Your Daily Ten@10

This is edition 2026/126 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. Why New Zealand Keeps Promising Roads It Cannot Build

Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project

🛣️ Follow-up to the RoNS backdown: 17 Roads of National Significance, $56 billion total, $49 billion unfunded, only six with credible construction dates.
🗣️ Mike Hosking: NZ is famous for “talking big and doing little”; Joel Maxwell calls National “tell-don’t-show” and RoNS its KiwiBuild.
🚛 National Road Carriers’ James Smith: “The first step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem.”
📋 Simon Upton: once a project is a RoNS it “goes straight to the front of the queue” and BCRs become “rubber-stamping”; if BCR < 1, “history suggests” it stays a RoNS.
🔄 Mill Road: announced/cancelled five times since 2017 by Labour and National — “not one metre of motorway.”
💰 Shamubeel Eaqub: stop-start infrastructure cycle costs $11.8 billion over 25 years; Vernon Small: beyond a third term an election promise is “at best a slogan.”
🎯 Takeaway: the fight is no longer left vs right over roads — it is whether the NZ state can get from announcement to asphalt.

2. Act’s High Hopes for Henry

Peter Allan Williams — Peter’s Substack

📺 Act names former TV host Paul Henry (Paul Henry Hopes) as a list-only candidate — joining celebrity-politics trend with NZ First’s Taine Randell and Labour’s Rakesh Naidoo.
🗣️ David Seymour: Henry “infects the room with enthusiasm”; Williams, who shared a studio with him for years, agrees — and notes he loses interest if he is not the centre of attention.
🏆 Of Holmes, Hosking and Henry, Williams rates Henry the best broadcaster: Breakfast, Close Up, Traitors, The Chase.
🔥 Career flashpoints: remarks on Sheila Dikshit’s name; questioning Anand Satyanand as not a “real New Zealander”; a timid TVNZ let him go.
📋 He quit Three’s Paul Henry at end-2016; TVNZ board tenure lasted ~12 months and became untenable once candidacy broke.
🎯 Takeaway: he will almost certainly enter Parliament; in cabinet he will be a nightmare for bureaucrats — if Act is out of power, Williams doubts he lasts the full term.

3. The $56 Billion Broken Promise

Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project

📉 Chris Bishop’s “Major Transport Projects Pipeline” is a large-scale retreat: of 17 RoNS, only six in construction/procurement; eleven parked as “preparing,” “route protection” or “continuing more slowly.”
🗣️ Thomas Coughlan: Bishop was “positively Ardern-esque” in denying cancellations; delayed roads are “as good as cancelled.”
🚇 Wellington SH1 / second Mt Victoria tunnel: no construction start date after campaign promises of “spades in the ground”; Heather du Plessis-Allan: “That is now a broken promise.”
💵 Full programme ~$56 billion over 20 years; funding entirely via petrol tax/RUC would need ~70% one-off lift (~49c/litre) — and still miss harbour crossing and busways.
📄 July 2025 MoT briefing (reported by Henry Cooke): RoNS “relatively low value”; all BCRs < 3.0, some < 1; household burden may outweigh benefits.
🎯 Takeaway: National wanted expensive highways and cheap petrol; the numbers never worked — and the ministry told the minister a year before the public climb-down.

4. Is New Zealand Heading in the Wrong Direction?

Grant Duncan — Politics Happens

📊 Roy Morgan May/June: 37% say NZ is heading in the right direction; 49% wrong; the rest don’t know — roughly half the country is pessimistic.
🧭 Duncan notes “Don’t know” is valid: what is the “right direction,” how do you measure it, and how close is the country to it?
🔀 “Wrong direction” is not a single faction: left objecting to Luxon & Co; right saying the government is not radical enough; others simply gloomy about the economy or their own circumstances.
🎭 The poll is a catch-all of moods and party loyalty — but moods matter at elections.
🗳️ He asks whether the right/wrong-direction question has historically predicted a change of government in election years (full analysis is paywalled).
🎯 Takeaway: half the country already thinks NZ is off course — which is why the November election will be fought as much on mood as on policy detail.

William McGimpsey — The Conservative Network

📜 White paper tracks NZ policy eras: liberal settler economy (1840–1930), Keynesian welfare/ISI (1930s–84), Rogernomics free trade (1984–99), then openness plus selective industrial strategy post-2000.
🏭 Thesis: NZ’s comparative advantages are high-value primary production and nature-based tourism — strategy should double down there rather than chase generic “diversity.”
💵 Propose citizen-only UBI trial replacing welfare; make KiwiSaver compulsory; convert NZ Super Fund into a broader sovereign wealth fund.
🛂 Make work migration temporary and end residence pathways for most migrant workers; charge non-citizens a daily stay fee.
🧾 New primary-sector taxes (land, inputs, environmental limits) proportionate to state support — plus higher tourist/immigrant cost recovery.
🎯 Takeaway: economic nationalism as a programme — specialise hard, tax the rents, restrict permanent demographic replacement, redistribute to citizens.

6. Don’t Worry, Big Brother Is Here to “Keep You Safe”

Alexander Hatzikalimnios — The Spectator Australia

👁️ WA Police trial of “Overt Live Facial Recognition Technology” — first planned deployments already under way.
📋 Official aims: prevent/detect crime, find missing persons, track registered sex offenders, “protect the public” via adjustable “alert lists.”
⚠️ Alert categories can expand under the same “public safety” language; mass CCTV already exists to plug the system into a national grid.
🧬 Live scan → biometric template → similarity score vs watchlist; actual threshold unpublished; officers must review before approach — for now.
📄 WA Information Commissioner flagged biometric mishandling risks a day before the trial began.
🎯 Takeaway: “I have nothing to hide” collapses once the law changes; mass AI surveillance changes behaviour toward conformity — Big Brother is watching you.

7. The Classless Response to Ann Widdecombe’s Murder

Lois McLatchie Miller — The Spectator Australia

🕯️ Widdecombe: principled, warm, dignified — murdered at home; parts of left Twitter responded with “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” glee.
🗣️ Peter Tatchell celebrated her death and called her a “BIGOT” over traditional marriage; deleted and apologised only after backlash.
📊 YouGov: ~1 in 6 Britons still hold the traditional view of marriage — Christians, Muslims and secular alike.
👶 She argues the marriage debate never died — it reappeared as surrogacy, single-sex spaces and the claim that men can fully replace mothers.
🗣️ “Disagreement is not the same thing as hatred… Some people oppose gay marriage. Get over it.”
🎯 Takeaway: celebrating a murdered politician’s death is not tolerance — it is the intolerance the left claims to oppose.

8. Ann Widdecombe Was Formidable, Generous and Wonderful Company

Claire Fox — spiked

🤝 Brexit Party MEP Fox recalls her first private meeting with Widdecombe after media storms over Fox’s Irish Freedom Movement past: “So, you wanted to blow me up.”
⏱️ After 45 minutes of forensic grilling: a wry smile, a hand squeeze, and “We’d better get on with saving Brexit then.”
📬 Widdecombe insisted on answering all correspondence, including hostile letters; ferociously loyal yet fiercely independent.
🏛️ Advice on joining the Lords: gird loins against condescension; speak only on what matters; don’t be bullied; act on conscience.
📣 She was still “dashing around the country” for Reform UK when she was struck down — “perhaps someone thought an act of violence would silence that voice.”
🎯 Takeaway: unbiddable, unbuyable, tireless — and a model of how political opponents can still become comrades.

9. The Ann Widdecombe Murder Investigation Has Shocked Britain

Hugo Timms — spiked

🚨 Devon and Cornwall Police: Widdecombe found dead at her Dartmoor home with “serious injuries”; murder investigation launched; suspect arrested in Newton Abbot.
🧑 Police: suspect is a white British national; assistant chief constable Matt Longman remains “open-minded” on whether the attack was political or whether the suspect was known to her.
🗳️ The 78-year-old served Maidstone and the Weald for more than 20 years — known for sharp intellect, firebrand conservatism and Brexit advocacy; later a Reform spokeswoman.
🇬🇧 Another politician slain; the motive unknown at time of writing, but the shock is national.
🎯 Takeaway: whatever the motive, Britain has lost another public figure to violence — casting a long shadow over public life.

10. Trump Restarts War Powers Clock With New Iran Campaign

Drew Berkemeyer — The Daily Wire

📨 July 10 letter to Congress: US military operations against Iran resumed July 7 after Iranian attacks on neutral commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz (July 6–7).
⏱️ War Powers Resolution clock restarts: 60 days of operations without new authorisation, plus optional 30-day extension.
💥 Strikes hit missile launch sites, air defences, military maritime assets, C2 facilities; “United States ground forces are not involved.”
🚢 CENTCOM: three consecutive nights of strikes; Trump also reimposes a Hormuz naval blockade and transit fees for US security ops.
🏛️ House and Senate had passed non-binding curbs last month; critics say the prior clock never really stopped during the April ceasefire.
🎯 Takeaway: the White House frames a new conflict after a collapsed truce — resetting the legal clock as the campaign escalates.

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