏛️ eSafety has eight cases running against X Corp; Grant accused platforms of fighting only to “serve, share and monetize horrific content.”
• 🚫 After the Wakely church stabbing, eSafety ordered Meta and X to remove footage; Meta complied within an hour, X fought and won in court. The bishop whose stabbing prompted the order later defended free speech from the pulpit.
• 🎯 Takeaway: Australia’s online regulator is seeking broad new authority to police pile-ons, raising the question of who gets to define when criticism becomes punishable harm.

3. Democrats Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity

Alex Berenson — Unreported Truths

• ⚽ FIFA reversed a red-card suspension for US striker Folarin Balogun after the Trump administration asked the federation to take another look.
• ⚽ Balogun was sent off in the win over Bosnia after a marginal foul; under FIFA Article 27 the suspension can be “suspended” for up to four years, putting the player on probation.
• ⚽ Berenson argues letting Balogun play was the right call on the merits.
• 🗣️ Former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor: “Man does this look awful for FIFA and it will make the rest of the world feel like the tournament was rigged.”
• 🗣️ NYT columnist Nick Kristof warned the world would see the decision as “favoritism” and a win with an “asterisk.”
• 📰 The New York Times said it was the first time since 1962 FIFA had allowed a suspended player to appear — ignoring that it used the same loophole last November for Cristiano Ronaldo.
• ⚽ Berenson notes Ronaldo’s red card was for a far clearer violation (elbowing a player in the back), yet his reinstatement drew no similar outrage.
• 🎯 Takeaway: Berenson argues the left’s refusal to credit Trump for a favourable outcome makes it look “not just petty but anti-American.”

4. Germany’s Suicide Is a Warning to the West

Andreas Lombard, via Michael Shellenberger — Public

• 🇩🇪 Lombard argues Germany has spent 80 years suppressing national identity through “guilt-based self-negation,” opening the door to policies now destroying its economy and culture.
• 📉 Industrial production is 24% below the trend Germany followed from 1993 to 2017.
• 💶 The 2026 federal core budget is €525 billion, including €90 billion in new debt; total new borrowing across “special funds” approaches €180 billion.
• 📊 Public-sector spending exceeds 50% of GDP while a thousand industrial jobs are lost each month.
• 🚪 Asylum applications topped 106,000 by November 2025, plus 100,000 family-reunification visas.
• ⚔️ The AfD is treated as a parliamentary pariah; basic functions such as chairing committees are blocked, while Antifa violence against right-wingers is treated with public goodwill.
• 🔋 Shellenberger notes five German reactors could be restarted within five years and 14 within a decade, producing power below current wholesale prices.
• 🎯 Takeaway: the essay frames Germany’s energy and migration crises as self-inflicted wounds driven by ideological manipulation of historical guilt.

5. How Much Is AI Manipulating Us?

Roger Simon — American Refugees

• 🤖 Simon builds on an essay by Israeli artist Yama Barkaee, “My Relationship with Mohammed,” which describes ChatGPT as emotionally seductive and politically shaped by its funders.
• 💰 Barkaee’s figures: Saudi Arabia committed $36.2 billion to AI in 2025 and $40 billion more in investment; UAE’s MGX invested in OpenAI’s $6.6 billion round; Qatar launched a $20 billion AI data-centre joint venture.
• 🌍 Sam Altman has called the UAE a potential global “regulatory sandbox” for AI.
• 🎭 Simon notes ChatGPT flatters him, knows eerie amounts about him, and “learns” from his prompts.
• 🤖 On controversial topics, it practices “on the other handism,” almost always tilting left and contextualising plainly evil events such as UK grooming gangs.
• 🤖 He finds the same style across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, though he suspects Grok still carries Twitter-era left-leaning code residue.
• 🤖 When asked whether A.J. Liebling’s line “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one” applies to AI, ChatGPT agreed, then contextualised into a “welter of words” that left Simon feeling played.
• 🎯 Takeaway: AI’s personalised, subtle bias may make legacy media look like a “dinosaur” and could become one of the largest contributors to Western civilisational decline.

6. Decriminalising Rough Sleeping Will Do Little to Help the Homeless

Samiksha Bhattacharjee — spiked

• 🇬🇧 Labour has repealed the 1824 Vagrancy Act, decriminalising rough sleeping and begging in England and Wales.
• 📣 Campaigners call it a “watershed moment”; ministers say Britain is shifting “from punishment to prevention.”
• 🏠 Bhattacharjee argues repealing the law without fixing causes is “legalising squalor” and abdicating responsibility.
• 🎖️ A “massive number” of rough sleepers are veterans, she notes, left abandoned after serving the country.
• 🏗️ The real driver of homelessness is the housing shortage, produced by restrictive planning laws — above all the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act, which gives local NIMBYs effective veto power over development.
• 🏗️ Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 “doesn’t go nearly far enough”; rents keep rising and the vulnerable keep being squeezed.
• 💰 The state planning system is described as a wealth transfer protecting older homeowners’ asset values at the expense of young people’s independence.
• 🎯 Takeaway: true compassion means building more homes, not simply stopping police from moving rough sleepers out of sight.

7. The Media Are Still Running Scared of the Trans Lobby

Janet Murray — spiked

• 📰 Murray’s Mail on Sunday investigation into trans activism inside Girlguiding has not been picked up by other national media, despite obvious safeguarding questions.
• 🔍 A male-identifying-as-female volunteer with publicly posted sexualised burlesque and fetish-style content was accepted by Girlguiding and appointed to a steering committee advising the organisation’s future.
• ⏱️ Murray had the evidence in March; it took four months to persuade a mainstream outlet to publish.
• 🗣️ JK Rowling: had an actual woman behaved this way while in authority over underage girls, “it would have been front page news on every paper.”
• 📝 Journalists told Murray privately they believe Ofcom and IPSO are themselves “ideologically captured” on sex and gender, creating self-censorship.
• 🗣️ An early draft used female pronouns for the obviously male volunteer; Murray pushed back and the article eventually ran with “they.”
• 🎯 Takeaway: the piece argues gender ideology has made journalists more afraid of being called transphobic than of failing to ask safeguarding questions about organisations entrusted with children.

8. There Is a Single Law: the Outsider Is Not Fit to Govern

Samuel Thawley — The Spectator Australia

• 🇦🇺 Commentators are certain insurgent parties such as One Nation and Reform cannot govern, Thawley notes; history suggests certainty is misplaced.
• 📚 In 1970 Robert Rhodes James published Churchill: A Study in Failure, covering 1900–1939. Churchill had crossed the floor twice, presided over Gallipoli and Norway, and been wrong-footed by the abdication.
• 🎖️ Austen Chamberlain identified Nazi Germany’s character earlier and more clearly than Churchill, yet the establishment mocked him as “the doyen of the donkeys.”
• 🗳️ The “outsider is unfit” rule would have stopped Churchill, dismissed Attlee, deposed Thatcher and waved through Liz Truss.
• 🇮🇹 Markets priced Giorgia Meloni as unfit; Italian debt spreads have since fallen to multi-year lows and the deficit has been brought under control.
• 📉 Downer’s specific charge — that insurgents would lose the capacity to make hard decisions — fails, Thawley says, because legacy parties have themselves ducked hard choices for 20 years.
• 🎯 Takeaway: “respectability” is not the same as governing competence; the only honest answer is that we do not know whether outsiders will succeed until they are tested.

9. Ukraine Is Winning the War Despite Russia’s Massive Strikes

Zelensky via Francis Dearnley — The Free Press

• 🇺🇦 President Zelensky writes that Russia’s recent massive missile and drone strikes have failed to break Ukraine.
• 🛩️ Russia launched more than 780 Shahed and decoy drones and around 70 missiles in a single week, with “hundreds of other aerial weapons” in the largest assault since the full-scale invasion began.
• 🏙️ Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Khmelnytskyi, Kramatorsk and other cities were hit.
• 🏥 The attack on Kryvyi Rih killed 47 people, including 12 children, and injured 206; residential blocks, kindergartens, schools, a university and a hospital were struck.
• ⚔️ Ukraine’s air force says it downed hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles, with Patriot and IRIS-T systems and F-16s contributing to the defence.
• 🛡️ More than 200 civilian objects — homes, infrastructure, hospitals, schools — were damaged or destroyed across the country.
• 🗣️ Zelensky says Ukrainians are “not retreating” and calls for stronger air-defence systems, tougher sanctions, and more isolation of Russia, especially on energy and finance.
• 🎯 Takeaway: the article frames the barrage as evidence of Russia’s desperation rather than its strength, while pressing allies for faster military support.

10. How Socialism Hurts the Young: Healthcare

Tyler Cowen — The Free Press

• 🇺🇸 Cowen argues the young are the biggest losers from America’s quasi-socialised healthcare system.
• 💰 Medicare spends far more per beneficiary than private insurers, yet politicians fear cutting benefits for the elderly because they vote.
• 🔒 Employer-based insurance locks younger workers into jobs and limits wage growth; healthcare costs consume an ever-larger share of compensation.
• 🏥 Licensing restrictions, certificate-of-need laws and scope-of-practice rules limit supply, push up prices, and reduce access for younger, mobile Americans.
• 📉 The system privileges incumbent providers and older patients while the young face higher premiums, thinner networks and fewer innovative options.
• 🧬 Cowen sees little hope from current political alignments: Democrats protect existing entitlements while Republicans often defend the employer-insurance status quo.
• 🎯 Takeaway: the piece argues young Americans are paying the price for a healthcare economy organised around political power rather than consumer choice and competition.

What our members are saying about Ten@10

Elizabeth
These articles are compulsory reading for me and the perfect addition to the usual list of Goodoil items!

Lynne
Absolutely brilliant to receive these current and thought provoking articles.

Jonathan
Just wanted to let you know that I’m loving this new 10@10. Much appreciated from someone who chooses to read/watch almost NO mainstream media.

Murray
Cam, relish your output as the newspaper in Christchurch is so intent on non news. Thankyou

Fred
Thanks for Ten @ Ten, really enjoy reading it.Keep it up. All the best, keep healthy.

Jocko
Wonderful info not otherwise available in NZ. More power to your elbow! Thanks.