This is edition 2026/153 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. De-Platformed
Steven - Media Law Journal
- 📻 BSA upheld complaint against Sean Plunket's The Platform over Fire and Emergency NZ kaupapa Māori talk. Called tikanga "mumbo jumbo" and worse. Listeners piled on. BSA said scornful, anti-Māori, one-sided.
- ⚖ Finding: breached good taste and decency. Naming the complainant triggered privacy and law-and-order breaches. BSA floated Harmful Digital Communications Act risk.
- 🧠 Author predicted a knock-back. Says BSA would not have upheld a couple of "mumbo jumbo" lines alone. Extended ridicule did it.
- 🗣 Programme hit fire service priorities, cultural values vs firefighting, tikanga incoherence, Māori-only targeting, democratic legitimacy, FENZ no-show, career signalling, money vs trucks.
- ⚠ Ugly caller lines existed. Author flags dog-whistle moments. Still mostly political speech, ball not man.
- 📐 Wrong pigeonhole: racism/denigration complaint shoehorned into taste and decency (historically swearing/sex/nudity), then stretched to offensive opinions.
- 📜 Bill of Rights duties underplayed. Offensiveness that turns on viewpoint is the danger. No penalty, but chilling all the same.
- 🎯 Takeaway: political talkback punished as "offensive ideas." Free speech dies by amorphous taste standards.
2. SPANIARD: Schrödinger's Citizen
Spaniard - Brash & Mitchell
- 🐱 Schrödinger's Cat joke applied to NZ: some with Māori ancestry cast as Crown citizens and sovereign iwi citizens at once. "Partnership" and "co-governance" as packaging.
- 🏛 Democratic and tribal governance do not marry. One needs public accountability. The other runs by fiat. Dual citizenship of this kind is undoable and hazardous.
- 🧾 Everyday reality: mixed ancestry, shared tax and redistribution. Ethnic two-track citizenship is pointless on the ground.
- 🚧 Cases cited: Covid road closures by iwi; 2024 High Court overturn of Joshua Green's obstruct-police conviction over mana; 2026 Otago marine reserves co-created with Ngāi Tahu without clear legislative power.
- ⚠ Partial democracy plus ethno-party politics (Te Pāti Māori named) flagged as civil-war risk factors in the literature the author invokes.
- ⚡ Pace advantage: democracy is slow; tribal fiat is fast. Mariameno Kapa-Kingi expulsion fight used party tikanga then Crown courts for reinstatement.
- 📜 Trace: Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 wording, Lands Case "akin to a partnership" memory-hole, Treaty clauses across statutes. Only a elected government can unwind it.
- 🎯 Takeaway: one kind of NZ citizenship. Hobson and Matiu Rata: he iwi kotahi tātou. End the double-deal.
3. When a system fails
Peter Allan Williams - Peter Allan Williams
- 🏔 Tauranga City Council: Davison report into 22 January Mt Maunganui landslide damning. Six dead at the council-owned holiday park.
- 👤 CEO Marty Grenfell (ex-cop, in post since 2018) blames "systemic failure." Author: the buck stops with the person who owns the systems.
- 🌧 Eyewitness: Williams was in the Mount that night and next morning. Month's rain in 24 hours. Walked the camping ground ~9.10am. Slip ~20 minutes later took toilet block and hot pools area.
- ⛺ Campers drying gear, not evacuating. Blue tent already had mud on the flap. Slope water streaming. Nobody ordered them out.
- 📋 Slope-risk warnings back to 1999, repeated as recently as June 2025. Systems that get reports must push them to every layer that runs the park.
- ⚖ WorkSafe chased Ports of Auckland CEO Tony Gibson after a stevedore death. Hard to see Grenfell escaping similar heat over six deaths on council ground.
- 🇳🇿 Pattern: Cave Creek, Pike River. Politicians sometimes wear it. CEOs often do not. "We'll do better next time" is not accountability.
- 🎯 Takeaway: systemic failure is a cop-out until a named boss owns it. Grenfell could set a precedent. So far he has not.
4. The State Housing Rabbit Hole
Natalia Albert - Natalia Albert
- 🏠 Simple ask: how many public houses does NZ actually have? Answer drowned in 7,078 housing-policy docs (2000-2025) and shifting definitions.
- 📊 Stock counts change by decade: owned, owned-and-leased, then "funded social housing places" (placements, not houses). Waiting lists broke in 2014 when MSD took over and cut categories.
- 🏗 Clark years: new-build figures for one year of nine. Key years: unpublished until OIA 2022, first year "data unavailable." Parties campaign on numbers nobody can check.
- 🔄 Labour stopped Key-era stock transfers to community providers (Dec 2017). Community share still roughly doubled: ~7% (2017) to ~17% / one in six (June 2026).
- 📈 2018 to June 2023: system +12,174 homes; community providers +6,936 (over half). Year to June 2026: Kāinga Ora +178, community +1,448.
- 💰 Same income-related rent subsidy (IRRS) funds both. Bill: $890m (2017/18) to $2.07b (2025/26). Dashboard does not split KO vs community spend.
- 🧩 Same day 30 June 2017: dashboard 66,146; HNZ 63,276; MSD 64,416. All "right," different counts. Tamaki 2,800 and Tauranga 1,138 transfer dates even conflict across sources.
- 📉 Public Housing Quarterly Report stopped after Dec 2023. Fastest-growing slice (community) is least transparent.
- 🎯 Takeaway: election housing claims float on fog. Landlord shifted, taxpayer still pays, public can't see who owns what.
5. Judicial Power, Democratic Accountability, and the Smith Case
Gary Judd KC - Gary Judd KC
- 📜 Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill passed third reading 18 Aug 2026. Bars emissions-related tort claims, including live cases. Smith v Fonterra shut down.
- ⚖ Court of Appeal struck Smith out: seeking court-designed regulatory regime, polycentric politics, no democratic accountability. Supreme Court reinstated the claims anyway.
- 🗣 Peter Watts KC: Parliament entitled to stop litigation that intrudes on quintessentially political terrain. AG Chris Bishop: climate tort policy belongs to the legislature.
- 🏛 Judd: Supreme Court tin-ear on constitutional lane. Judges lack democratic participation and accountability, so self-restraint is the fetter. Fail it, and Parliament must legislate over the top.
- 👨⚖️ Relief sought: declarations plus injunctions forcing respondents to zero net emissions by 2030. Implication: shut emitters, farmers, Fonterra. National economy as lawsuit.
- 📣 Legal profession should say so out loud. Judd prefers Law Association (elected officials) over NZLS as sectional repository.
- 🧭 Activist stretch beyond principle (Denning-style) is one thing. Climate policy as tort is political theatre in robes.
- 🎯 Takeaway: when the Court will not stay in its lane, Parliament must. Respect for judges is earned by restraint, not imperialism.
6. TAMAKI DERANGEMENT SYNDROME
John McLean - John McLean
- 📰 Herald op-ed by Alan Ringwood (ex Bell Gully / Herald lawyer): do not extend Human Rights Act s131 hate-speech crime from race to religion. Beliefs are not innate.
- ✅ McLean agrees on the thesis. Says Ringwood's framing is loopy: paints Brian Tamaki as wanting religion-shield criminalisation. Tamaki has opposed expanding hate-speech laws.
- 🔫 Context: Tamaki called for purge of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities after Hindu nationalist targeting of Christians in India. Police seized his guns.
- 🕌 Islamic Federation, Hindu Council, Supreme Sikh Society, Amnesty Aotearoa want "gaps" closed. Author: authoritarian instincts dressed as safety.
- 🏛 Amnesty slammed as woke flip: from freeing prisoners of conscience to jailing "dangerous" speakers; opposed sex-definition Bill via Te Tiriti angle.
- 🟦 Nats still cloaked: Doocey, Grigg, Luxon mateship, and Wellington Central pick Dr Scott Sheeran (UN/human-rights lawyer) lamenting NZ does not criminalise religious antipathy like UK/Canada/Australia.
- 📻 Irony: if religion were covered, RNZ's John Campbell's Destiny attacks could be in the dock. Still no reason to pass the law. Jews as ethnicity already covered; O'Connor, Swarbrick, Davis called out on Oct 7 lines.
- 🎯 Takeaway: agree with Ringwood's bottom line, reject the Tamaki smear. More speech crime is not the cure.
7. Niall Ferguson: Elon's Favorite Sci-Fi Prophet Was Wrong
Niall Ferguson - The Free Press
- 🤖 Musk channels Iain M. Banks' Culture novels: AI exceeds human intelligence ~5 years, quasi-infinite robot economy, work optional like gardening, money obsolete.
- 📚 Ferguson: you must read sci-fi to map AI futures. Gibson, Chiang, Banks. Distant Terminator memories do not count.
- 👎 Banks as prophet is a poor bet: Scottish nationalist-socialist, anti-Iraq passport stunt, BDS. Culture utopia is socialist, atheist, post-scarcity, gender-fluid, ruled by AI "Minds."
- 🔬 Culture science fails: limitless abundance, aligned AI, intergalactic travel, many civilisations. First two look unlikely. Starship to Proxima: tens of thousands of years.
- ⛏ Copper crunch: S&P Global sees demand 28Mt (2025) to 42Mt (2040), possible 10Mt shortfall. Mines take ~17 years. Rare earth refining China-dominated. Coal still tops global electricity, China heavy.
- 🌍 Climate and pleasant places stay scarce. Billionaires buy palaces because scarcity still rules. AI does not print Côte d'Azur.
- 📖 Better guide: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. AI as monetised product, Neo-Victorian elites, UBI lumpen, tech meeting messy humans.
- 🎯 Takeaway: expect sci-fi's darker realists, not Banks/Musk abundance cosplay. History of tech is unintended consequences.
8. Left Ramps Up Its Demands For Sweeping Online Censorship, From The US To UK To EU
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- Nobel economist Daron Acemoglu wants governments regulating social media algorithms so "incendiary" posts cannot go viral. Brands himself free-speech absolutist, then wants to control amplification.
- 🇺🇸 That is First Amendment poison. Print analogy: write the book, state picks the print run by anger metrics. No Declaration, no Candide, no Bible under that rule.
- 🇬🇧 UK Greens' Zack Polanski: press "never freedom to own and dominate." Wants £1bn "Independent Media Commons" under government oversight. Amnesty UK pushes "Arday's Law" after Cambridge plagiarism scandal suicide.
- 🎓 Nathan Cofnas (who exposed Arday plagiarism) suspended by Ghent; rector Petra De Sutter is ex-Green leader. Pattern: expose fabrication, face institutional punishment.
- 📱 Acemoglu ignores X already has Following vs For You. He wants the discovery tab neutered. Blames apps for loneliness trends that predate the internet.
- 🚓 UK: 12,183 arrests (2023) for offensive messages while real crime enforcement lags. Met probed journalist Jack Grove for months after Arday complained of distress.
- 🧒 Parallel track: under-15/16 social bans (Denmark, Australia, France, EU age-verification, Canada C-34) risk killing anonymity via digital ID.
- 🛡 Pushback: Michelle Goldberg (NYT) warns progressive speech policing breeds backlash. French constitutional court annulled core of youth ban over ID/election risk.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Left factions split on economics and Israel. They reunite on censorship. Guard X and Substack.
9. Hunter Biden's Laptop, Russiagate, And Hillary's Email Server Can Only Be Understood As One Long FBI Operation
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- 🧵 Three "separate" sagas, one thread: Midyear Exam (Clinton server, 2015), Crossfire Hurricane (Trump, Jul 2016), Hunter laptop (drive in Dec 2019, Post story Oct 2020).
- 📉 Comey closed Midyear with solo presser, "extremely careless," no charges, no DOJ advice. 26 days later Bureau opened full CI probe on Trump. Durham: no actual collusion evidence at start.
- ⚖️ Double standard: Clinton got voluntary interviews, consent, immunity, incomplete device seizure. Crossfire ran on uncorroborated Steele smoke the Bureau itself amplified.
- 🕵️ Steele memos pushed into ICA despite CIA "internet rumor" view. Comey briefed Trump Jan 2017 then leak path to BuzzFeed. Reverse-targeting of aides alleged as warrant fuel.
- 💻 Laptop op: defensive briefings to frame GOP interest as Russian disinfo; Aspen tabletop; months of hack-and-leak warnings to Twitter/Facebook; refused to confirm authenticity on 14 Oct 2020 while knowing it was real.
- 👤 Continuity names: Comey/Wray oversight; James Baker (FBI GC then Twitter deputy GC flipping Roth); McCabe; Strzok/Page texts showing mission zeal.
- 📰 Media framed each drama so FBI partisan abuse sat outside the Overton window. Hoover-level power games sold as dogged investigation.
- 🎯 Takeaway: not three scandals. One long deception op to kneecap Trump and shield Democrats. Read it as a single file.
10. Ronald Reagan's Greatest Speech
Tevi Troy - The Free Press
- 📅 19 Aug 1976, Kansas City RNC. Reagan lost nomination to Gerald Ford by 117 votes (1,187-1,070). Last undecided GOP convention.
- 🎙 Ford insisted Reagan speak after acceptance. Reagan tried to decline. Nancy said no. Crowd chanted "We want Ron!" Off-the-cuff, ~771 words, under six minutes.
- 📜 Time-capsule question for 2076: would future Americans thank 1976 for heading off nuclear loss of freedom? "There is no substitute for victory."
- 🔥 Crowd went wild. Broder joked two acceptance speeches. Delegates muttered they nominated the wrong man. Ford's best speech upstaged on his own night.
- 🚀 Set stage for 1980. Ford done after Carter loss. Reagan returned, beat Carter, ran Cold War strategy: "We win. They lose."
- 🕰 Halfway to Reagan's 100-year challenge. Soviet tyranny beaten. Autocracies, nukes, and liberty fights remain.
- 🎯 Takeaway: unprepared speech, clear mission. Message still travels: unite, deter, win.
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.
