This is edition 2026/125 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. “Which Is to Be Master – That’s All.”
Chris Trotter — Writing from Left Field
- ⚖️ Trotter says a boil-over between the Judiciary and the Legislature is simmering after former Solicitor-General Una Jagose KC’s Law Association breakfast address urging politicians to “straighten-up and fly right.”
- 🗣️ Jagose: “I think we are in trouble as a society and a democracy… We lawyers need to speak up more about the constitutional settings.”
- 🏃 She urged lawyers to proselytise in “running clubs” and “book clubs” — examples Trotter reads as pure middle-class self-improvement.
- 📜 He traces the “rights that lie so deep” claim to Lord Cooke’s Taylor v New Zealand Poultry Board dicta, calling it a slippery slope from torture hypothetics to judicial overreach.
- 🔥 The real flashpoints: legislative efforts to reverse decolonisation/indigenisation in the courts, and Jenny Marcroft’s Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill on transgender issues.
- 🗣️ Jagose, quoting Sir Michael Cullen: “Can Parliament conclusively define, without Māori, the meaning of that Treaty… Do you see limits to constitutional legitimacy there? Because I do.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: in any struggle between Parliament and the Courts, only one side has democratic legitimacy — and Trotter says it is not the Courts.
2. Modern Politics Has Become a Parallel Universe
Rodney Hide — Brash & Mitchell
- 🧠 Hide argues progressive politics operates as a “secularised salvation story”: original sin becomes systemic oppression; awakening is “getting woke”; salvation is endless activism for equity.
- ⚧️ Gender theory reframes biological sex as part of the fallen order; dissent over sports, prisons and medicalisation of children is cast as heresy.
- 📜 Treaty politics is cast as original sin (colonisation as theft), collective guilt and perpetual redemption through “partnership” and resource transfer.
- 🗣️ “To have a penis and wear a skirt, or to have a Māori ancestor, is both an occupation and a claim to serious political power.”
- ⚡ The heat of modern debate comes from two sides inhabiting different stories — one sees policy trade-offs; the other sees cosmic struggle against evil structures.
- 🎯 Takeaway: free speech and debating as equals against results — not purity tests — is how Kiwis reclaim a shared public square before the parallel universe wins.
3. The Dynamite Fishermen of Democracy
Zoran Rakovic — Brash & Mitchell
- 💥 Selwyn independent candidate Rakovic compares party politics to dynamite fishing: stun the lake, count the floating fish, cry “Mandate!” amid civic debris.
- 📚 Drawing on Simone Weil, he says parties manufacture collective passion and teach members to experience obedience as conviction.
- 🎭 Negative partisanship “works” like rats work as urban waste disposal — the method produces results while poisoning the water all future politics must live in.
- 🤝 Doorstep politics is “philosophically subversive” because voters become persons rather than demographic targets for consultants to message at.
- 🗣️ “The quiet scandal of democracy… is that party politics is often too stupid for ordinary people.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: the real ballot question is whether we reward those who blast the lake or those who learn the river and cultivate trust.
4. The Flying Golf Ball Conundrum
Peter Allan Williams — Peter’s Substack
- ⛳ Golf NZ: paid club members rose from 105,967 (2019) to 153,665 (2025) — a 45% jump; ~350,000 casual players and half a million play at least once a year.
- 🏠 More traffic means more balls over fences — dramatised in a TVNZ Sunday piece on Avondale Golf Club (est. 1919) and young families in surrounding social housing.
- ⚖️ Brookfields Park near Palmerston North was ordered closed as an “actionable nuisance” after ~20,000 balls hit a neighbouring organic farm; the farm then bought the course.
- 📜 Being there first does not win: under the tort of nuisance, neighbours have a right to quiet enjoyment; judges tend to favour home occupiers.
- 🛠️ Clubs (Akarana, Cromwell, Avondale) respond by moving out-of-bounds lines, paying for broken windows, or redesigning holes — or face “Catch-22” when closing a course for housing angers neighbours who like the amenity.
- 🎯 Takeaway: “In the end there’s only one guaranteed solution. Golfers must learn to hit the ball straight. Yeah right.”
5. Socialism as Royal Road to Fraud
Roger Simon — American Refugees
- 📰 Axios claims both left and right have rejected free markets — Trump taking government stakes in private firms, socialist Democrats winning primaries — one of the biggest US policy shifts since Reagan.
- 🕵️ Citizen journalist Nick Shirley confronts an adult-care centre in Flushing, Queens claiming 7,899 members while staff admit they do not have 7,000 — overbilling at $1,600 per patient for $12.9 million in 2024.
- 💰 Shirley links ~$44 million siphoned by Korean-mafia networks; Minnesota programme fraud estimates exceed $9 billion; California estimates ~$24 billion.
- 🗣️ Simon’s diagnosis: “No one is watching the store” — officials are held accountable mainly at elections and often placate the very communities where fraud thrives.
- 📉 He extends Thatcher’s line: socialism does not only run out of other people’s money; it creates fertile ground for stratospheric fraud.
- 🎯 Takeaway: fraud is the contemporary, personal argument against the socialist siren of “equal outcomes” — and Shirley deserves better than a scrubbed Pulitzer.
6. Anthropic’s Dystopian Plan
Michael Shellenberger — Public
- 🤖 Anthropic staffer Chloe Lubinski compared AI “character” and self-stories to human moral conversion — a metaphor Shellenberger says misrepresents the research and humanises machines.
- 🗣️ CEO Dario Amodei: if the exponential continues, AI will soon be “better than humans at essentially everything.”
- 🧹 Anthropic’s residual job vision: grounds maintenance, food service, personal care — spun as “relational” work of “loving one another.”
- 💰 Shellenberger: a near-trillion-dollar valuation depends on eliminating high-paying jobs so customers save billions; service work is treated as “essentially nothing.”
- 🌍 He links Anthropic’s rhetoric to Malthusian “Great Turning”/Great Reset ideology and anti-nuclear deep ecology (Joanna Macy).
- 🗣️ Free Press’s Spencer Klavan: “Treat things like people, and you run the risk of treating people like things.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: humanising AI and dehumanising people is both a sales pitch and a civilisational error.
7. The Modi Lovefest
Peter Allan Williams — Peter’s Substack
- 🤝 Williams finds a NZ Prime Minister holding hands with a visiting 75-year-old PM in public “just weird” — something never seen with Chinese, Australian or US leaders.
- 🏟️ Modi filled Spark Arena with ~10,000 of the Indian diaspora in a rally of “adulation” that Williams compares to cults of personality.
- 🗣️ Modi spoke in Hindi with no translation for non-Hindi speakers; Luxon called Indians in NZ “younger, wealthier and better educated.”
- 🌉 Both leaders cast the diaspora as a “living bridge” — Modi: “your body may be here, but your heart remains connected there.”
- 🗣️ Luxon: “We should reject outright the voices and the politicians that are wanting to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment,” and thanked Chris Hipkins for supporting the India FTA.
- ✈️ Winston Peters was “coincidentally on purpose” out of the country; a promised US$20 billion NZ investment in India over 15 years is framed as commitment by India and aspiration by NZ.
- 🎯 Takeaway: trade is fine; all-in lovefest diplomacy and dual loyalty messaging deserve a cooler head.
8. RIP Ann Widdecombe — and Shame on Her Haters
Tom Slater — spiked
- 🕯️ Former Tory MP and Reform UK spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe, 78, was found covered in blood in her Dartmoor home; a murder investigation was launched; a man arrested and later released without charge.
- 📺 Even before murder was suspected, the left’s response mixed glee and derision: a since-deleted Socialist Worker piece titled “Hurrah! Ann Widdecombe is strictly dead”; Peter Tatchell signed off “BIGOT!”
- 🎙️ Sky’s Adam Boulton called her a “spinster” and “old maid” and re-aired virginity gossip while her body was barely cold.
- 🗳️ Slater places her with Benn, Tebbit and Skinner — bombastic, sincere politicians motored by duty rather than phone scripts.
- 🇬🇧 She backed Brexit, rejected positive discrimination, and said of private adult life: “I do not care tuppence what consenting adults do.”
- 🎯 Takeaway: basic decency is suspended for dead conservatives — and the public’s horror shows that sulphurous fringe is not the nation.
9. AI and the Elephant in the Data Room
John Mikkelsen — The Spectator Australia
- 🤖 Mikkelsen asks whether AI can be trusted as a reliable information source: “no… Maybe… Or to quote Split Enz, sometimes.”
- 🎬 Google AI wrongly identified the killer in an SBS murder mystery until he corrected it and received an apology.
- ☢️ Asked twice about the Coalition’s energy policy, AI insisted on “seven government-owned nuclear power stations” at named coal sites — conflating Peter Dutton’s old election blueprint with the formal plan to lift the ban and crowd in private capital.
- 🔗 The bot even linked the official Liberal “Plan for Affordable Energy” it had not read — then apologised for “conflating two different stages.”
- 🏭 On AI data-centre demand, retiring coal and China’s/India’s coal build-out, the bot agreed Australia faces a “global paradox” of exporting coal while enforcing a capital-intensive domestic transition.
- 🎯 Takeaway: double-check AI “facts” — especially on politics — before letting them shape the public debate.
10. Starmer’s Britain Is Ineffectual and Sinister
Max Jeffery — The Spectator Australia
- 🇬🇧 “Starmer’s Britain” entered the lexicon in May 2021 after Hartlepool: at once gormless and ominous.
- 📜 Canon of the genre: the Chagos deal, early prison releases with bottle-popping, Rachel Reeves crying, Manchester Airport police beatings, the Assisted Dying Bill’s senescence.
- 🧳 Great Man of the Starmerverse: Hadush Kebatu — sex offender who sparked the Epping riots, was accidentally released, tried to turn himself in, then deported with a £500 “resettlement grant.”
- 🏛️ David Lammy and Richard Hermer went to Chatham House to rebrand Starmer as a foreign-affairs strongman restoring Britain’s international reputation.
- 💸 Hermer blamed energy bills on “Putin’s aggression” and blocked shipping lanes — using Harold Wilson’s “pound in their pocket” line.
- 🎯 Takeaway: “He has done nothing with power, but also everything” — the festering bin bag of British absurdities feels made for his rule.
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