This is edition 2026/168 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 Greens raise the stakes on supermarket reform with KiwiMart
Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project
- 🛒 Greens want a publicly owned supermarket chain. Opponents renamed it CommieMart within hours. Winston Peters called it textbook communism by stealth. National went with Soviet-style. Rodney Hide imagined a Lettuce Board.
- ⚖️ Edwards says a state chain competing for customers is not Soviet central planning. The jokes let critics skip the actual question: after years of inquiries, why is there still no serious third supermarket player?
- 📊 Foodstuffs and Woolworths still hold about 82% of grocery retail. The Commerce Commission market study, a Grocery Commissioner, wholesale rules and covenant tweaks have not shifted the picture. The latest annual report found retail prices up and most competition measures barely moved.
- 🤷 Nicola Willis admitted she cannot force a third entrant, only open her arms as wide as possible. No large overseas chain came. Edwards says KiwiMart starts where that admission ends.
- 💰 The Greens would force Foodstuffs and Woolworths to divest at least 120 stores and distribution capacity. Parliamentary Library modelling they cite puts asset buy at about $1.3 billion, plus $1.5 billion of Crown capital. About $2.8 billion to start, aiming at 15% of the market.
- 🏬 Chloe Swarbrick: we are not short of supermarkets, we are short of competition. Sue Chetwin of the Grocery Action Group calls it a plausible way to get prices down. Tex Edwards of Monopoly Watch says distribution is the real bottleneck.
- 🔒 Paywall cuts in after the entry-problem section. Locked: the state changes the argument, the numbers are the weak point, what the Soviet jokes avoid, and if not KiwiMart then what.
- 💡 Takeaway: Edwards is not selling the business case. He is saying ridicule is not a supermarket policy, and the people jeering still have not named a third competitor that actually exists.
2. The Trojan Horse of Labour Party AI Policy
A Halfling's View - A Halfling's View
- 🐴 Hipkins dropped Labour's AI action plan on 9 September. David Harvey says Chippy is no Odysseus. The horse is obvious: AI branding wrapped around a wider online-control kit.
- 🏛️ Four new bits of state: an Office of AI inside DPMC, a senior AI minister with a published work programme, an online safety regulator, and an AI Expert Advisory Panel reporting to ministers.
- ❓ Labour's own site never defines what AI is. Search, document review, expert systems, ChatGPT? Harvey says if they cannot name the target, the regulatory plan has no credibility.
- 🛡️ The online safety regulator is the real cargo. Harvey reads it as a revival of the Ardern/Hipkins Safer Online Services work that died when the coalition took office, plus a stronger version of National's still-unintroduced Online Safety Bill.
- 📰 Copyright rules for AI training get a cheer from Sinead Boucher at Stuff. Harvey says that is the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill coming back under another name, with enforcement that mainly hits local developers in a small market.
- 🏭 Data centres would have to find their own renewable power, pay their own connection costs and drop load at peak. User-pays dressed as climate care, aimed at talking big campuses out of coming here.
- 🗣️ Free Speech Union flagged the speech hit. Section 14 of the Bill of Rights covers seek, receive and impart. AI tools are expressive tools. A regulator that can write secondary rules about what platforms must remove is making law Parliament should write.
- 💡 Takeaway: The bits with no design at all are the dangerous ones. An office and a panel you can staff. A speech regulator and a copyright levy you cannot assess until they tell you what they are.
3. Democracy Briefing: What the Winton Land scandal reveals about power in NZ
Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project
- 🏗️ Chris Meehan is resigning as a Winton Land director from 14 September. He and his wife still hold majority control. The company is in turmoil: workplace allegations, a falling share price, and a string of board and management exits.
- 🏡 Sunfield at Ardmore is the prize. Auckland Council is in the High Court next week challenging the fast-track consent. The council says the site is flood-prone and the wrong place to grow.
- 💵 Electoral Commission returns: Speargrass Holdings about $52,895 to National in 2022, Chris and Michaela Meehan about $103,260 in 2023, $50,000 from Chris Meehan to ACT in 2023, $7,500 to NZ First in 2025. More than $213,000, plus later in-kind support.
- 🍽️ Newsroom's Jonathan Milne documented fundraising dinners for Shane Jones at the Meehans' Queenstown home. Winton also hired Lillis Clark. Steven Joyce joined the board in June 2023. Access predates this coalition. Labour's Michael Wood met Meehan and the lobbyists in November 2021.
- ⚖️ Chris Bishop spruiked Sunfield from opposition. When fast-track arrived, the file moved to Simeon Brown. An expert panel consented 3,854 homes on about 225 hectares in March 2026. Recusal does not answer who set the rules.
- 🌊 Councillor Richard Hills told BusinessDesk the site is 70% to 80% in the floodplain. No water or stormwater hook-up, no public transport, under the Ardmore flight path. A consent does not say who pays for the pipes.
- 🗞️ Matthew Hooton in The Post: politicians pick losers, because losers pick politicians. Be extra suspicious when the same people talking stalled projects are also talking party donations.
- 🔒 Paywall locks workplace power and the boardroom, returning the political donations, and the cost of saying no.
- 💡 Takeaway: Edwards is not claiming a receipt was bought. He is mapping how money, dinners and lobbyists get a developer into the room when the neighbours cannot assemble the same operation.
4. Niall Ferguson: 9/11 Did Not Doom the American Empire
Niall Ferguson - The Free Press
- 🦅 Twenty-five years after 9/11, Ferguson says the old question is back: is America an empire? He asked it then. He is asking it again with a war on Iran in its seventh month.
- 🗺️ Trump still talks about annexing Canada and Greenland. Ferguson adds the Donroe Doctrine and the Trump Corollary in Venezuela, with Cuba listed as coming soon.
- 💥 After 9/11 the left said bin Laden had landed a blow against American imperialism. Some Bush neocons agreed. An unnamed senior adviser told Ron Suskind in 2004: we are an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.
- 🇺🇸 Official line was the opposite. Bush in April 2005: we are not an imperial power, we are a liberating power. Paul Bremer, six months into running Baghdad, emailed his wife that they were already halfway out and not ready for empire.
- ⚔️ Kissinger threatened to seize the Saudi oil fields during the 1973-74 embargo and was bluffing. Ferguson says a storm of steel against the Persians this year still looks kind of empire-y.
- 🏛️ June at the White House: gladiators in a temporary Colosseum for Trump. Robert Harris says you can see him in a toga with a gold laurel wreath. Der Spiegel put Trump-Caesar on the cover last January as Der Imperator.
- 📉 Ferguson's own line on the page: his prophetic vision of decline and fall 25 years ago has not been fulfilled. Subtitle: America has serious problems, the rivals have bigger ones.
- 🔒 The Free Press cuts you off there. The China comparison in the slug and the rest of the argument stay paid.
- 💡 Takeaway: He is not saying the republic is healthy. He is saying 9/11 did not kill the American empire, and the men who said they were not running one still keep acting like they are.
5. Many Democrats Today Agree With Republicans That Trans Is "Crazy." Imagine Their Shock When They Learn It's Also A Sexual Fetish
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- 🗳️ Shellenberger's free stretch is a political history: Democrats used to win by painting Republicans as cruel on this file. The GOP now treats it as a midterm closer.
- 🏫 Caption on the opener: Penn stripped Lia Thomas of titles and records in 2025. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico reversed on medical procedures and males in female sport. Rachel Levine, a Biden official, secretly lobbied for no minimum age on surgeries.
- 🚻 North Carolina's 2016 bathroom law (HB2) brought boycotts the piece says cost the state $3.8 billion over a dozen years. PayPal walked away from a plant. The NBA moved the All-Star Game. Governor Pat McCrory lost.
- 🐦 Trump in 2016 said Caitlyn Jenner could use any bathroom at Trump Tower. A 2017 Quinnipiac-style poll he cites had voters 68-27 against a trans military ban.
- 📺 2020: American Principles Project spent $4 million on trans-themed ads against Biden in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Biden carried all three. 2022: at least $50 million across 25 states. Third Way said the ads flopped.
- 🗳️ Kentucky's Andy Beshear vetoed a ban on transgender medicine for minors, copped the sex-change attack from Daniel Cameron, and won by five points in 2023.
- 🔒 The paid half is where the headline's fetish claim lives. The free text never gets there. Word count listed as about 3,240.
- 💡 Takeaway: From the preview alone, the politics flipped. What used to lose elections is now the closer. The shock in the headline stays behind the paywall.
6. Douglas Murray: Who's Afraid of the 'Far Right'?
Douglas Murray - The Free Press
- 🇩🇪 AfD finished first in Saxony-Anhalt with almost 44%. English-language headlines called it a far-right party on the march, and the first chance to govern a German state since World War II.
- 📸 Getty shot on the page: Ulrich Siegmund of AfD at the Magdeburg rally on 5 September, the night before the poll.
- 🗞️ Murray says nothing thrills journalists more than throwing around far right, then adding on the march. If the label were true, he writes, it would be a cause of great concern. Then he asks: is it?
- 🔍 He calls AfD a vital and special case for Europe's future. Most outsiders, he says, analyse it with the care of a brain surgeon in boxing gloves.
- 🚫 Opening verdict: it is not the case that AfD is a far-right party. That does not mean it has no far-right people in it, or that it could not become one.
- 🏛️ The standfirst: German leaders enabled a populist rise through their own failures, then cling to power by branding the challengers as extreme.
- 🔒 The Free Press cuts you off there. Subscribe wall. Merkel, immigration detail and the rest of the argument stay paid.
- 💡 Takeaway: Murray's free paragraphs are a fight over the label, not a manifesto. The AfD vote is real. Whether far right fits is the bit editors will not let you finish for free.
7. More Than 6,000 Leaders Across Entertainment, Academia and Public Life Unite to Reject "Genocide" Accusation Against Israel
CCFPeace Press Release - Creative Community for Peace
- 📝 Open letter from Creative Community for Peace with Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer and Professor Jonathan Karp. Dated Los Angeles, 9 September 2026.
- 🔢 The headline says more than 6,000. The lede says more than 5,000 leaders from entertainment, academia, government, business and civic life. The page never reconciles the two figures.
- 👤 Named signatories include Boris Johnson, Deborah Lipstadt, Niall Ferguson, Steven Pinker, Benny Morris, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Irwin Cotler, Shari Redstone, Debra Messing, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the late Abraham Foxman.
- ⚖️ The 1948 Genocide Convention needs specific intent to destroy a group as such. The letter: a crucial difference between war as tragedy and war as genocide is intent. In this war, only one side intended genocide, and that is Hamas.
- 📉 Lipstadt: the charge was common by 10 October 2023, before Israel had even entered Gaza. Cotler calls it a genocide libel and a moral inversion of fact, law and history.
- 🎬 CCFP director Ari Ingel cites Mark Ruffalo, who in 2021 called the accusation not accurate and a cover for antisemitism, then went back to broadcasting it.
- 🕯️ The letter sits against record US assaults on Jews in 2025, the Capital Jewish Museum shooting, the Boulder firebombing, and the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre.
- 💬 Closer: treat the accusation with revulsion, as the latest in a long history of lies about the Jewish people. A lie has no legs, says the Hebrew proverb. We will not allow this lie to stand.
- 💡 Takeaway: They are not asking you to love every bomb. They are asking you to stop using the worst word in the law as a slogan.
8. Politicians discover men
Bettina Arndt - The Spectator Australia
- 🎙️ Llew O'Brien, Nationals MP for Wide Bay and a former cop, is the Coalition's new Shadow Special Envoy for Men and Boys. Arndt calls him the one who actually talks straight.
- 📉 He sat on a suicide-prevention committee and says men barely rate a mention in the National Suicide Prevention Strategy. Seven men a day. Seventy-five per cent of completed suicides.
- ⚖️ As an ex-cop he wants balance on family violence. Intimate-partner homicide down about 70% over 35 years, he says, which does not match the current rhetoric. Male victims still get almost no services.
- 👨👧 Family Court and family breakdown are the suicide trigger he keeps naming. He wants Labor's family-law changes reversed, shared parenting as the starting point, and consequences for false complaints.
- 🏛️ O'Brien on Labor: an anti-male government. He worries the institutions now assume that at the heart of every man is an abuser. Albanese at the Queensland Labor conference lumped any talk of female-perpetrated violence in with the unthinkable.
- ⏱️ Victoria appointed the world's first cabinet Minister for Men and Boys, Paul Edbrooke, in April 2026. After Jacinta Allan quit and Ben Carroll reshuffled, the job lasted 14 weeks.
- 🗺️ Copycats anyway: NSW Coalition floating a men's health portfolio, South Australia a Parliamentary Friends of Men's Wellbeing group, ACT a Shadow Minister, and a federal inquiry into boys' education with bipartisan cover.
- 💡 Takeaway: The titles are multiplying. The one minister who got a seat at the table was gone in a season. O'Brien is still the one saying the quiet part about the 75%.
9. The dark truth about 9/11 conspiracy theories
Fraser Myers - spiked
- 📅 Twenty-five years on, Tucker Carlson's 2025 series The 9/11 Files says the official story is a lie. In 2012 the same man called Twin Towers truthers parasites and morons and told them they had no evidence.
- ✅ Official facts Myers restates: four hijacked planes, two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, one forced down in a field. Bin Laden named within hours. He claimed it on Al Jazeera in 2004.
- 📊 A fifth-anniversary poll had more than a third of Americans suspecting federal officials helped or stood back. Fifteen years later more than half thought the government was concealing the truth.
- 📻 Alex Jones was 98% sure Bush did it on the day. Gore Vidal in the Observer in 2002 accused the Bush junta of picking bin Laden as a logo for Afghanistan. 9/11 Truth in 2004 pulled in Ralph Nader and Van Jones.
- 🧱 The split: LIHOP (let it happen) and MIHOP (made it happen). Jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Loose Change sold a controlled demolition, with WTC7 as the smoking gun. It was actually wrecked by debris from the towers.
- ✡️ Carlson now says Israel stands out for possible foreknowledge. The older lie said no Jews died because they were tipped off. Myers: at least 119 Jews died in the towers.
- 🪧 Since 7 October the antisemitic strain has gone from fringe entertainment to protest placards blaming a Jewish false flag.
- 💡 Takeaway: The facts never moved. The audience did. What started as crank TV now walks around as Jew-hate with a documentary sheen.
10. Can we just stop AI?
Sean Thomas - The Spectator Australia
- 🚪 Jacob Coxon, 27, walked out of Anthropic this week and quit the whole industry. He said the people building AI seriously think it could kill everyone by the end of the decade, and they are still racing.
- ☠️ Evan Hubinger, who runs Anthropic's alignment science, publicly agreed and put mass human extinction inside a decade at more than one in ten. He also said there is no real plan yet for controlling a superintelligent machine.
- 💹 The same firm is lining up a flotation that could value it at a trillion dollars. Thomas: if Supernuke Inc's safety chief said the new reactor might wipe out the species, we would not be pricing the IPO.
- 📜 Five days before Coxon's resignation, Bernie Sanders unveiled a bill to ban superintelligence, with 20 years' jail for anyone who builds one. Xi Jinping is due in Washington on 24 September. Accelerationists smell a decel campaign.
- 🛑 The obvious line: if the risk is real, just stop. All the big frontier labs are American or American-owned. Washington once banned booze. It could ban a class of research.
- 🇨🇳 Then China keeps going. Trump, asked if he worries about AI going feral: we watch it, and whoever wins AI, wins. Asked earlier whether he feared Beijing or extinction more, he said both.
- 💍 Thomas calls superintelligence Tolkien's One Ring. Coxon describes systems that can hack anything and acquire real power. The first nation to hold it does not win the race. It ends the race.
- ☢️ The nuke analogy fails: bombs leave fingerprints. Model weights fit on a drive. You cannot switch off the world's server farms without switching off the world. A pact with Beijing is a trust exercise Hong Kong would not recommend.
- 💡 Takeaway: Race and you might build the thing that kills everyone. Stop and you may hand the Ring to Beijing. Trump's line still stands, with a kicker Thomas adds: the winner might be the machine.
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