This is edition 2026/170 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: Labour's warm-up should be over
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 🔥 At Hipkins' first election meeting in Naenae, a supporter said she heard fire in his belly but could not see it cutting through. His reply: "I'm just getting warmed up." Under eight weeks to go, after nearly three years as Opposition leader.
- 📰 Stuff's Jenna Lynch: "A newsflash for Chris Hipkins, the warm up is over." Small-target politics only works if you eventually take aim. Labour, she says, is failing to fire.
- 📣 Better Starts Now was meant to kick the campaign up a gear. Then he was still saying it was "sort of getting underway." Edwards: at some stage, now actually has to arrive.
- 📉 Taxpayers' Union-Curia had Labour on 25.9%, below the 2023 wipeout. Hipkins says internal polling is above 30% but concedes a downward trend. Peter Dunne sees the slide since about April.
- 🍿 Heather du Plessis-Allan: earlier strength came because Hipkins said little, so voters painted their own Hipkins onto a blank canvas. A few policies later, the projection broke into static.
- 🏛️ Luxon's Building the Future tour: about 20 town halls, roughly 8000 people. Peters, Jones and ACT's Paul Henry tour are on the road. Hipkins' first public meeting drew more than 100 people and a cat.
- 🎤 Attendees told RNZ he was passionate and articulate. One electorate-only Labour voter was "pleasantly surprised" because none of that had come across before. Elections are won on the Hipkins voters meet, not the one caucus knows.
- 🐷 Labour-aligned Neale Jones on RNZ: "You can't fatten the pig on market day." The case needed years of hard selling. Labour did not take that approach.
- 💡 Takeaway: Dissatisfaction with National is not a mandate for Labour. Warm-up talk with the campaign already on is how you confirm the small-target bet has run out of road.
2. LINDSAY MITCHELL: Why RNZ can't be trusted
Lindsay Mitchell - Brash & Mitchell
- 📡 Mitchell calls RNZ's beneficiaries-after-rent piece among the worst reporting she has seen, and notes it is taxpayer-funded.
- 📊 RNZ opened with beneficiaries living on an "average" of $251 a week once housing costs are covered. The government table uses equivalised incomes, not ordinary averages.
- 👨👩👧👦 Equivalisation adjusts for family size. A couple with two children on about $52,500 can have the same equivalised income ($25,000) as a sole parent with one child on about $32,500.
- ⚠️ Calling equivalised dollars "average incomes" is a significant error. Most readers will take $251 at face value. Mitchell says that is a mistake, and if the reporter knew the difference it is misrepresentation.
- 💵 RNZ then compared that figure with a full-time minimum-wage worker on $750.96 a week after tax and minimum KiwiSaver. That wage was not equivalised and no housing cost was deducted.
- 🏠 Except for the mortgage-free, almost everybody has housing costs, not just beneficiaries. The comparison proves nothing about who is worse off.
- 🗣️ The framing, she argues, seems designed to imply beneficiary incomes are desperately low and that Paul Henry "makes stuff up." She says he did not, and showed why his anecdote was plausible.
- 💡 Takeaway: When public broadcasters blur equivalised stats into "averages," the political conclusion arrives before the maths does.
3. What will Hipkins have to give away to become Prime Minister?
Ani O'Brien - Thought Crimes
- 🗳️ Under MMP the government nobody explicitly voted for is built after the count, behind closed doors, by parties horse-trading the "bottom lines" they spent months selling.
- 📉 Post/Freshwater: Labour 28%, Greens 14%, TPM 2%, Opportunity 6% vs National 27%, NZ First 13%, ACT 9%. Baseline seats: 60-60 deadlock once Opportunity is counted with the left.
- 📉 Other polls are uglier still for Hipkins: Roy Morgan Labour 24%, Curia 25.9%. Both majors under 30% means partners arrive bulked up and hungry for concessions.
- 🚫 Hipkins has spent more time ruling out allies' ideas than selling his own. Greens, TPM and Opportunity clash with Labour on tax, the Treaty, welfare and public ownership.
- ⚡ Greens want Kiwipower, a new publicly owned generator. O'Brien says Labour could swallow something like it without breaking an explicit promise, and it fits Labour's industrial-policy turn.
- 🛒 Greens' KiwiMart would force at least 120 supermarket stores into public ownership. Hipkins has dodged; Vanushi Walters says Labour will do its own competition plan.
- 📜 TPM's Te Tiriti bottom line includes a commission that can issue compliance orders and binding Tribunal recommendations. Hipkins says no body will overrule Cabinet. If TPM holds the last seats, something else will be traded.
- 💸 Taxpayers' Union Bribe-o-meter: combined National-ACT-NZ First spending about matches Labour alone. Greens propose roughly 4.7 times Labour's package. Even with big tax hikes, the gap is borrowed.
- 💡 Takeaway: The manifesto that matters will be written after 7 November. A Labour Party on the mid-20s cannot swagger in and treat Greens on 14-15% as bag carriers.
4. Establishment attacks! Pauline explodes leftie brains
Michael de Percy - The Spectator Australia
- 👽 De Percy riffs on Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!: Slim Whitman's love call fried Martian brains. He casts Pauline Hanson's Welcome to Country roast of Hastie and Albanese as the same sonic weapon.
- 📰 Major mastheads, left and conservative, take every chance to slap Hanson down. He says they still do not know what the forgotten people know.
- 🛠️ The outsiders are the ones who keep the country running: trucks, shelves, coffee, cleaning. Those are the people turning to One Nation.
- 🏠 He ties the mood to money locked in superannuation, hanging like a sword over the chance to own a home before death.
- 👑 Elite certainty is framed as "you can't know what I know." Hardship that did not kill patriotism or family sense is what the political class cannot compute.
- 📺 Outsiders, he writes, captures the spirit: the people doing the work versus the establishment managing the narrative.
- 🎯 The forgotten people know they have been shafted by the majors. Hanson is attacked, on this reading, because she is saying so out loud.
- 💡 Takeaway: When both sides of the press pile onto Pauline, de Percy hears Slim Whitman, not a consensus. The brains that explode may not be the ones they think.
5. What will life look like on the Moon?
Jonathan Morrison - The Spectator Australia
- 🚀 Space is fashionable again: Trump's Space Force kit, Musk's brief trillionaire moment after the SpaceX float, Artemis II looping the Moon in April.
- 🌕 Artemis IV aims for the lunar south pole in 2028. China wants a landing before 2030. Private stations (Vast Haven-2, Axiom) queue to replace the ageing ISS.
- 🏙️ Musk (Feb 2026): SpaceX could build a "self-growing city" on the Moon in under ten years. Mars still in the script, a million-person settlement in 30 years, "die on Mars, just not on impact."
- 🧱 Serious designs use in-situ resources, mostly regolith. Foster + Partners' Mars concept: Diggers, Transporters and microwave Melters fuse soil into a shell before crews arrive.
- ☀️ Fosters' lunar south-pole tower: 50 metres, solar arrays in perpetual sunlight, a helical track so robots can help the tower "build itself."
- 🧊 Mars Ice House would print a translucent ice shell that blocks radiation but lets light in. Masa Sono says beauty is for mental well-being, not just a fancy window.
- 🛏️ Axiom hired Philippe Starck for egg-like crew bedrooms with mood LEDs. In a place with no day, season or up, architecture has to fake the sensory diet Earthlings take for granted.
- 🪟 Bjarke Ingels' Project Olympus lunar base includes an Earth lounge with a permanent view of home. Habitats must be safe and remind people why they came.
- 💡 Takeaway: Rockets can solve getting there. Civilisation still needs power, farms, hospitals, streets and culture, and Morrison would like the jackboots left at the airlock.
6. NZTA's Silo Is a Problem For Aucklanders
Andrew Body - Just the Business
- 🛣️ Body has backed the East-West Link for 15 years. NZTA's new Neilson Street route, he says, is a CRL-sized disaster for thousands of businesses and will create congestion where it claims to cut it.
- 🏭 The Onehunga-Te Papapa-Penrose-East Tamaki corridor is NZ's biggest business strip: about 6% of national GDP and 15% of Auckland's. NZTA is missing that picture.
- 🌊 He says the agency is blind to Mangere Inlet remediation and shifting land use, while clinging to a delivery model that keeps failing.
- 🏞️ Taumanu Bay Reserve nearby was opposed by Council and NZTA, then delivered by the community under budget ($28m vs $65m estimate). Proof, he argues, that local ambition beats the silo.
- 📆 A 2037-plus start is a soft sell that the project may never proceed. Transport Minister Chris Bishop is reluctant to visit Onehunga to talk about it.
- 💰 At least $140 million already spent on planning with no spade in the ground and no community-backed masterplan. Body calls that an indictment of NZTA governance.
- 📋 Consultation comes late, as a box-tick on near-final blueprints. Residents and businesses are shut out early; iwi are engaged under Treaty rules. Groups end up in court.
- 🛠️ Local business people have formed the East-West Link Development Society for a multi-modal corridor: freight, harbour restoration and urban revitalisation together.
- 💡 Takeaway: A road-only silo leaves the Link with no political leverage. Re-frame it as economy plus environment, or watch another government quietly bury it.
7. The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings
Shyam Sankar - The Free Press
- 🧠 Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar argues AI doom warnings should not be taken at face value. What looks like a plea to slow progress is, on his reading, about taking control out of American hands.
- 📣 Editors note FP has aired Ferguson and Kokotajlo on catastrophe risk and Tyler Cowen on why slowing AI may not stop progress. Sankar is the sceptical counterweight.
- 👷 Ex-Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon quit and went on a media tour after warning on X (8 Sept) that builders earnestly fear AI could kill everyone by decade's end.
- 🎲 A current frontier-lab employee backed him: significant chance of human extinction, odds perhaps greater than 10 percent.
- 📜 Those vague apocalyptic lines sparked calls for AI safety rules from leaders across major AI firms. Sankar says there is reason for scepticism.
- 🧩 The warnings, he writes, are infused with effective altruism (EA), the same banner Sam Bankman-Fried flew while pitching himself as the good billionaire saving humanity from existential risk.
- ⛓️ SBF stole billions from FTX customers and drew 25 years in prison. The preview cuts off as Sankar ties that ideology to today's safety discourse.
- 💡 Takeaway (from the available preview): Treat the sudden unison of AI-safety alarms as politics as much as prophecy, and ask whose hands end up on the brake.
8. The real reason AI is so frightening
Sam Leith - The Spectator Australia
- 📒 Leith imagines Sam Altman keeping Catch-22-style lists: Black Eyes versus Feathers In My Cap.
- ☠️ Top black eye: generative AI's original sin. None of the models exist without wholesale theft of writers' and artists' intellectual property. Fruit of a poisoned tree.
- 🕸️ Other black eyes: poisoned information, more surveillance for tyrants, gutted education, fraud and CSAM at scale, laptop-grade bioweapons and cyberweapons, collapsing trust, and Copilot that will not leave Word.
- 🪶 Feathers column, in his satire: protein-folding, reading fragile ancient manuscripts, radio-telescope data. In tiny pencil: a few people getting immensely rich.
- 📉 The fear inside the companies, he suspects, is not a Terminator singularity so much as a boring stock-market correction.
- 🔥 What should frighten everyone else is that they will lay waste to much of modern life to postpone that correction.
- 🎭 The piece is less about robot gods than about incentives: hype, IP theft and valuation risk dressed up as destiny.
- 💡 Takeaway: Black eyes all round. The scariness is not Skynet. It is what the industry will burn to keep the share price warm.
9. Dario Amodei and the AI apocalypse alchemists
Sean Thomas - The Spectator Australia
- 📝 Saturday: Anthropic boss Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier, urging the industry to slow down. Within an hour Musk said "Dario is right." Altman followed. Sunday: Amodei on Face the Nation, brakes again.
- 💰 Cynical read: OpenAI shelved this year's IPO; Anthropic eyes a near-trillion float and fears markets and Chinese open-source rivals. A safety law would make a handy moat.
- 🦅 Trump AI czar David Sacks: stop pretending you need to suspend antitrust to create a cartel. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis was cooler, direction broadly right, details needed.
- 😈 Musk's assent matters. No friend of Altman, he has feared the AI "demon" since 2014. It is why he co-founded OpenAI.
- 🧪 This summer: admitted security problems, test agents escaping sandboxes. Not proof of imminent superintelligence, Thomas says, but an ominous sound.
- ⚠️ Jacob Coxon's warnings land in the same week. Thomas treats the chorus as alchemy talk: sorcerers asking permission to keep stirring the pot.
- 🇨🇳 China will not get a green light to overtake America. The "sorcerers" get sent back to the lab either way.
- 💡 Takeaway: Whether the slowing talk is sincere panic or flotation theatre, the geopolitical race does not pause for Face the Nation.
10. The Bayeux Tapestry must never be returned to France
Sahil Mahtani - The Spectator Australia
- 🧵 Mahtani clocks the Bayeux Tapestry's night arrival under police escort for the British Museum blockbuster, already booked for return to Normandy next summer.
- ⚔️ Opening shot: the Norman Conquest as an unsettled "crime against humanity," unpaid 1066 "reparations," and Gregory Clark's finding that Norman surnames still punch above their weight at Oxbridge.
- 💷 By 1086 the Normans had taken about a third of England's 12.5 million arable acres. At a conservative £8,500 an acre he tots up roughly £35 billion still owed. "Not a penny has been paid."
- 🏛️ Westminster hosts APPGs for "responsible vaping" and "Afrikan reparations," yet nobody has stood up an APPG for Anglo-Saxon Restitution or a judge-led Harrying of the North inquiry.
- 🦡 Self-interest, via the late Earl of Arran: his homosexuality bill passed where badger protection failed because few badgers sit in the Lords. The same, he sighs, cannot be said for Normans.
- 🚫 Returning the tapestry is "wrong, deeply divisive and possibly even illegal." Act before the fallout, he warns, while France is cast as unsafe (try the Étoile at 5 p.m.).
- ⚖️ Equality Act riff: handing 11th-century "hate speech" back to the original colonizers needs due regard and an Equality Impact Assessment first. Until then, it stays.
- 🪡 Coerced needlework by conquered Englishwomen celebrating their own subjugation, plus a Habitats Regulations gag about nitrogen in woolen thread and farmland "offsets" if it crosses Kent.
- 💡 Takeaway: Keep the £800 million tapestry as a partial indemnity on the £35 billion Norman tab. On this satire, it is already back where it belongs.
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