Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/169

This is edition 2026/169 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. The Engine of Discontent: Why democracy's defenders should pay more attention to the price of a house

Roger Partridge - Roger Partridge

• 🏠 Partridge says the English-speaking world's favourite story is a lie: rising house prices did not make ordinary families rich. They transferred wealth from people who needed a house to people who already had one.
• 📊 UBS 2023 ranked NZ fourth in the world for median wealth per adult. RBNZ 2022: housing is worth more than seven times the local sharemarket. More than half of household assets sit in residential land and buildings. Most of the gain is the land getting dearer.
• 💳 Mortgages are about nine-tenths of household debt. OECD 2026: shallow capital markets, no major domestic float since 2021. Treasury has been saying since 2005 that too little capital sits behind each Kiwi worker.
• 📐 Infrastructure Commission: from the late 1930s to the late 1970s, prices rose about 0.5% for every 1% of population growth. After the Town and Country Planning Act 1977 handed objectors the veto, they rose 2% for every 1%.
• 📉 Median house just over three times household income in January 2002. More than six times by 2017. Auckland near ten, then more than eleven at the 2021 peak. Home ownership peaked at 73.8% in 1991 and hit its lowest since 1951 in 2018.
• 💸 Bishop calls $5.5 billion of housing supports unsustainable. A quarter of households get some form of it. Census 2023: 112,496 severely housing-deprived. Child poverty before housing costs fell. Material hardship barely moved.
• ✈️ Year to September 2025: a record 72,700 NZ citizens left, net loss 46,400. Almost two-fifths were 18 to 30. Only 17% of New Zealanders think the next generation will be better off.
• 💡 Takeaway: The excluded blame capitalism for what planners did. A housing market rigged for the people who arrived first is how you teach the rest the game was settled before they started.

2. RICHARD PREBBLE: Is the Public Service Neutral?

Richard Prebble - Brash & Mitchell

• ⚖️ Prebble: a politically neutral public service is a constitutional principle you lose by chips, not by a bang. Then one day it is gone.
• 🪧 On 9 September almost 10,000 public servants struck. A coordinated walkout 47 days before voting, he says, is unprecedented.
• 📢 The PSA has always been political. It says it campaigned against National in 1999. This year it registered as a third-party promoter. Campaign name: Change the Government. Election material went into government workplaces.
• 🏛️ Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche: the postcards are election advertising. Displaying them in public-service workplaces is inconsistent with political neutrality.
• ❓ The government called the strike political. Prebble's question is where the Opposition is. Why has Labour not told the PSA to drop the campaign?
• 💰 Did the 10,000 lose pay for the hours they were not working, or did the taxpayer fund the walkout? He wants that answered.
• 💡 Takeaway: He used to call sabotage talk paranoia. A union running Change the Government from inside the building is why he has stopped.

3. GRAHAM ADAMS: Decolonisation agenda drives race-based MAPAS

Graham Adams - Brash & Mitchell

• 🎙️ Guyon Espiner grilled David Seymour on race-based med-school entry and skipped the family receipt. Emma, then Espiner, got in via Auckland's MAPAS. She has said Seymour encouraged her to apply. ACT now wants MAPAS gone.
• 📚 She was already an arts graduate, a parliamentary staffer and an executive recruiter. The low-decile disadvantage story does not fit. The fallback is patients do better with doctors who look like them.
• 🏥 Professor Warwick Bagg and Sir Collin Tukuitonga repeat cultural concordance. Adams: 43% of NZ doctors are overseas-trained, the highest share in the developed world. About 25% of GPs are Asian. Most Kiwis are already treated by someone who does not share their ethnicity.
• 📉 OIA on Auckland 2024 graduate intake: median GPA General 8.5, MAPAS 6.25. Lowest General 7.25, MAPAS 4. Otago this year: General offer floor 93.14%, Maori 65.29%. Bagg's target is 40% Maori/Pasifika. Practice is 25-28%.
• 🧬 One Maori or Pasifika great-grandparent qualifies. Adams says some MAPAS doctors do not look Maori or Polynesian at all, and the scheme still stains every Maori and Pasifika doctor in the public mind.
• 📜 The real engine, he writes, is indigenisation. A BMJ piece led by Bagg: inclusion is not enough. Normalise Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Matauranga Maori as an equal knowledge system, mauri included.
• 🗣️ Associate Professor Elana Curtis: she went in with some of the lowest marks and saw MAPAS as a right, not a favour. Tangata whenua, sovereignty, self-determination. Adams: that ideology is rarely sold to the public as the reason.
• 💡 Takeaway: The GPA gap is the receipt. The decolonisation paper is the motive. Espiner left both off the table.

4. Measuring what matters

Paul McBeth - Just the Business

• 📈 Aurellan Asset Management's Anthony Edmonds has gone after the SPIVA report that is used to bag active managers. He says the benchmark is one no local fund actually measures itself against.
• 🇳🇿 S&P's Sue Lee has previously said a little local knowledge helps domestic active managers. The global underperformance story is starker than the home-market one.
• 📰 Generate's Greg Smith prefers Morningstar's active/passive barometer in the Herald. It still favours indexing, just by less. Generate is unashamedly active. Aurellan runs both.
• ⚖️ Adviser Nick Carr, via interest.co.nz: SPIVA is shaky enough that you should not hang a religion on it. Edmonds' real target is product spruiking on bad ground.
• 💼 March 2026 year: Milford and Generate pinched the big dollars from rival KiwiSaver schemes. Sharesies and Kernel grew fastest. Pathfinder's most-ethical growth fund slowed to 4.1% poaching after years of double-digit inflows.
• 🥇 Highest 10-year rolling return he cites: NZX SuperLife US large growth at 19.6%, almost 99% in a Vanguard growth ETF. Households feeling the pinch still chase the number.
• 👀 5.3% of KiwiSaver funds under management switched provider in the March year, up from 3.5% in 2025. The FMA is getting twitchy about past-performance pitches.
• 💡 Takeaway: Active versus passive is cafe sport. The member who spends 40 years wondering what if I'd switched has already lost the plot.

5. Universities: what did they exist for?

Grant Duncan - Politics Happens

• 🎓 Duncan: universities now have a reputation for suppressing ideas. Harvard biologist Carole Hooven said on TV in 2021 there are two sexes, based on gametes. She was made so uncomfortable she left the job she loved.
• 🚫 He has seen a sex-and-gender event cancelled on health-and-safety grounds that someone might kill themselves. On that logic, he says, cancel exams too. Hooven: knowledge is subordinated to political goals.
• 🗣️ At a seminar an American academic was alarmed when the host said ladies and gentlemen. She told him he should not say that.
• 📚 The late Jason Arday at Cambridge is the other exhibit. Victim of a racist feeding frenzy, or of non-meritocratic hiring under DEI? Duncan says straw people were set on fire on all sides.
• 🔬 He will not pretend evidence and logic are a colonial trick. When critics call the demand for proof Western oppression, systematic knowledge itself is on the line. Feyerabend's anything goes never ran the lab. Peer review still does. Campus politics got narrower.
• 🏛️ Noel Annan in 1963: a university exists for the intellect. Derrida, of all people: the university professes the truth, and that is its profession. Lyotard in 1979 saw the shift from truth to performativity, research bought for power not enlightenment.
• 📈 Annan guessed 20% of adolescents in higher ed by century's end. 2026: over 40% of UK school leavers at least applied. Universities always trained useful professionals and reproduced elites. Mass entry changed the mix, not the original job.
• 💡 Takeaway: The culture war is real. So is the funding war. Truth got squeezed by both the commissars and the accountants.

6. We need an engineer, not PwC: The future of the public service

Natalia Albert - Natalia Albert

• 📁 Paul Goldsmith holds 11 portfolios, including Defence, Justice, Treaty negotiations, Arts, Veterans, Pacific Peoples, Space, National Security, Media, Digital Government, and the Public Service. Albert: that arrangement is the tell. Size was never the real design fault.
• 🎯 The cut was to 1% of population, about 55,000 government-funded jobs. She says they fired too many, too fast, and called it transformation before anything was built to absorb the gap.
• 🔧 Principle of reform, yes. Execution, no. The public service trades in continuity. You cannot smash it at speed then act shocked when advice gets worse and nothing else stabilises.
• 🗳️ Labour will campaign on putting the number back. National will campaign on cutting further. Neither is describing a better machine. They are describing a dial. Bigger, smaller.
• 💼 Consultants as political insurance. High transparency, high accountability, no appetite for risk, so Deloitte and PwC carry the sentence. Wellington City Council is her exhibit. Knowledge walks out of the state.
• 🇮🇪 Ireland caps cabinet at 15 in the constitution. Singapore runs 16 ministries with depth underneath. NZ just keeps adding. Population agencies (Women, Pacific Peoples, Ethnic Communities) are either underpowered or should be absorbed.
• 💡 Takeaway: An engineer would ask how the system works. Wellington asks PwC where to cut, then asks them again where to build.

7. Niall Ferguson: 9/11 Did Not Doom the American Empire

Niall Ferguson - The Free Press

• 🔁 Same Ferguson piece that ran as item 4 in 168. Still here because it was in today's paste.
• 🦅 Twenty-five years after 9/11 he asks again: is America an empire? The war with Iran is 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 hit 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.
• 🇺🇸 Bush in April 2005: we are not an imperial power, we are a liberating power. Paul Bremer, six months into Baghdad, emailed his wife they were not ready for empire. 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 can see him in a toga. Der Spiegel put Trump-Caesar on the cover as Der Imperator.
• 📉 Ferguson's line: 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. China comparison stays paid.
• 💡 Takeaway: 9/11 did not kill the American empire. The men who said they were not running one still keep acting like they are.

8. Why So Many People Refuse To Accept That An Angry Lone Leftist Killed Charlie Kirk

Michael Shellenberger - Public

• 🔫 A year on, Tyler Robinson is charged with aggravated murder for shooting Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Prosecutors want the death penalty. Many Americans still say he did not do it, or did not act alone.
• 📺 Candace Owens has implied Erika Kirk conspired with Turning Point staff and foreign governments. Shot from below the stage. Assassin through tunnels. First casualty of the war in Iran. Robinson a patsy who was never on campus.
• 📝 Shellenberger's free stretch: Robinson confessed in writing. Partner: you weren't the one who did it right. He: I am, I'm sorry. I had enough of his hatred. Note under the keyboard: I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it. Discord: it was me at UVU yesterday.
• 👨‍👩‍👧 Family turned him in after the FBI released the photo. Kash Patel's subject in custody that afternoon was George Zinn, 71, who confessed falsely. Hearing video: Robinson on the roof, then jumping down.
• 🔬 Rifle in the woods, towel about 95% his DNA. ATF: trillion-to-one he was the main contributor on the trigger. No casing on the roof because the Mauser is bolt-action and still held the spent round. His lawyers at the 1 September 2026 hearing...
• 🔒 Paywall hits mid-hearing. The headline's human-nature argument stays paid. Word count listed as about 2,466.
• 💡 Takeaway: The free text is the evidence stack against the conspiracy. Owens' tunnels versus the Discord confession. The rest is behind the wall.

9. Heartaches and Handbrakes.

Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter

• 🍺 Trotter's Laurie and Les, pale ale on the deck, election on the table. Laurie: what the hell is the matter with your guy. Doesn't he want to win.
• 🎓 Les: Hipkins was never my guy. A student politician who never quite graduated. That he leads Labour explains why Les no longer votes for it.
• 🗣️ Jacinda could make you want to believe her. Then the talking had to stop and the doing start. Laurie: all the things she talked about, Labour never quite did. All the dodgy things it did, she never quite talked about.
• 🔵 The two Christophers have more in common than the name. Laurie still gives Luxon a dorky sort of energy and says at least National knows there is an election on. Hannah, pouring, is still Green.
• 🌿 Les on the Greens: half want the Middle Ages, the rest Petrograd 1917. Back-to-nature Bolsheviks. Opportunity has dropped under 5%. Qiulae Wong still impresses him. Half a point shy of Parliament.
• 📞 Laurie: Luxon was a fool to rule Opportunity out. National is stuck on 29 because reaching for the centre drives the angry right to Peters and Seymour. After the election, pick up the phone to Wong. Do you want to make a deal.
• 🛑 Would she, versus Chippy and Chloe and Rawiri? Of course. A handbrake on the Right. What else is the election about, if not a handbrake on extremism.
• 💡 Takeaway: Trotter's pub table has Hipkins as the student pol who will not fight, Luxon as the dork who might, and Wong as the spare tyre National left in the shed.

10. The Overhang Strategy.

Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter

• 🗳️ Trotter opens on 1978. From 1945 to 1985, turnout never dropped below 82.5% except that year. Official figure: 69.2%. Electoral Commission: enrolment was a mess, so the real turnout was probably higher.
• ⚖️ Labour won 691,076 votes (40.4%). National 680,991 (39.8%). First-past-the-post still gave National 55% of the seats. The party with fewer votes kept the Treasury benches.
• 🕵️ Through 21st-century conspiracy glasses, 1978 looks bloody suspicious. Muldoon, enrolment stuffed, aggressive redistricting, then 55% of the seats on 39% of the vote.
• 📝 Subtitle: those planning to rort MMP should bear in mind that two can play at that game. The free preview never reaches the 2026 overhang plan.
• 🔒 only_paid. Word count listed as about 1,288. The modern strategy, named parties and the two-can-play punch stay locked.
• 📄 Without the paid half, we have the 1978 parable and the warning, not the playbook.
• 💡 Takeaway: He is winding up an MMP rort piece with a Muldoon ghost story. The actual strategy is behind the paywall.

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.