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# Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/156
- URL: https://goodoil.news/your-daily-ten-10-2026-156/
- Published: 2026-08-26T22:00:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T22:00:56.000Z
- Description: 10 News Stories They Chose Not to Tell You
- Author: Cam Slater
- Tags: Ten@10, NZ Politics, Local Government, Election 2026, Free Speech, Social Media, World Politics, Media Bias, Israel, UK Politics

**This is edition 2026/156 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!

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dfNL!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdb2c0ca1-3eff-4e6a-8f49-08ec7d4b69a3_1404x1066.png)

## 1\. Democracy Briefing: Where’s the accountability after the Mt Maunganui report?

*Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project*

- 🏚 Davison KC on the Mount Maunganui landslide: six dead in January. They did not need to die. Council warned for 27 years. 2006 estimate: a large slip could put about 30 campers in the path and kill 21.
- 📋 2023 and 2025: experts recommended a Trigger Action Response Plan. Davison: campers would probably have been evacuated. "The loss of life could in all likelihood have been averted."
- 📁 Warnings "received, filed, discussed, forwarded, and then left." Not unknown, hidden or beyond foresight. "One competent consultant after another" named the slope.
- 🏛 "Systemic failure" is his finding. No one person blamed. Andrea Vance: that is the neat trick of modern public-service management. Systems do not build themselves.
- 🤷 Former mayors Crosby, Brownless, Powell, and commissioner Tolley say the warnings never reached them. If true, the council spent two decades commissioning death-risk reports and not telling the people who run the city.
- 📄 June 2025 geohazard report went to deputy mayor Scoular and three councillors. Meeting cancelled. They did not read it. CEO Marty Grenfell: never told, reports stayed "operational". He is paid more than $600,000.
- 🎯 Garner, du Plessis-Allan, Woodham, The Post: the boss of an eight-year shambles should go. Uffindell and Watts call it unforgivable, then leave Grenfell to the council. WorkSafe is looking.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Lisa Maclennan, a camper, spent five hours trying to evacuate others. She died at 9.30am. Davison's word for the risk: "unowned." 27 years of reports. Six graves. Still no owner.

[Read More](https://www.democracyproject.org.nz/p/democracy-briefing-wheres-the-accountability?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bdz9!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b59ef4a-95e1-4fed-918a-cb17d36860a5_1766x987.png)

## 2\. Apologising for Telling the Truth.

*Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter*

- 🎥 Aaron Bastani of Novara Media called Jason Arday a conman. Then he issued an abject public apology for doing it.
- 📋 Trotter: never mind that Arday was a conman. Never mind the defamation threats, the harassment complaint, the months-long police investigation of a journalist who asked questions.
- 🎓 Cambridge made him a full professor at 38\. Trotter's line: foresight to choose Black parents, plus a plagiarised, fabricated CV.
- ⚖ Bastani covered it as any honest journalist would. A few days later Arday took his own life. The tables turned. The "racist lynch mob" script wrote itself.
- 💸 Novara is mid-upgrade. It could not afford a subscriber haemorrhage. Contributors rebelled. Bastani bowed like a Cultural Revolution comrade and hoped the teenage Red Guards would not kick him to death.
- 🧠 A Left that will not let facts alter the reaction is not elevation. It is decline.
- 🎭 They prized the skin colour and the neuro-divergence, not the man. When the truth made him useless, they walked away.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Bastani apologised for telling the truth. Revolutionaries should be made of sterner stuff.

[Read More](https://christrotter418256.substack.com/p/apologising-for-telling-the-truth)

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/2026/08/9Tzi8ywRz924XE3uHaD6DfGZQfjEdZd7oKlsiR53VLHvSZExpMzuRmKdwHbkL9Pkv7I8OCb68wqNGbW1pHkZ1SHLwJ_gp3q5FlcplPbCFCX_QWTqif9-5zTZHkeLOCKMJuX6YV-yypn_5iAcU9m2vgUqtkTLgJNl0jsXNcXZ8J2lAMTzKtUcE8h9QbZlOvuyvYBE71_Q3RN6vi9-5PMzjw---1.jpeg)

## 3\. DON BRASH: Is the Electoral Commission no longer neutral?

*Don Brash - Brash & Mitchell*

- 📧 A supporter applied to be an Election Day volunteer. The Electoral Commission email: agree to "learn about our values and grow your knowledge of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the workplace".
- ⚖ The body that is meant to be impeccably neutral has taken a political position, down to the name Te Tiriti rather than the Treaty of Waitangi.
- 🗳 Learning the Treaty has nothing to do with handing out papers, counting votes or reporting results. Applicants are not asked. They are compelled.
- 🚫 Brash: race-based political conditioning has no place in the public service, and least of all in the Electoral Commission.
- 🏛 Ties it to the Professionals Not Politicians campaign. Real estate, medicine, architecture, law: codes of conduct as political tests. Janet Dickson: accept a Treaty reading or lose the licence.
- 📣 He wants immediate action from the Commission and the Government. The referee of the election is now running a Treaty seminar as a condition of counting the votes.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the referee has picked a side and called it values training.

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/don-brash-is-the-electoral-commission-no-longer-neutral?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/2026/08/IMG_8136.jpeg)

## 4\. RODNEY HIDE: National's Online Safety Bill is a Trojan Horse

*Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell*

- 🐑 1990: Hide warned farmers the RMA would end in woolshed-colour diktats and paying for spirits to leave. They thought he was unhinged. Then it arrived, and worse.
- 📱 The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill is sold the same way: narrow, popular, kids off high-risk social media, platforms to verify age. Parents not fined. Big Tech the target.
- 🏛 The real shift: a cultural and parental problem is handed to platforms and a new state regulator. "Harm" is elastic. Risk assessments become leverage.
- 🔮 His forecast: in five years the same machine can treat political or religious advocacy as a child-safety risk. Family First already sits in that zone. No need to "ban transphobia". Signal that hosting it lifts the risk score. Compliance does the rest.
- 📧 Charities Registration Board dumped Family First, kept Greenpeace and Waipareira. Covid: NZDSOS / NZ Health Forum Facebook pages shut with an official email. The new regulator can do that to Meta with one more.
- 🏗 Same National Party, same pattern. Limited first clause. Then an enforcement body. Then "safety" walks.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the first clause is about children. The machinery is about speech.

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/rodney-hide-national-s-online-safety-bill-is-a-trojan-horse?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!e40N!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0bb6248e-8c59-4038-bddf-cbb3de950ca0_1024x683.jpeg)

## 5\. Douglas Murray: The Death Penalty Is Cruel. Hamas Terrorists Deserve It.

*Douglas Murray - The Free Press*

- ⚖ Murray has always opposed the death penalty. He cites Camus: the cruelty is making a mind know the time and place of its ending.
- 🎪 Ben-Gvir degrades the debate: golden-noose lapel pin, execution-themed 50th birthday cakes, a video gloating about public gallows with viewing rooms for victims' families.
- 🇮🇱 Israel bans capital punishment for most offences. In May the Knesset voted unanimously to allow it for October 7 terrorists. The courts must now decide whether it proceeds, and on whom.
- 🕯 Exceptions he accepts: Nuremberg hangings, Eichmann in 1962\. The Nukhba Force men captured after 7 October invaded to murder, rape, torture and kidnap.
- 🔄 Extra reason Israelis live with: live prisoners are swap chips. Sinwar was traded in 2011, 1,000-plus terrorists for one soldier. Sinwar: the best news in a Palestinian prison is that an Israeli has been kidnapped.
- ⚖ Keep them alive and the next kidnapping restarts the calculus. Hang them and the incentive breaks. Treat them as heinous criminals, not combatants.
- 🌍 Cost: mass hangings would feed the world's equivalence industry. Iran hangs protesters; the NGOs would still find Israel more odious.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the case is solemn. Ben-Gvir's cakes are not. Eichmann was not sent off with icing.

[Read More](https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-the-death-penalty?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4jfT!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fffaa4373-31ca-47b2-8e98-15cc3644cf06_2914x1102.png)

## 6\. The Data Is Now Overwhelming That It Was The Left, Not The Right, That Radicalized

*Michael Shellenberger - Public*

- 📊 Cambridge Political Psychology Lab: right-leaning Americans stayed fairly stable for 35 years. The left-leaning half became 31.5% more socially liberal by 2024 than in 1988\. The right moved 2.8% more conservative.
- 📰 The story sold since 2016: Trump radicalised the GOP, Klein's "asymmetric polarisation", Biden's MAGA-threatens-the-republic speech, Trump-as-Hitler copy.
- 📈 ANES 35,000-plus responses, 14 core issues, 1988-2024\. Pew: Republican view that immigrants strengthen the country rose 30% to 42% (1994-2017). Democrats on the same question: 32% to 84%.
- 🗳 Gallup: Democratic liberal ID 25% (1994) to 59% (2025). Republican conservative ID 58% to 77%. Rhetoric got hotter. Issue positions on the right did not.
- 🎓 The leftward lurch is thickest among the college-educated. Professors at 40 universities: 11.5 Democrats per Republican; journalism 20 to 1; under-35s 22.7 to 1\. Polarisation rose fastest among over-65s, not the phone addicts.
- 🏭 Al-Gharbi: elite overproduction. 22 million BA holders (2000-2019) chasing 10 million extra degree jobs. Cancellation as a way to thin the queue. 2008 is the fork: crash, Obama, iPhone.
- 🪞 Goldberg: liberals did not notice how far they had moved, so they saw conservative extremism. Projection with a newsroom.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Klein was right about asymmetric polarisation. He had the arrow the wrong way round.

[Read More](https://www.public.news/p/the-data-is-now-overwhelming-that?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T4_R!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9be558d6-8c1f-4675-8e0a-b7678a4d851e_5999x4001.jpeg)

## 7\. Why No One Trusts Data Centers and Flock Cameras

*Erick Erickson - The Free Press*

- 🏛 Free Press frame: not a crisis of trust. A crisis of trustworthiness. Government, media, education, medicine spent what they had.
- 📹 Two live fights: data centres and Flock surveillance cameras. The tech is not the point. Whether spent trust can be earned back is.
- 🏖 April 2020, San Clemente: 37 tons of sand dumped in a skate park to keep teenagers out. Sheriff's deputies arrested a lone paddleboarder. Cities unbolted basketball rims.
- 🐀 LA mayor: "snitches get rewards." People rang the tip lines on neighbours whose grandkids came over. Newsom then did The French Laundry.
- 📅 March 2020: Americans closed shops, schools, funerals. Two weeks to stop the spread. Civic trust is a limited resource. The press, politicians, bureaucrats and experts spent it.
- 🔒 Paid after the Covid opener. About 3,070 words sit behind the wall. The free cut is the analogy, not the data-centre or Flock case file.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the argument is that Covid spent the trust now demanded for cameras and server farms. The evidence for both is for subscribers.

[Read More](https://www.thefp.com/p/data-centers-flock-cameras-erick-erickson-institutions-trust?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1483478550801-ceba5fe50e8e?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wzMDAzMzh8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwzNHx8c29jaWFsJTIwbWVkaWF8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzg3NjM4MzE3fDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080)

## 8\. The wrong end of the telescope

*Liam Hehir - The Blue Review*

- 🔭 Hehir's objection is not VPNs, facial ID or adult checkpoints. Those are real. His question is whether this is a proper function of the law at all.
- 📵 Luxon sold it as the sequel to the school phone ban. Hehir backed that one. He does not buy the sequel. Different kind of power.
- 🏫 School is compulsory. Staff stand in loco parentis as Crown agents. The Crown may set terms for an enterprise called education. That mandate stops at the gate.
- 🍔 Social media can be a curse, like unlimited junk food. The Crown does not write the family menu. It does not get to run the family feed either.
- 👨‍👩‍👧 Parents decide devices, hours and apps. A messaging thread for a school project or a friend who moved away is a parental office, not a Beehive one.
- 🔧 Fight only the mechanics and you concede the premise. Every engineering fix becomes the new hill. The live question is purpose, not competence.
- 🎯 The Crown may set a floor when harm is obvious and parents neglect it. Social media harm is usually contingent and individual, not certain and universal.
- 🎯 Takeaway: looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The state is not a parent with a longer lens.

[Read More](https://thebluereview.substack.com/p/the-wrong-end-of-the-telescope)

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![](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/GettyImages_2266269960.jpg)

## 9\. We are already at war with Iran

*Stephen Pollard - The Spectator Australia*

- 🇬🇧 Starmer: "This is not our war." Burnham said the same. Pollard: you may not want a war with Iran. Iran is already in one with you.
- ⚡ This weekend: Iranian hackers shut a British power plant for four days. First time they have pulled that off. Timed with similar hits on US water plants. Treated as a warning shot.
- 💻 Russia, China, Iran, North Korea already hit NHS, schools, M&S, Jaguar Land Rover. Commons Intelligence and Security Committee: cyber is a "significant area of asymmetric strength" for Iran. Thousands of hackers. Tens of millions of dollars.
- 🗡 Iran pays criminals to stalk, plot and attack dissidents and Jewish targets. George Stana and Nandito Badea jailed 12 and 8 years for the March 2024 stabbing of Iran International presenter Pouria Zeraati in Wimbledon. Judge: carried out on behalf of the Iranian state.
- 🕵 Dual national and an Iranian charged under the National Security Act over surveillance of the Israeli embassy, Bevis Marks synagogue, a Jewish centre and the CST. Three other Iranians charged over Iran International staff. They deny it.
- 🛡 MI5's Sir Ken McCallum: over 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in a year. ISC: at least 15 murder or kidnap attempts against UK-based people since 2022\. Tehran sees Britain as "a particularly malevolent opponent".
- 🇨🇳 Reports this week: China supplied the technology for the cyber attacks. Britain will name Iran and still chase Chinese growth.
- 🎯 Takeaway: hear no evil is not a strategy. The other side already opened fire.

[Read More](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/we-are-already-at-war-with-iran/?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/fd6d7e6c58fccb4cdbc329f25a3db62f.jpg)

## 10\. Is short-form video rotting our brains?

*David Shipley - The Spectator Australia*

- 📱 New brain study: liked short videos produced "significant deactivation" in cognitive-control regions. Instant gratification up, self-control down. Shipley, who will not watch videos, felt a moment of I-told-you-so.
- ⚠ Almost all SVA research is post-2020\. TikTok 2018, Reels and Shorts later. A lot of it is pandemic-era, and a lot of it is Chinese university students.
- 📉 Repeated findings: rapid switching weakens recall. TikTok interruptions degrade performance; long YouTube and Twitter do not. Heavy users shrug at losses and decide on thinner evidence.
- 😞 Meta-analysis: "problematic" short-video use tracks depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness and boredom. Non-problematic use seemed to cut anxiety.
- 💃 2019-2022: doctors saw a jump in adolescent girls with Tourette-like tics. Some researchers tied it to TikTok #tourettes. Possible social contagion, overlapping lockdown.
- 🧪 Caveats: no agreed definition of "problematic" or "addiction". Limited use is not shown to harm. Harms cluster in people who had childhood abuse or neglect. Some grey-matter increases. Effects fade when people stop.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the phone is not a moral emergency for everyone. Put it down and the brain comes back. A ban is a bigger claim than the evidence.

[Read More](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/is-short-form-video-rotting-our-brains/?ref=goodoil.news)

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