Your Daily Ten@10

This is edition 2026/157 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!

Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project

📱 Minutes after National tabled the social media bill, Act and New Zealand First said they would vote no. Stanford was still selling it. The coalition partners had already walked.
🤝 Hipkins then offered first-reading support. The election map flipped: National and Labour for prohibition; Act, NZ First and the Greens against, for different reasons.
📋 Labour's Reuben Davidson was still waiting on answers to 79 questions. Within a day Hipkins promised the votes. He will not let "a quest for perfection" delay progress. That is not a finished position. It is a first-reading one.
🗳 The electoral maths is simpler: vote no and National gets the campaign line for free. Why will Hipkins not even let Parliament look at keeping kids off TikTok?
📅 Convenient squeeze: Louise Upston says the House is too crowded. First reading waits until after the election. National campaigns on the ban. No select committee tests the nuts and bolts. Labour endorses the principle and never votes on the product.
🏠 Stanford says it is personal. Luxon says the algorithms keep him awake. Parent vote, culturally conservative without the usual culture-war kit, and a fight with Meta. Almost nobody likes the target.
📊 Stuff readers' poll: 80% support. Earlier surveys above 60%. ODT, Herald, Hosking, du Plessis-Allan, Schulz: do something. Prebble: bans cost little, kids cannot vote, adults can. "Teaching road safety by banning children from seeing a road."
🚫 Newsroom's Fox Meyer: National says the platforms cannot be trusted with children, then hands them the age checks and the risk assessments. Stanford: they "don't give a damn" and will pay the fines. The answer is still "the norm matters."
🔒 Paid after the open. About 2,717 words. Named leftovers behind the wall: the real problem, the three objections, the everyone-must-verify catch, two bills in one, and a consensus that has not been tested.
🎯 Takeaway: the two big parties have found a children-and-TikTok hug. The small parties refuse it. Parliament will not sit the exam until after you vote.

2. ACT proposes “one law for all” - again

Grant Duncan - Politics Happens

🏛 ACT wants the courts brought to heel and Parliament put back on top. After the Treaty Principles Bill, "one law for all" is the sequel. Same fight, different statutes.
📊 2023 party vote: 8.64%. The Treaty row pushed ACT over 10%, at times 13%. Both ACT and Te Pati Maori have since slid. Recent polls put ACT under its election result.
📃 Not a rerun of the failed bill. Targets: Constitution Act 1986, Bill of Rights Act 1990, Legislation Act 2019, Senior Courts Act 2016.
⚖ Three lines to write into the Constitution Act: Parliament is sovereign, the rule of law is fundamental, all New Zealanders are equal before the law. None of that is new. The Senior Courts Act already nods at the first two.
🔍 Legislation Act change: statutes mean what Parliament enacted, read in the context of the time. Judge-made presumptions can fill a gap. They cannot override clear words. Tikanga: say when courts may use it, and when they may not.
🏡 Add a property-rights clause to the 1990 Bill of Rights. The live question, Duncan says, is who has the last word on what the law means: the House or the Supreme Court. ACT's answer is the House.
🚨 Opponents treat the Treaty as higher law and tell Parliament to stay out. That inverts the 1688 settlement still recognised here: courts do not overrule the elected legislature.
🔮 His call: legalistic, so it will not land like Treaty Principles. Is a 2.0 still in the drawer for the debates? Any poll lift is stolen from National and NZ First. Divisive rows do not buy Luxon a second term.
🎯 Takeaway: Seymour is back on equality before the law. The last version set the country on fire and still died. This one is drier. The target is still the judges.

3. The Tallest Poppy: Caitlin Clark and the Psychology of Resentment

Ani O'Brien - Women's Rights & Wrongs

🏀 Essay two in the WNBA series. Clark did not grow famous inside the league. She arrived with an audience the women's game had never seen, and the hierarchy had to be renegotiated overnight.
📺 2024 NCAA title game, Iowa v South Carolina: 18.9 million viewers. Her first WNBA game: 2.1 million. The Aces, defending champions, on the same night: 464,000. Indiana University economist: $36 million for Indianapolis, about 27% of the league's 2024 economic activity.
🌱 NZ name for it: tall poppy. Peers ranked her 11th at her position in All-Star starter voting. The player filling the buildings is, apparently, the 11th-best guard.
🤝 Female groups demand warmth, self-deprecation and the pretence you have not risen above the pack. Clark does the ritual. Credits teammates. Refuses the persecuted-heroine part. The status gap stays.
💬 Angel Reese, June 2024: people will realise it was "not just because of one person. It's because of me too." Fair enough as history. It still sounds like a status claim dressed as fairness.
👯 Sophie Cunningham: Black Sheep, not tall poppy. She said women's sport should stay single-sex. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore "Trans Kids Belong" against the Fever. Toronto debuted a nonbinary mascot. New York Liberty put pro-trans messages on the scoreboard.
⚰ Basketball is contact. The story is who laughs, who minimises, who will not condemn, and which coalition assembles in minutes. Male sport has a language for dominance. The sisterhood does not.
🎯 Takeaway: Clark brought more sunlight than the league had ever had. Sunlight makes shadows. Understanding the psychology does not make the fouls fair.

4. Progressives Will Be Horrified When They Wake Up To What They’ve Done

Michael Shellenberger - Public

📊 Follow-up to the Cambridge numbers: the Left moved more than ten times as far as the Right, 1988-2024. College-educated postgraduates swung left after 2010. Everyone less educated drifted right.
🧠 The beliefs that will not die: Fauci as science, ICE as Gestapo, police killing unarmed black men by the hundreds. 2019: 13 such deaths. More than half of "very liberal" respondents guessed 1,000 or more.
🎭 90 million patient records, 2024: adults after "gender-affirming" surgery attempted suicide at 12 times the rate of other ER patients. Jazz Jennings is the poster child they celebrated, then sterilised.
📰 Some liberals are blinking. Atlantic on youth gender medicine, Powell on harm reduction (862,000 overdose deaths 2014-24), Harper on anti-white campus paranoia, Chait on the DSA. Most of the choir is still singing.
📈 Gallup 2025: 59% of Democrats call themselves liberal. 66% view socialism positively, 42% capitalism. One-third now identify as democratic socialists. Five DSA-backed House candidates won Democratic primaries this summer.
🧬 Yale's Dan Kahan: the smarter you are, the better you get at defending the team. Highest cognitive-reflection scores showed the most bias. A gun-control maths problem: the most numerate got it wrong when the answer cut against their politics.
🕊 Shellenberger and Gutentag, forthcoming book: the professional-managerial Left as a pseudo-religion. Voegelin's "dream world," where not recognising reality is the first principle. Fauci: attacks on me are attacks on science.
🎯 Takeaway: the horror film is the parable. Nikki snaps out, sees what she has been doing, and looks away from the mirror. The surgeries, the overdoses and the school closures will not look away with her.

5. How Cambridge became the epicentre of Western self-loathing

Brendan O'Neill - spiked

🏫 Same Cambridge education faculty that employed Jason Arday now has Farah Ahmed, assistant research professor. His life story was embellished. Hers, O'Neill says, is all too real.
📝 Andrew Gilligan in the Spectator: Ahmed co-authored a 2002 Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet with Nazreen Nawaz, republished 2017. Muslims should build "advanced weaponry" for jihad. Allah's reward "immeasurable" for those who make "machinery for jihad".
🛑 The dream: no school except Islamic ones. Nothing taught that "contradicts with Islam". Freedom, nationalism, democracy, evolution: haram. Engineering exists to aid jihad. Computer science exists to elevate Islamic society over every other.
📚 She also wrote against the "corrupt tradition" of democracy, religious tolerance that puts Islam on "the same level" as other faiths, English literature as "one of the most damaging subjects", and the teaching of evolution. Darwin's university hired her.
🔄 Apologists say she changed. 2010: she no longer supports "all" of Hizb ut-Tahrir's teachings. Last year she co-authored "How Islamic is my school?" A Cambridge project she runs tells 12-year-olds Israel uses Hamas as "an excuse", calls the kidnapped "prisoners of war", and uses a map with Israel erased.
🧭 The quads that split the atom, found the structure of DNA, and trained Turing now add trigger warnings to Shakespeare and employ people who tweet "White Lives Don't Matter. As white lives."
🎯 Takeaway: from Tyndale, who died so every man could read the Bible, to a hire who once wanted education bent to jihad. O'Neill: not a glitch. The university thought wokeness was renewal. It was demolition.

6. Murdoch, the Australian and me

Tom Switzer - The Spectator Australia

📰 Everyone knows the Australian as Murdoch's conservative national daily. Twenty-five years ago it was, Switzer says, a wet impersonation of the ABC, the Herald and the Age.
🚢 Tampa, 26 August 2001: 438 rescued, captain turned toward Christmas Island, Howard said no. Troops boarded. Pacific Solution. "We will determine who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come."
📝 Switzer was at the AFR, at odds with Fairfax colleagues who called Australia a "white fortress". Hired as the Australian's opinion editor a month later. Mixed feelings: Thatcher, Reagan, Fox News; also News had kicked South Sydney out of the NRL.
📄 The Oz of 30 August 2001: Howard's response an "offensive, inhumane embarrassment", "deterrence first and decency last". Let them ashore. Greg Sheridan: "darkest fears" of the Australian psyche. Paul Kelly: a "deep but false sense of national crisis".
🚫 One exception inside the paper: former editor Frank Devine called the tears "soft-headed" and backed the government's right to stop unauthorised arrivals.
🎯 Chris Mitchell arrived from the Courier-Mail. The opinion pages (Switzer, 2001-08) then ran Harries, Hirst, Albrechtsen, Blair, Salusinszky, O'Sullivan, Steyn. People-smuggling stopped. Public confidence in immigration rose.
🎯 Takeaway: the remarkable fact is not that the Australian changed after 2002. It is that it lost its senses in the first place.

7. TikToxic antisemitism

Rebecca Weisser - The Spectator Australia

⚖ Royal Commission, dying days: Rita Jabri Markwell of the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network tables an "anti-dehumanisation" framework written to protect Palestinians. Asked how it applies to Jews.
💬 Zionism, she said, sits "on the same page as white supremacy" and ISIS, and can be "characterised as a form of violent extremism". Nicholas Bender SC put a campus text about Zionists as "animals" to her. On its face, she said, it would not breach the framework.
🏴 Commissioner Bell asked, putting the word Zionism aside, whether she accepted the legitimacy of the state of Israel. She could not. Occupation, apartheid, genocide: not a legitimate state.
🏫 Macquarie's Randa Abdel-Fattah, 2024: if you are a Zionist you have "no claim or right to cultural safety". Greens senator Nick McKim: Labor is "captured by Zionist interests". The Protocols, with better lighting.
📖 Paul Berman, 16 years ago: Western intellectuals stroked Tariq Ramadan and condescended to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He "understands terrorism so tenderly he ends up justifying it." 7 October was the milestone. Opera House forecourt. Campus anticolonialism.
🎙 Sheikh Shadi Alsuleiman on Ibrahim Dadoun's "day of victory" after the massacre: personal capacity, ANIC does not endorse. Under oath he accepted it could look celebratory. Home Affairs still found $308,000 for the parent of OnePath, which brought Sneako out. Sneako's set includes praise of Hitler.
🧠 Three currents: far-right, Islamist, progressive. All dissolving into the same Tiktoxic soup. Bondi made it impossible to unsee.
🎯 Takeaway: the Commission was never going to fix it. It has shown the poison. The antivenom is the hard part.

8. Data centre derangement syndrome

Will Bennett - The Spectator Australia

🖥 Data centres poll worse than potholes, nuclear plants, wind, solar, even "non-AI" server farms. Australia is the world's second-largest destination for the money, after the US.
🧠 Closed-loop versus open-loop cooling does not move anyone. A US study: data centres pushed average retail electricity prices down, 2015-2024. Facts arrive. They bounce.
🔌 Netflix, Zoom and your photos already run on this kit. Take the social-media version seriously and the sheds will drain the water table, break your marriage, and fix a third Brisbane Lions premiership.
🏭 Tomago aluminium smelter uses twice the electricity of Australia's entire data-centre fleet. Politicians fight to keep it open. Almond orchards drink more water than all of North America's data centres. Nobody is picketing smoothie bowls.
🛑 Q1 this year: more American projects blocked or delayed than in all of 2025. Billions in lobbying. Weyland-Yutani spokespeople reading AI-written talking points. The public hears the warehouse, not the megawatts.
💰 People who cannot stop AI taking the job, turning the internet to slop, or minting the next trillionaire can try to stop the shed down the road. They are not wrong that someone is getting rich.
🤝 Apartment-development research: 63% warmed up when they saw community benefits. An English offshore-wind study: call the cheque a "bribe" and support vanishes. Mining learned this the hard way.
🎯 Takeaway: the argument is no longer what a data centre does. It is what people think it represents. Statistics will not buy the social licence.

9. Are Americans Losing Faith in Capitalism? We Asked Them.

Mene Ukueberuwa - The Free Press

📊 Honesty Project is back. Free Press plus Populace, a think tank that tries to catch "private" opinions, the ones people will not say in a normal poll.
🏛 This year's primaries have turned into a referendum on the economic system. DSA wins from New York and Pennsylvania to Colorado and Florida.
⚖ So they asked Americans about capitalism versus socialism.
📉 The free cut's only finding: the public is down on capitalism, still wary of full-blown socialism, and weighing whether a few socialist candidates might shake the system.
🔒 Paid after "We found that:". About 1,560 words sit behind the wall. The numbers, the private-versus-public gaps, the rest of the survey: subscribers only.
🧠 The series is built to beat the usual poll problem: people say the respectable thing. Populace tries to catch the view they keep for the kitchen.
🎯 Takeaway: the argument is that the mood has shifted. The evidence for how far, and how privately, is for paying readers.

10. ‘You Have To Take It Out’: Trump Vows To Ban Sharia Law

Brecca Stoll - The Daily Wire

🏛 Trump to Glenn Beck: he would "absolutely" prohibit Sharia in the United States. "You do have pockets of it. You go to London, you go to Paris, it's almost like their second way of life. ... You have to take it out."
📣 House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has joined the Sharia Free America Caucus: "completely incompatible with the American way of life." Sen. Tommy Tuberville's No Sharia Act would stop courts enforcing foreign-law judgments that violate constitutional rights, including in marriage, divorce, custody, adoption and inheritance.
📄 Precedent already on the books: Maryland's highest court, 2008, refused to recognise a husband's unilateral Pakistani / Islamic divorce because it would have let him dodge Maryland's marital-property rules.
⚖ Traditional Sharia, as the piece lists it: a man may have four wives, a woman one husband; men can initiate divorce without fault; a woman's testimony may carry less weight; dress rules fall harder on women. US courts do not grade witnesses by sex.
🏆 The fight has landed in the Michigan Senate race. Abdul El-Sayed, at 24, told the New York Times he took a Sharia-compliant mortgage to avoid interest. "When I die and I stand before God ... I don't want to say I did it the easy way." He says the faith is his, not a programme for anyone else.
📊 CAIR: 255 Muslims now hold elected office in the US. Nihad Awad calls it engagement. The Republican bills call it a reason to write the ban down.
🎯 Takeaway: Trump has given the caucus the line. The legal fight is about which law sits on top when the two collide. London and Paris are the warning poster.

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.

Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/157

1. Democracy Briefing: The social media ban has scrambled the party lines