Your Daily Ten@10

This is edition 2026/134 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 RMA Power Grab

Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project

📜 Select committee report on dual RMA-replacement bills: core question is how much power Parliament hands ministers over land, water and environment.
⚠️ PCE Simon Upton (ex-National minister who took 1991 RMA through): bills give “complete discretion” to strike any environment/development balance — goals like a Rubik’s cube, “no guardrails.”
💼 Lobbying magnet: farmers, miners, developers already dominate corporate donations (property >$2.5m since 2021); more ministerial discretion = more special-interest pressure.
👑 Regs Review Committee: Henry VIII clauses; EDS’s Severinsen: “breathtaking” power; environmental limits “completely gutted” — any activity can breach if minister sees public benefit (Ikea/Bunnings as “infrastructure”?).
💸 “Regulatory relief”: councils compensating landowners for bush/heritage protections — MartinJenkins $7m–$2bn liability on ratepayers; Waitākeres in the frame.
🎯 Takeaway: development ideology doubled down; constitutionally and environmentally shaky. (Further sections paywalled.)

2. No to Blasphemy Laws: People Have Rights, Religions Do Not

Ani O’Brien — Thought Crimes

⚖️ Law Commission Hara ngākau kino: keep hate as sentencing aggravator, not standalone offences; better flags, data, sex as protected ground — hate speech out of scope.
🕌 FIANZ keeps pushing speech bans that protect beliefs/practices (“denigrates/vilifies”), not just people — Christchurch, Pride, flag-burn, “hate soup” as endless lever.
🗣️ Blurs Muslims (rights-bearers) with Islam (open to mockery/critique like any creed); 2019 blasphemous-libel repeal was correct.
🌍 ICCPR GC34 / Rabat: blasphemy laws incompatible with free expression; “awful but lawful” stays the police line.
🎯 Takeaway: no diversity-labelled blasphemy law — protect people from violence, not ideas from challenge.

3. Defending New Zealand

Chris Trotter

🏛️ Horatius’s pledge to patria once schoolroom staple — now read as patriarchy/imperialism/war; that’s the West’s recruitment problem.
🛡️ Defence Minister Chris Penk back from NATO: money helps, but weapons need people — where do young men and women come from?
🎯 Takeaway: do we still love the country enough to fight for it? (Full essay paywalled after free open.)

4. Let Them Build: Electricity and Datacentres

Eric Crampton — Offsetting Behaviour / Newsroom

⚡ NZ generators already know how to stick a pipe in the Taupō Volcanic Zone — decades of geothermal, huge untapped potential.
🖥️ US hyperscalers pay premiums for speed; off-grid gensets beside DCs waiting years for grid connect.
⏱️ If consent for geothermal + datacentre dropped to weeks/months not years, “tens to hundreds of billions” could land fast — window won’t stay open.
🎯 Takeaway: Wellington’s choice is welcome the Americans again, or watch capital go elsewhere.

5. The Revolving Door at the End of the Pacific

Oliver Hartwich — NZ Initiative / Brash & Mitchell

🌏 ~3 in 10 NZ residents foreign-born (top tier of 29); 12.8% of NZ-born live overseas — extreme in-and-out combination (Ireland closest peer).
✅ Pull factors: 4th honesty in govt, 5th rule of law, high life satisfaction vs richer peers, 5th generosity, 6th “someone to count on.”
📉 Push: productivity 20/29; Aussie wage ~US$10,700 PPP ahead on like-for-like jobs — low wages, unaffordable houses, thin capital.
🎯 Takeaway: revolving door keeps turning; policy can only give more people reason to stay (investment, competition, housing, trade, skills).

6. NZME Turns Its Own Radio Stunt into Political News

Centrist

📻 Hauraki: ACT candidate Paul Henry plays “shoot, shag, marry” with Hipkins/Peters/Luxon — “You’ve got to shoot Hipkins, haven’t you?”
📣 Verrall on ZB: “death threat”; Hipkins: leaders are being shot worldwide; Costley: not genuine threat, line-drawing issue; Henry: “plainly humour.”
🎭 Seymour: Labour knows he didn’t mean harm — nor sex with Peters nor marry Luxon; manufactured outrage.
🏢 Editor’s note: Hauraki, ZB and Herald are all NZME — same house set the violent premise, then ran condemnation and “scandal.”
🎯 Takeaway: media invent the game, then clutch pearls at the answer.

7. The World in a Tomato — Greek Salad and Globalisation

Roger Partridge — Plain Thinking

🍅 Horiatiki tourists photograph as ancient Aegean is younger than ketchup — tomato into Greek kitchens only in the 19th c.; modern plate is 20th-c. taverna + tourism.
🌍 Peppercorn rents → Mamluk monopolies → da Gama/Columbus; chilli misnamed “pepper”; tomato from Mesoamerica via Spain, feared as nightshade for two centuries.
🍝 Naples poor rehabilitate it; Latini 1692 “Spanish-style” sauce; ketchup = Hokkien fish sauce word + American tomato bottle (Heinz).
📝 Leonard Read’s pencil, again: nobody designed Italian-ness of sauce, American-ness of bottle, Greek-ness of salad — traditions globalisation made.
🎯 Takeaway: what we defend against trade is often what trade invented.

8. Political Violence: Is It Time to Stop Joking About It?

Grant Duncan — Politics Happens

🔫 Henry “shoot Hipkins” divides: Seymour says be real / lighten up; Labour disgusted; X floods Hipkins’s old “kick Seymour” clip.
🇳🇿 Peace Index #2, but threats up, access down; Rubio frames “left-wing terrorism”; Pew post-Kirk: both parties say violence rising, each blames the other side (~77%).
📊 Curia 2025: 80% reject “violence to get country back on track,” but 14% agree (18% men; higher TPM 25% / ACT 20%; youth 18–39 hottest).
🤖 AI-slop + Fuentes pipelines ≠ Mill’s free speech; Christchurch showed lone actors aren’t alone online.
🎯 Takeaway: temperature down beats body-count point-scoring. (Further sections paywalled.)

A Halfling’s View (David Harvey)

📰 Herald front: Stanford “standing up for kids against insidious tech” — after its own advocacy series; Cabinet path and bill text still foggy; Hipkins waits to see detail.
🇦🇺 Luxon: physical-world rules for kids should apply online; school phone ban as proof; Aussie under-16 model + fines of interest; poll ~58% for ban.
🪪 Structural catch (Privacy Commissioner): keep under-16s off means every adult proves age → digital ID/surveillance drift; VPN ban floated then ruled out (China/Russia company).
🤝 ACT + NZ First won’t back government bill; Stanford courts Labour — opposition becomes privacy/liberty/disability/queer edge coalition.
🎯 Takeaway: popular child-safety frame becomes everyone-online ID infrastructure — that’s the real fault line.

10. Muddled Multiculturalism

Simon O’Connor — On Point

🧱 Multi-ethnic fine; hard multiculturalism (all cultures equal on fundamentals) fails — equal rights vs unequal treatment of women; free speech vs soft blasphemy; one rule of law.
🧳 Soft: other cultures under one civic/legal roof. Hard: Starmer/Burnham/Ardern/Trudeau-style “no single culture.”
🎭 Muddled: third type — leaders trash own heritage while performing foreign festivals; Union Jack bad, terror flags sometimes fine.
🇲🇦 Morocco travel notes (girls absent from streets/beaches) as reminder: culture is choosing what’s right, not culinary relativism (Strauss’s cannibalism line).
🇳🇿 NZ rights inheritance is Judeo-Christian-shaped whether we admit it; Portugal over Morocco for raising a family is a values call, not ethnicity.
🎯 Takeaway: a city divided falls — coherence needs confidence in the home culture.

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!

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