Your Daily Ten@10

This is edition 2026/155 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!

Ani O'Brien - Thought Crimes

📱 Ani agrees the harm is real. Haidt's Anxious Generation and Freya India's Girls. Not a moral panic, and not an adult liberty right for children.
🛡 Parents first, state second. Kids cannot drink, contract or drive. Law can help parents say no. She still wants less family interference, not more.
🧾 National's bill: "high risk" platforms take "reasonable steps" that users are 16-plus. Facial age estimates, digital ID, formal ID. DIA regulator, global-revenue fines.
🔓 The catch: prove I am an adult and you learn something about who I am. Weak gates fail. Strong gates price speech at identification.
🇦🇺 Australia already ran the trial. Teenagers have time, competence and bloody-mindedness. Failure breeds VPN talk, then device monitoring, then a rebuilt internet.
🤝 Sold as a "government bill". ACT and NZ First agree-to-disagree. Seymour: weak fails, strong nabs adults. Peters: digital ID and privacy tech next. National needs Labour.
📵 Her fix: restrict smartphones for under-16s, keep basic phones, put account rules on parents. Change the default. Do not ID every adult.
🎯 Takeaway: the objective is sound. The mechanism rebuilds the adult internet as a checkpoint because 14-year-olds keep finding holes.

2. A Law That the People It Targets Can Defeat With a Felt-Tip Pen

David Harvey - A Halfling's View

🖋 David Harvey's first look at the Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill, introduced 24 August, the day he landed home.
📜 Two duties: stop under-16s holding accounts (cl 11) and write an annual child-safety risk assessment for under-18s (cl 14). Fines up to the greater of $40m or 10% of global turnover. Site-blocking as last resort.
🎯 Marketed as a ban. It is not. It restricts account-holding. Public content stays reachable. No penalty on kids or parents. Manual date-of-birth is explicitly not a "reasonable step".
👥 The targeting paradox: to keep a 15-year-old out, every adult must prove they are not 15. Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster and the NZ Initiative both said the quiet part.
🖊 Australia's three-month review: 81.5% of under-16s still on at least one restricted platform, down from 85.9%. Half said nobody even checked their age. A Canberra 15-year-old: "nothing changed."
🥸 Facial age-estimation beaten with a moustache or a double chin. UK porn-gates: Proton VPN sign-ups +1,400% in minutes. The wall has a door and the door is unlocked.
🏛 Regulator: Secretary for Internal Affairs. Same department already runs ISP filtering, censorship inspectors, passports and digital identity. Capability outlasts good faith.
⚰ Ian Russell, Molly Russell's father, opposes the blanket ban: it lets platforms hide behind a gate instead of making feeds safe. UNICEF Aotearoa's Susan Glasgow: make the world safer, do not lock children out of it.
🎯 Takeaway: a law the targets beat with a felt-tip pen is theatre. The identity layer is the part that does not expire.

Fox Meyer - Newsroom

📣 After a year of back-and-forth, National tables the bones of an under-16 social media ban. Stanford says "it's personal". Luxon says the algorithms keep him up at night.
🏛 No other party is with them. They do not plan to take it past first reading before the election. They do not even expect it to be particularly effective. Supporters say that is enough.
📋 Labour got an advance copy and sent 79 consultation questions. Hipkins does not want a "political football". Stanford: intelligent questions, "nothing of serious concern".
🚫 Peters: dangerous privacy overreach via ID collection. Greens lean the same way. Act rejects the limit on choice. National is alone except B4-16 and a few principals.
🇦🇺 Australia, the model: eSafety said most major platforms were not complying within three months. National's own paper: only a third of covered kids actually left.
🔐 VPNs are not restricted. Kids spoof into an unregulated country. Stanford quotes Big Tech's "we try" line, then asks what is worse than a child learning self-harm on the app.
💶 She says the companies "don't give a damn about our kids, and they will pay [the fines]". Top penalty: 10% of annual global revenue. If they even show up to court.
🎯 Takeaway: an unwinnable fight sold as a first step. The fence is announced. The holes are already in the brochure.

4. Nicola Willis and the economy that didn't roar

Tim Murphy - Newsroom

🎤 Willis at Tāmaki: Treasury came into her office and said the recovery was "gonna roar through this year". Scene from Yes, Minister, and it was before 28 February.
🛢 Then Iran, Hormuz, oil, supply strain, inflation. Growth delayed. The roar is now a story about what would have been.
📈 Q1 2026: economy grew 0.8%. She says that is three times Australia (0.3%) and twice America (0.5%). "You may not have read about this in the New Zealand Herald."
📉 She admits the present: nobody can put a hand on their heart and say the economy is performing as well as we want. Q2 oil shock was "particularly difficult".
🏗 Pitch: foundations are in. Bank economists agree growth will accelerate. "We need desperately a second term to build the future." Builders might ask why the house is still at foundation after three years.
🗳 Two-tick National in Tāmaki, a seat Act holds. No offence. Values: ambition, entrepreneurialism, strong families.
💙 Team Luxon all the way: India FTA, Singapore food-for-fuel, "grace and style" managing coalition "large personalities". BNZ buyback a "DUMB idea". Peters' "go back to your own country" line: "that's not who we are."
🥊 Opposition is "Hipkins" and a "rabble" selling a return to spending, borrowing and tax. The Treasury anecdote does the rest of the work.
🎯 Takeaway: the roar is a memory. The ask is another term to build on a slab that still has no walls.

5. After ruling out new taxes, the Nats say voters' choice is simple - but there's support, too, for more spending on state services

Bob Edlin - Point of Order

📣 Matt Doocey: the choice is clear. No new taxes under National, more taxes under Labour. Edlin: perhaps. Do not stake too much on it.
🔄 9 August: no new taxes for "working people". Sunday: Luxon and Willis drop the caveat and promise no new taxes, including in any coalition deal.
🛏 The same leader had told local body bosses he would look at a bed tax after the election. Political commitment, Edlin says, is a fragile thing.
📊 Taxpayers' Union-Curia: 58% want National to promise no new taxes or increases (76% of National voters). 65% want income tax brackets indexed to inflation (74% of National voters).
🏷 Jordan Williams: you cannot campaign against Labour's tax hikes while leaving an escape hatch for "someone else". Bracket creep is a stealth hike.
🏦 Taxpayers' Union whooped the U-turn as "welcome home". Labour, Greens, TPM and TOP are lined up as the taxers. ACT already ruled out new taxes.
🏥 The other coin: Talbot Mills for Better Taxes (May last year). 83% wanted more spend on hospitals, schools and police. 57% thought the wealthy should pay more.
🎯 Takeaway: "simple choice" works until you read the poll that wants the services the taxes pay for.

6. Cowardly Editors Allowed Themselves To Be Bullied Into Requiring Inaccurate Pronouns

Michael Shellenberger - Public

📰 US and UK newsrooms treat preferred pronouns as accurate and ethical. AP Stylebook wants a pronoun for people who "don't identify as a he or a she".
🚫 AP tells journalists not to use "biological sex" or "both sexes", because not everyone identifies as male or female.
🎙 BBC style guide: generally use the term and pronoun the person prefers, "unless there are editorial reasons not to".
🧬 Shellenberger: that is wrong. English pronouns carry sex. Readers hear "she" and think female.
🧪 A man who identifies as a woman remains male. Sex is in the DNA. Hormones and surgery do not rewrite it.
🖼 The open image: BBC chair Matt Brittin, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, AP CEO Daisy Veerasingham.
🔒 Paid after the thesis. About 2,490 words sit behind the wall. The free cut is the claim, not the case file.
🎯 Takeaway: the argument is that "respect" here is a demand to mis-state sex. The evidence for the bullying is for subscribers.

7. When the woke left hounded a black researcher

Neil Davenport - spiked

⚖ After Arday's death, identitarians call CV and research scrutiny a racist "smear". Expecting a Cambridge professor's CV to be accurate is recast as white supremacy.
🎭 Double standard: Black public figures may make "mistakes". Question BLM or identitarian grievances and the same crowd reaches for "coconut", "Uncle Tom", "house negro", "race traitor".
📋 Tony Sewell chaired the 2020 race commission. It found discrimination real, but class, geography, family and education often explain gaps better than "systemic racism".
🤬 Sewell was called a "coon" and "race traitor". A Labour MP circulated a KKK image. Kemi Badenoch told the Commons the racialised abuse was meant to intimidate dissenters.
📱 2024: Dawn Butler shared, then deleted, a post branding Badenoch "white supremacy's black collaborator class" and "white supremacy in blackface".
🎓 Katharine Birbalsingh: diversity is a school uniform. Express yourself, provided you wear the approved kit.
📣 Munira Mirza, at a Hyde Park BLM rally, was chanted off as "not in line with what we believe in". A minority voice they wanted shut up.
🎯 Takeaway: skin is allowed to differ. The script is not. That is racial essentialism with a progress sticker.

8. People and politics now polls apart

Damien Costas - The Spectator Australia

📊 Everyone has a chart for the polls. Politicians decide the public needs "clearer communication". It never occurs to them the public understood perfectly well.
🗳 The funny theories: Albanese is the problem, Taylor is useless, Hanson is the saviour. One Nation thinks she has been proved right about things she has not said yet.
🚪 All three parties are in the twenties. Votes are not crossing the floor. They are leaving the building.
📉 Trust slide since about 2007. Kevin 07, spills, government by media release. Every failure grew a review, a taskforce and a logo.
🦠 Covid spent the national trust account. Rules and exemptions made little sense. Certainty stayed after the evidence moved. QR codes went. The habit of asking for proof did not.
🔎 Australians became auditors. "Affordable" policies that make the thing dearer do not survive the fine print.
⚖ Hate-speech laws, sports-wagering contortions, mining and gas backflips. The question is no longer "are they useless?" It is "are they doing this on purpose?"
🎯 Takeaway: "She'll be right" is dead. The new Australian asks "Right for whom?" Canberra calls that misinformation.

9. The myth of Saint Jason

Tom Slater - spiked

⚰ The new script: a "racist" press killed Jason Arday. A "public assassination". A "lynching". Slater: it is not true, and the racial hysteria is 2020 leftover.
📉 Two weeks earlier he resigned from Cambridge under evidence of a plagiarised PhD, fabricated achievements, a false workplace-intimidation tale, and a youth-autism story that may have been stretched.
📄 Telegraph: 100-plus PhD passages identical or near-identical to another student's thesis. Later papers accused of faked data and lifted quotes dressed as interviews.
🕵️ Not a Cofnas solo act. David Harris warned Cambridge in 2023. Jack Grove at Times Higher Education built 97 pages before Carter-Ruck spooked his editors. Arday reported both to police.
📰 Liberal mastheads did the damage too. Atlantic: memoir vs book-proposal gaps. New York Times: schoolmates recalled a talkative child. Guardian: no evidence of the masked knife-man. Met: no pig's-head hate-crime inquiry. The named butcher: "that's the kind of thing we'd remember."
🏛 Cambridge hired him over three more senior scholars, including two women of colour, on a modest publication record and a DEI fairy tale.
📋 Activists now want state press regulation and are circulating journalist hit-lists. A suicide is being used as a soapbox against scrutiny.
🎯 Takeaway: the myth of Saint Jason is a demand that the next lie be swallowed. Truth is not a homicide.

10. The Lord's Prayer is inclusive. Acknowledgement of Country is not...

Graham Young - The Spectator Australia

🙏 If the Lord's Prayer leaves Parliament, a secular prayer is already in the chair: Acknowledgement of Country, now almost mandatory at anything official.
➗ An Acknowledgement splits the room into traditional owners and the rest. It names an original sin of dispossession and a hierarchy of ownership the meeting cannot settle.
🏛 That frames every decision on contested ground. It says nothing about how people in the room should treat each other or reach a vote.
👨‍👩‍👧 "Our Father" is inclusive language. One family. The Father is in heaven, so the first relationship is aimed at the highest, not the grievance ledger.
🍞 Daily bread: shared earthly need and a bit of fortune. Forgive us as we forgive: a mechanism for reconciliation, not a hint that is left on the table.
⚖ The Lord's Prayer assumes we will fail and tells us how to keep working together. The Acknowledgement names a historical wrong and a bloodline distinction with no way past either.
🗳 Ancient, radically egalitarian, fitted to a democracy. The modern substitute ranks citizens by ancestry and stays in the past.
🎯 Takeaway: if one prayer must go, drop the Acknowledgement. If the Lord's Prayer is expelled, the racial substitute should go with it.

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Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/155

1. National is right about social media, but its ban is still a bad idea