This is edition 2026/132 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 Supermarket Break-Up Is Back
Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project
- 🛒 Nicola Willis is seriously examining structural separation — including forcing Foodstuffs to split Pak’nSave and New World (“banner split”).
- 📊 “Clear evidence” groceries are less competitive than peer countries; cost/how/whether lower prices still being worked through — no Cabinet decision yet; results before end of term.
- 🎯 Essentially Winston Peters’ April idea; Labour now opposes forced banner sales; National minister taking it seriously for the first time in election year.
- 🌍 Red-carpet failure: Aldi/Lidl declined search; Tesco nowhere; zero fast-track applicants; 21 target firms across 10 countries, no entrant confirmed.
- 🧱 Willis: entrants see “very powerful duopoly… significant market power” — “big ask… not get squashed”; Chetwin: if invitation were the answer, “it would have worked by now.”
- 📐 Crampton maps: 13 areas cap supermarket numbers; floor-area caps; “vitality and viability” tests — planner market segmentation that would be illegal if retailers did it by handshake.
- 📈 Quin (Foodstuffs): ~77% combined share, “competition from every direction”; ComCom: 82%, essentially flat five years. (Further sections paywalled.)
2. Can Labour Fight Off the Populist Challenge?
Grant Duncan — Politics Happens
- 📺 Hipkins on Tova, three ex-Labour figures to NZ First: Winston can rename the party “Labour’s Seconds” — witty dismissal; Nash was sacked in 2023 anyway.
- ❓ Real question: does Labour have a substantial answer to NZ First poaching blue-collar Labour voters?
- 📢 Peters’ method: attack “globalists/neoliberals,” bold pledges (50% mining royalties home; buy back BNZ) knowing coalition talks can park promises.
- ⚖️ Labour/National stuck cautious for “sensible middle” scrutiny; left angry at “the system,” Hipkins only tinkers.
- 🔥 Loudest June 26 conference clap: “neo-liberal trickle-down economics is a hoax” / smaller government ≠ more freedom — Duncan asks what Hipkins actually proposes next. (Full answer paywalled.)
3. Canberra’s $80,000 Ardern ‘Girl-Power’ Summit Splurge
Caroline Di Russo — Sky News Australia
- 💸 Australian Public Service >$80k on Women Unlimited Leadership Summit starring Jacinda Ardern — VIP tickets $4,499 (about a month’s average mortgage).
- 🏛️ Bill: ATO $10,029; Defence $13,371; IGIS $13,371; DCCEEW $15,385; Australian Signals Directorate top waste at $28,975.
- 🎤 Theme: “Courage to Lead Differently” / memoir A Different Kind of Power — scrap “thick skin” and iron fist; Di Russo: iron fist with a smile is still an iron fist; “single source of the truth” still Stalinesque.
- 🎯 Takeaway: serious agencies learning “different kind of power” from COVID-era speech-control PM while households bleed — culture of entitlement, not value.
4. Did Councils Ban New Supermarkets?
Eric Crampton — Point of Order / NZ Initiative
- 🗺️ Five years after urging ComCom to check zoning, Initiative maps (Claude Fable + human/adversarial review) live at supermarketzoning.nzinitiative.org.nz — Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin.
- 🚫 ~250 zones / nine plans: downtown “permitted” but land too dear; outer areas thinner; 13 areas cap supermarket numbers; floor-area caps; prove no harm to incumbents’ “vitality and viability.”
- ⚖️ Same geographic segmentation by retailers = court; planners do it with impunity; complexity needs local “fixers” — barrier even for incumbents.
- 🎯 Fast-track helps; real fix is planning that treats competition as a benefit. ComCom should check town planning before more “competition” theatre.
5. Japan’s Defence Minister: Time to Rethink Nuclear Weapons
Frances Martel — Breitbart
- ☢️ Japanese Defence Minister Koizumi Shinjiro publicly said Japan must debate whether to pursue nuclear weapons — firestorm across the region and at home.
- 🏷️ Story framed against China threat and PM Takaichi Sanae’s security era; breaks long taboo of the only A-bombed nation.
- 🎯 Takeaway: even Japan’s defence chief is putting nuclear options on the open agenda. (Full Breitbart body paywalled in capture — lede/metadata confirmed.)
6. Is History Dead?
The Editors (responses to Ferguson & Levin) — The Free Press
- 📚 Niall Ferguson + AI researcher John-Clark Levin: AI + social media overwhelm institutions that preserved historical truth; antisemitic rhetoric → genocidal reality lesson failing; Ferguson: “I have failed utterly.”
- 🛡️ Victor Davis Hanson: dangers real, history not dead — half-educated pseudo-history supercharged, but silence of academics lets Darryl Cooper-types win; 1619 Project lived too long for same reason; fight online with honest podcasts/courses.
- 🕯️ Deborah Lipstadt and others (BHL, Shapiro…) weigh “new age of Holocaust denial” — full symposium largely paywalled after Hanson open.
- 🎯 Takeaway: anti-history spreads like cancer unless historians leave the faculty lounge and contest the feed.
7. Can Universities Recover Their Mojo in the AI Age?
John Raine — Brash & Mitchell
- 🎓 NZ framed as extreme CSJ/DEI case; objectors silenced, made redundant, or quit; Treaty Principles still mandatory in eng/med/nursing/law/teaching despite coalition free-speech efforts.
- 🤖 AI + admin bloat (non-academic:academic ~1.5:1 vs ~0.8 offshore) crunch finances; credentialled AI micro-credentials will steal commodity degrees.
- 🧪 Uni edge: face-to-face critical thinking, labs/clinics/studios, rigorous oral/written assessment — Bologna-style master-and-student, not avatar-only delivery.
- 📉 Fix path: rebuild MoE culturally neutral; capped enrolments toward excellence + trades; cut non-academic ratio toward 0.9 with AI admin; optional Māori history, no decolonisation activism in science curriculum.
- 🎯 Takeaway: move into AI age without abandoning autonomous, politically independent truth-seeking (Bologna 1988).
8. Burnham Scrapped Digital ID. His Internet Plans Say Otherwise
Cam Wakefield — Reclaim The Net
- 🚪 Applause for killing Starmer’s adult digital ID (£1.8bn OBR) — money to cost of living — before anyone checked what survived.
- 📜 20-year trail: 2005–06 ID Cards Bill (“major breakthrough”; still “clear case”); 2008 Culture Sec plan (TV-style web decency, age certs, takedown clocks — Ofcom then said unworkable); 2016 Snoopers’ Charter after packaging tweaks.
- 🧒 Keeps online age-verification; backs under-16 social media curbs; team: digital ID checks to post on social media still on; Lucy Powell purdah-for-platforms; pressure to expand OSA into “legal but harmful.”
- 🎭 Pattern: object to packaging, vote the power through; drop BritCard, build the speech gate, sell as retreat.
- 🎯 Takeaway: privacy win is tactical; the enforcement machine grows. (Also notes Hope Not Hate strategist orbit — see item 10.)
9. The Odyssey Movie and How the Culture War Broke Everybody’s Brain
Konstantin Kisin — Substack
- 🎬 Nolan Odyssey “debate” is mostly pre-loaded culture-war scripts: Musk “desecrated”; representation side claims triumph (Pride + Greeks meme).
- ⚔️ Page as Sinon: looks frail on paper, but minor role, no “trans men are men” lecture, plays a small male part well — suspension of disbelief holds.
- 👑 Nyong’o as Helen/Clytemnestra: more clearly diversity-over-immersion; historically educated viewers will notice; still solid acting; Helen/Clytemnestra important but minor — rest of film “looks like ancient Greece.”
- 🎬 Side travesty: Clytemnestra as Helen’s twin (Faramir-level rewrite energy).
- 🎯 Takeaway: politics of casting says more about us than about Nolan — brains broken enough that art is scored like a team sport. (Rest of essay paywalled.)
10. Burnham’s Hope Not Hate Premiership Is Destined for Disaster
Hugo Timms — spiked
- 🗑️ New No10 strategy chief Matthew McGregor deleted X days before start — opponents kept receipts: 2016 Farage “racist piece of shit”; Reeves rules “too tight”; Ofcom should muzzle GB News hosts.
- 🏴 2018–21 head of campaigns/strategy at Hope Not Hate — “State of Hate” bone-pointing at Rees-Mogg, Duncan Smith, Cates; deleted Widdecombe “dangerous and divisive” piece after her murder.
- ⚖️ Reprieve board: strip dual-national citizenship powers (ISIS-bride clients); 38 Degrees CEO: kill Starmer welfare reform, put Gaza first on Trump agenda.
- 🎯 Takeaway: brains of the operation from activist blob = less speech, weaker borders, more welfarism, more Israel-obsession — same, only worse (Houellebecq).
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