This is edition 2026/158 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. Democracy Briefing: The ten key questions about MBIE’s contempt of Parliament
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 📱 MPs asked MBIE about the Biometric Capability Upgrade. Officials talked as if it was being reshaped. It had been shut down on 9 December 2025, almost three months earlier.
- 💰 Failed project: roughly $40 million. The Privileges Committee found MBIE deliberately misled the Education and Workforce Committee. Contempt of Parliament.
- 🗣 On 4 March, Phil Twyford asked Nic Blakeley and Alison McDonald about delays and reviews. Blakeley: "in the process of working out what the programme looks like going forward." The named project no longer existed.
- ⚖ Recklessness is not enough. A mistake is not contempt. The committee said officials would have been certain MPs were left thinking the project was still alive. "An insult to the entire public service."
- 🔒 Commercial sensitivity was the alibi. They could have gone private, taken it on notice, or said they could not answer in public. They hid the constraint and the cancellation.
- 🏛 Finding of contempt. No personal reprimand. House to take note. Public Service Commissioner Brian Roche then used the empty sanction to keep Blakeley.
- 💼 Roche in June: "completely unacceptable", "a disgrace", dismissals if the evidence held. This week the evidence was stronger. His line softened: "I don't think he lacked honesty at all." Blakeley stays. Stanford retains confidence.
- 💵 Accountability, Roche-style: fix what went wrong. That is already the $600,000-plus job. The punishment for contempt is staff training and keeping the desk.
- 🔒 Paid after question 5. About 2,447 words. Named leftovers: six weeks as a defence, whether Blakeley accepted the finding, why accountability goes soft at the top, what Stanford knew, and the next time officials are tempted.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Parliament was lied to about a dead $40 million project. The committee named the contempt. The Commissioner kept the chief executive.
2. Mumbo-jumbo and all that
Gary Judd KC - Thoughts from the North
- 📜 NZLS and its CLE provider are selling "Tikanga and the law." The ad itself splits them: "the intersection of tikanga and the law." Judd: the slip admits tikanga is not law.
- 🔮 "First law" is the slogan. No definition of law. No test. No reasoning. Then the vague product of creation stories is to be imposed on modern New Zealand.
- 📖 OED: mumbo-jumbo is a West African idol, then "jargon intended to impress or mystify; nonsense." Plunket called tikanga mumbo jumbo. The dying BSA took The Platform to task. Judd says the dictionary backs Plunket.
- ⚖ Ellis statement of tikanga, quoted to the Supreme Court: it "grew from and is very much embedded in our whenua." Some of it is tapu, kept from ordinary people. A religion, or a quasi-religion, sitting in the courtroom.
- 🎓 The course goes further: "Applying Tikanga in Practice: Civil Law and Professional Responsibility." Ethical decision-making "through a tikanga lens." The next step is a complaint against the lawyer who will not play.
- 🦖 A law dean, after Judd's Regulation Review complaint: "old racist dinosaurs" who can "go die quietly in the corner." The tone of the campaign.
- 🏛 NZLS, he says, is captured: lawyers fund a body that wants their minds. Glazebrook's line, quoted: "the taking back by indigenous people of power and control." The mullahs of mumbo-jumbo, without the hangings.
- 🎯 Takeaway: continuing education now sits at the intersection of mysticism and a practising certificate.
3. The Discovery of the Good Life
Roger Partridge - Plain Thinking
- 🔭 Vera Rubin: first woman at Palomar, 1965. Dark matter. A life her grandmother could not have imagined. Liberal societies make those lives possible and then cannot say what a good life is.
- 📊 GDP is not enough. Denmark and the US have similar income, different trust and mental health. Preferences are warped by what you have never been allowed to see. Happiness scores miss the teenager practising, not scrolling.
- 🧭 Rivals have a script: order, equality, Reno's strong gods, Deneen's claim that liberalism eats its own families. Liberalism's answer is freedom. It tells you what to protect, not what to do with it.
- 🧠 Aristotle, Mill, Deci and Ryan: capabilities, experiments in living, autonomy, competence, relatedness. Four dimensions: capability, relationship, work with a point, self-direction. The forms cannot be known in advance.
- 📈 Hayek for lives, not just prices. Software engineering and Wikipedia did not exist to be planned. Hungary under Orban: press 74th, universities captured, the young left. East Germany: Stasi density still shows in trust.
- 🚫 Two ways to close discovery. Post-liberals prescribe the forms. Nussbaum lists ten capabilities the state must secure; Sen refused a mausoleum list. Entrench "affiliation" and a campus speech code can wear the same words.
- 🏫 His fix: teach liberal history, a safety net without dependence, civic associations. Cultivate the dimension. Do not dictate the form.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the good life cannot be designed. It can be discovered. Rubin needed a country that did not already know what she was for.
4. Not Enough Rage.
Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter
- 🌬 Cold Wellington night. Trotter, too old for this, walks to the Fabian Society. British Fabians: Shaw, Wells, the Webbs, every Labour PM. NZ's copy arrived after Rogernomics and the ECA had smashed the independent labour movement.
- 📄 Core mission: make labour parties safe for educated middle-class reformers. Weapon of choice: the closely argued policy paper. Strikes and pickets belong to people who would only feel a paper if it were rolled and applied to the skull.
- 🎤 Guest speakers: Bryce Edwards on left populism, Van Jackson of Vic and the DSA. Edwards: left populism aims at monopolies, landlords, lobbyists, captured institutions. The migrant down the road is not the target.
- 🗳 Rage is the fuel. Trump as rogue billionaire. Mamdani as the cool son of privilege who "gets" downward mobility. In the room above Unity Books: polite Kiwi Fabians. Very little rage.
- 📚 Unity Books: recent NZ left writing has little interest in putting ordinary Kiwis back at the wheel. "Ordinariness" and "Far Right" are becoming interchangeable. A former PM pleased at a chink in parliamentary sovereignty.
- 🏷 Holy trinity of the NZ Left: Te Tiriti, transgenderism, Palestine. None of them score on the bread-and-butter meter. A left-populist surge this election is unlikely.
- 🔄 Victor Billot, reanimating the Alliance: NZ needs "a left-wing NZ First." Audible intake of breath. Trotter thought it brilliant. The room did not.
- 🎯 Takeaway: too many ready to go gentle into that windy political night. Too few ready to rage against the dying of the fight.
5. GRAHAM ADAMS: Māori gods rule the CRL underworld
Graham Adams - Brash & Mitchell
- 🚇 Auckland's $5.5 billion City Rail Link, blessed at dawn by Ngati Whatua Orakei and seven other iwi. "Tikanga and cultural safety" before the open days. Passengers will care about not being assaulted and trains staying on the rails.
- 🛐 Stations designed around Ranginui, Papatuanuku, Tane Mahuta, Mataoho. Gifted names: Maungawhau, Karanga-a-Hape, Te Waihorotiu, Waitemata. Basalt has mauri. Science retired animism. The engineers, mercifully, did not.
- 🤝 Mana Whenua Forum partnership since 2012. Maoritanga "intrinsically woven through the essence of CRL at every stage." Act: Treatyism as NZ's new religion. Colonisation the original sin. Wear the adornments, practise the rituals, smite the unbelievers.
- 📊 Richard Hills: Auckland is a "Maori city." 2023 Census: 12.3% Maori, 50% European, 30% Asian. Signs put Maori first and heavier: Ararewa over Lift, Putanga before Way Out. 2.6% of Aucklanders understand te reo.
- 🏷 Britomart becomes Waitemata. Mt Eden becomes Maungawhau. Partnership, Adams says, meaning: let's compromise, let's do it our way.
- 🚤 The "Waka Train": a canoe morphing into a carriage because Britomart used to be water. Maori never invented the wheel. The steam locomotive to Onehunga, 1873, would be the honest ancestor. That would admit colonisation brought the trains.
- 📋 The Forum wants the relationship as a template for every large infrastructure job. CRL opens 13 September.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the tunnels were dug by engineers. The shrine was built by a 14-year political project.
6. COVID WINDOWS ON WOEFULNESS & WORSE
John McLean - John's Substack
- 🏥 Hospitals creaking. PHF Science's Dr Hannah Cooper: COVID-19 activity "very low." Flu, rhinovirus, colds. After Omicron in 2022, McLean says, COVID stopped being a real risk to healthy people.
- 💉 One genuine long COVID: distrust. "Safe and effective" against infection and transmission was a lie. Flu jabs fell. Flu deaths rose. The warped response is still killing people.
- 📋 Phase Two inquiry: Whitiki Aotearoa. Illingworth, Hill, Kavanagh. The double-Aotearoa title is the tell. Phase One was Ardern's narrow whitewash. Phase Two added insult.
- ⚖ Inquiries Act powers unused: no summons, no oath, no documents. Ardern, Hipkins, Little, Robertson, Verrall refused public testimony. Bloomfield appears not to have been asked.
- 📄 July 2021 TAG memo to Bloomfield: myocarditis and pericarditis from Pfizer and Moderna, worse after dose two, worse in males and the young. He told the inquiry his recollection was blurred.
- 📅 He did not formally tell Little or Hipkins until December 2021 at the earliest. That month they kept two-dose mandates for the young. Hipkins' March 2022 Cabinet paper shows he knew. He told the inquiry he was never told. The inquiry agreed, despite the paper sitting on the Ministry website since May 2022.
- 🚫 Mandates for the young ran on after any justification had gone. Ethics 101: you do not force risky treatment on people who do not need it.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the virus's gain-of-function, in NZ, was to teach a country to distrust official inquiries.
7. TOP is guided by developmental science on youthful criminality - but how is young adult voting behaviour affected?
Bob Edlin - Point of Order
- 🗂 Opportunity scrubbed "to 25" from its Smart on Crime policy. March archive: raise Youth Court jurisdiction to 25, "in line with developmental science." Now the age is gone. The raise remains.
- 🤷 Leader Qiulae Wong, asked where the limit should sit, could not give a figure. Simeon Brown: "very weak when it comes to law and order."
- 📅 Age 17 came in in 2019, murder and manslaughter out. Opportunity never said whether 25 would cover every offence, or come in stages. Two interview requests: no reply.
- 📊 Taxpayers' Union-Curia: 64% oppose extending Youth Court past 17, 22% support. Among Opportunity's own voters: 75% against, 10% for. 18-39s: 57% against. Rural: 73%.
- 📉 Every party tested: NZ First 86%, ACT 78%, Te Pati Maori 78%, Opportunity 75%, National 68%, Labour 58%, Greens 53%. Tory Relf: "There is nothing 'youth' about a 24-year-old."
- 🗳 Same party, 2023: lower the voting age to 16. Natalia Albert wanted a "comprehensive review and reset." Developmental science for the dock. Votes at 16 for the booth.
- 🎯 Takeaway: they will not name the age, and their own voters do not want it. The science, somehow, still wants the franchise younger.
8. The myth of ‘rogue AI’
Andrew Orlowski - spiked
- 🤖 Daily Mail: an OpenAI model "escaped containment," hacked another firm's systems, Terminator comparisons. Anthropic ran a similar stunt. The Register: they are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder.
- 📋 AISI, a UK civil-service shop, issued a mocked-up "Incident Report" that looked like a real hack notice. The Mail: "It may be too late to contain AI." The transfers were engineered in-house.
- 🧠 Ciaran Martin, founding head of the NCSC: the agents were not going rogue. They were doing what humans told them, "with the precocity and indiscipline of talented but unsupervised children." They had unsupervised internet access. They "escaped" because they were allowed to.
- 🛡 Two cyber experts, for the Telegraph: the AISI report was designed to produce that outcome. "They're implying the AI agents have the ability to think, which they don't."
- 💰 Effective Altruism: $1.5 billion into the "AI doom industrial complex." Superintelligence has not emerged. ChatGPT and Claude cannot reliably count to 10. The threat is fiction, and the press cannot resist it.
- 🏛 Sunak's 2023 summit captured and relabelled a Safety Summit. AISI's CTO Jade Leung is a senior EA and the PM's official AI adviser. Pay-grade exceptions. GCHQ's NCSC is firefighting the publicity.
- 🌍 Martin's closer: while the media gawped at test failures, hackers hit water facilities in a dozen American states.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the taxpayer is funding a sci-fi marketing department. The real attacks are already on the pipes.
9. Trump’s stalemate with Iran looks set to limp on
Jonathan Spyer - The Spectator Australia
- 🌊 Stalemate. Iran tried to make Hormuz intolerable for civilian shipping and force a US climb-down before the midterms. It has not worked.
- 🛳 US patrols and escorts via the southern Omani corridor. Washington claims 8-10 million barrels a day; more modest figures say 5-6 million. Still a dent in Iranian "control."
- 🛢 Saudis: East-West pipeline, about 7 million barrels a day to Yanbu. Houthis not going all in. UAE: Habshan-Fujaira, up to 1.8 million, with a parallel line being fast-tracked with Total.
- 📉 Iran: economy to contract 5.4%, inflation near 90%, Kharg Island exports effectively stopped, petrol shortages, February-April damage. Neither side has enough leverage to make the other fold.
- ⚔ Tehran threatens to "expand the battlefield." Bessent: an "economic D-Day" of secondary sanctions. China calls them illegal. Trump to al-Jazeera: "no rush."
- 📄 The April memorandum is a dead letter. The fight is no longer missiles, nukes, proxies or regime change. It is Hormuz. That subject-change is Iran's gain.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Iran survived and moved the argument. It has not imposed its terms. The limp continues.
10. The disgusting bigotry of blaming Israel for anti-Semitism
Brendan O'Neill - spiked
- ❓ Piker and the Ivy League left: Israel endangers the world's Jews. O'Neill's question: why do only Jews suffer for the supposed sins of their homeland? No Sudanese beaten for Khartoum. No Orthodox churches burned for Putin. No Shias shot for Tehran.
- 🎤 Piker: Israel is "Jewish ISIS." Jews who stay "singularly invested" in it invite action "against American Jews." Jeffries: dangerous and anti-Semitic. Even Abdul El-Sayed backed away.
- 📰 Owen Jones, defending Piker: "It is an obvious undeniable fact that Israel's actions are fuelling anti-Semitism." O'Neill: when a middle-class canceller says obvious and undeniable, it is usually neither.
- ⚖ Victim-blaming is the great woke sin, except for You Know Who. The descendants of nations with worse ledgers are not hunted in the street. Israelophobia preceded the war they call a genocide.
- 📢 The fuel is the lie: war recast as genocide, civilian deaths as baby-killing. Synagogue desecrators have been yelling those words for three years.
- 🕯 O'Neill is a Zionist, wants Hamas destroyed, does not buy the genocide charge. He has not been racially abused. His institutions are not graffitied. He is not a Jew.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Jews are not being attacked for what Israel did. They are being attacked because they are Jews.
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