This is edition 2026/174 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: 10 questions arising from the Tom Phillips report
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 📋 Edwards opens on the Simon Moore KC inquiry into how Police and Oranga Tamariki failed Tom Phillips' three children. Family warnings were discounted, evidence went unread, and chances to find them were mishandled.
- 🌲 Phillips hid the children in bush around Marokopa from December 2021 until September 2025, when Police shot him dead and recovered the kids. Better agency cooperation, the inquiry finds, could have prevented the second disappearance or brought them home sooner.
- 👩👧 The maternal family had to fight to be heard. An October 2021 OT note recorded a sister asking whether the agency 'would be held responsible if the children went missing again'. That is exactly what then happened.
- 📰 Mihingarangi Forbes credits older sisters Storm and Jubilee Dawson for raising the alarm when adults and agencies charged with protection failed. She says media and agencies minimised Cat Christey's mana as mum.
- 📄 An older sister's affidavit about controlling and abusive behaviour appeared unread at OT. After a home visit, OT called Phillips 'a very capable and loving father' and told the Family Court the children were 'completely fine'.
- 🗂️ With the children already missing for months, OT closed its report of concern, treating it as 'a police matter'. By then it had gone almost five months without meeting either sister or the mother.
- 🔫 Firearms warnings were not properly pursued: delayed licence-suspension service, incomplete seizure follow-up, and mismatched Police assessments of danger versus OT reporting.
- 💡 Takeaway: Ministers accepted nine recommendations and leaders apologised. Edwards' unpaid questions still cut deepest: who is accountable, and what does accepting responsibility actually change?
2. DON BRASH: Yet another reason the Waitangi Tribunal must go
Don Brash - Brash & Mitchell
- ⚖️ Brash says the Waitangi Tribunal has again found the Crown in breach, this time over the Coalition's draft school curriculum rewrite and its knowledge-rich push on reading, writing, science and maths.
- 📚 The Tribunal's complaint, as he reads it, is that instructional time on foundational skills crowds out te reo Maori, tikanga and matauranga Maori. He calls that cultural preference dressed as Treaty principle.
- 🔬 He argues traditional belief systems are being given equal or superior footing to physics, chemistry and biology, trading rigorous inquiry for political and cultural ideology.
- 🎓 He condemns personal attacks on Dame Elizabeth Rata for her role in guiding the reforms, calling her one of New Zealand's most distinguished education academics.
- 🗣️ The familiar claim that the Crown 'failed to meaningfully engage' with Maori is, he says, a catchphrase that never ends until the outcome yields completely to Tribunal demands.
- 🏛️ He traces a wider pattern: a body set up for historical land grievances now poking into ever more government decisions, and even asking whether democracy itself is 'fit for purpose', citing Richard Prebble in the NZ Herald.
- 🗳️ ACT wants the Tribunal abolished once historical settlements are done. NZ First would limit its scope; National has been silent. Brash wants the full Coalition to wind it up.
- 💡 Takeaway: Children need knowledge and opportunity, he says, and the country needs equal citizenship, not an unelected tribunal above Parliament.
3. Open Letter from Foodstuffs North Island Grocers
Foodstuffs North Island Grocers - Brash & Mitchell
- 🛒 More than 320 local North Island supermarket families write to the Prime Minister and Minister Willis opposing National's plan to break up the Foodstuffs co-op.
- 👨👩👧👦 They stress one family, one store: New World, PAK'nSAVE, Four Square and Gilmours owner-operators who live in the same towns as their customers.
- ⚙️ The co-op, formed in 1922 for joint buying, is their warehouses, trucks, IT, marketing and supplier muscle, not a separate corporate head office.
- 📉 They say duplicating warehousing and support will not cut checkout prices, and National's own analysis admits regional prices could rise.
- 🏘️ Over 119 of them serve towns under 5,000 people. The co-op model, they argue, stops places like Otaki, Turangi, Wairoa, Kaikohe and Taumarunui paying more for distance.
- 💼 Store value is tied to co-op value. Owner-operators take on debt and risk; a forced break-up dumps that risk on them, customers and communities.
- 😤 They call the policy as far from 'business friendly' as National could get, and say they are lying awake wondering whether to keep investing under the uncertainty.
- 💡 Takeaway: If cheaper groceries are the goal, back Kiwi-owned operators and the co-op they built, they say, do not pull it apart. A South Island letter is linked alongside.
4. New Zealand's political fragmentation may be under way.
Grant Duncan - Politics Happens
- 📊 Duncan notes two recent polls with National and Labour both under 30%. A combined November result under 62% would be the lowest ever; under 60% now looks possible.
- 🔄 Weak leaders and fuzzy brands are the easy explanation, he says, but smaller-party polling is jumpy, reflecting volatile opinion and sampling hard corners of the shift.
- 🌍 Similar legacy-party discontent shows in the UK and US, where favourability for the big two has gone net-negative even when they still dominate institutions.
- 📜 He revisits his mid-2017 argument that NZ's MMP landscape could fragment like continental Europe. The 2020 pandemic result then interrupted what 2017 discontent had started.
- 🔀 Since then niches hardened: Greens and Te Pati Maori swung left, NZ First turned more conservative-nationalist and refuses Labour, ACT grew from one seat to eleven.
- 🧩 A Nordic-style scenario he sketches: multi-party cabinets, protracted talks, slim majorities, and fractious coalitions becoming normal rather than rare.
- 📉 The old floor near 25% for each major party, and the tidy pendulum back over 40 for the other, may be narrowing. 2023 already showed Labour's crash without National reclaiming Key-era heights.
- 💡 Takeaway: If fragmentation is real, Luxon and Hipkins may be fighting for sub-30, even sub-25, results no matter the hustings lines. Paid section continues on how they should handle it.
5. The Parents Voice
Peter Allan Williams - Peter's Substack
- 📣 Williams flags a new education lobby, The Parents Alliance, chaired by economist Cameron Bagrie and launching Tuesday 22 September.
- 📈 Bagrie's line: if you want the economy in thirty years, look at education achievement now. PISA fell from 5th in 2000 to 20th by 2012, then back to 10th last year.
- 👨👩👧 Amid politicians, unions and bureaucrats, he says parents have lacked a structured voice on how and what children are taught.
- 📝 Core values include achievement first, classroom-ready teachers, meaningful reports, early support for disadvantaged kids, fewer zoning barriers, and annual parent surveys of schools.
- 🧠 Wellington mother Anya Zohrab, ex-staffer for Annette King and David Seymour, appears to be the organiser behind the group.
- 🤝 Board heavy-hitters include Bagrie, pollster David Farrar, former Labour minister Kris Faafoi, plus businesswomen and mothers Cat Moody and Joanne Chaplow.
- 🌐 Nearly 3,000 supporters had signed up at parentsalliance.nz when Williams wrote. He frames it as non-partisan focus on outcomes, not party colours.
- 💡 Takeaway: Teacher unions have carried too much weight for too long, Bagrie argues. A parent-backed counterweight with this cast is overdue.
6. An Apology
David Harvey - A Halfling's View
- 📰 HarperCollins and Byron Clark have publicly apologised to Conservative Party leader Helen Houghton over her inclusion in a chapter on women and the Alt Right in Clark's 2023 book Fear.
- 📖 The chapter (also run by The Spinoff in February 2023) risked readers linking Houghton with extremist views she says she does not share or associate with.
- 🤝 A settlement statement said they never intended to defame her and apologised for the hurt and distress caused. It describes her as a free-speech supporter and Christian conservative.
- 🏳️ Houghton called it a win for people who reject the habit of tagging conservative, Christian or traditional views as extremist by default.
- 🎙️ Clark remains a frequent NZ media go-to on far-right politics and conspiracy movements, including via RNZ and The Spinoff.
- 📝 Harvey revisits his April 2023 review of Fear alongside Histories of Hate (Spoonley et al.), calling Clark's book a polemic short on intellectual heft.
- 🔍 He argues Clark blurs mainstream right-of-centre politics into 'extremism', leans on scaremongering, and is thin on sovereign-citizen and OPCA analysis.
- 💡 Takeaway: An apology landed for Houghton. Harvey still asks when conservative values became a far-right label.
7. SPANIARD: Yellow-eyed penguins on Ngāi Tahu's menu
Spaniard - Brash & Mitchell
- 🐧 Spaniard says Ngai Tahu killing and eating endangered yellow-eyed penguins (hoiho) is now treated as fine by the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust and, apparently, DOC.
- 📄 DOC's recovery plan Te Kaweka Takohaka mo te Hoiho 2019-2029, written with Ngai Tahu and the Trust, cites past harvest of birds, eggs, feathers and bones and an aspiration to return to those practices once populations are 'healthy'.
- 🚨 He calls that a charitable trust's misfeasance against its purpose, a government agency bending its duty, and science subordinated to tribal 'thinks and feels', with the $5-banknote bird at existential risk.
- 📉 Hoiho are Nationally Endangered, two steps from Extinct in NZ's threat system, found nowhere else, and depend heavily on a small share of 'super-breeders'.
- 🧬 He notes mainland yellow-eyed penguins expanded only about 500 years ago after earlier yellow-eyed subspecies were wiped out by pre-European Maori hunting.
- ⚖️ If a 'healthy' harvest threshold were truly evidence-based, he argues, that would be science, not tikanga ownable as a traditional hunting right.
- 🧀 Mainland Cheese has backed the Trust since 1989 with over $2.5 million. Spaniard wonders whether French owner Lactalis knows the Trust's de facto end-purpose now includes tribal harvest.
- 💡 Takeaway: With both guardians Treaty-bent, hope may rest on the Wildlife Act review not greenlighting hunting. Tradition without downside is fine; this one makes victims of science, law, and the bird.
8. RODNEY HIDE: Greengrocer Czars
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🕳️ Hide's opener: everything government monopolises, it botches. Roads, schools, hospitals, welfare. Always another review. Always another failure.
- 🛍️ Then walk into a supermarket: clean, stocked, thousands of lines, fresh today. No ballot for bananas. Leave if price or service is wrong. Failure costs money.
- 🗳️ This election, he says, politicians who cannot fix a pothole want to run the greengrocery.
- 🪓 National will 'pursue' carving up Foodstuffs after a Commerce Commission think-piece. Labour will police wholesale and ban 'gouging'. The Greens want KiwiMart, a state supermarket.
- 📌 NZ First wants a break-up too. Only ACT mostly says stop strangling entry and let someone else try.
- 😤 Bullying a supermarket is easier than teaching a child, clearing a waiting list, or admitting state failure is not a PR problem.
- ✅ Groceries can be dear; land covenants and supplier squeeze deserve hard eyes. The answer is more rivals and fewer barriers, not the Ministry of Everything on the lettuce.
- 💡 Takeaway: The private shop works. The public monopoly still does not. Stick to the potholes.
9. You Bought Permission
EKO - EKO LOVES YOU
- 📣 EKO opens on Julian Assange posting on X for the first time in 8.5 years: two words, two million views in an hour, confirmed by WikiLeaks, then silence.
- 💻 The thread runs back to Aaron Swartz, charged at 24 for downloading academic articles from JSTOR via MIT's network, laptop hidden under a paper box in a wiring closet.
- ⚖️ First indictment: four felonies, up to 35 years and a $1 million fine. A later count rose to 13 even after JSTOR settled and said it did not want prosecution continued.
- 💔 Swartz was found dead at 26 on 11 January 2013. His family said the prosecution helped kill him. Copying had been turned into a life-consuming case.
- 📚 Much of the research was publicly funded, written and reviewed by scholars, then locked behind expensive gates while authors saw little of the money.
- 📂 In 2008 he had already copied twenty million pages of federal court records that were public in name but paywalled to read. The FBI visited and closed that case without charges.
- 🧾 The through-line EKO draws: Assange, Swartz, and a world where the crime is the copy and permission is what you buy.
- 💡 Takeaway: You already live in the world Assange's post returned to. The gatekeepers changed. The charge sheet stayed the same.
10. Has Antisemitism Peaked (for now)?
Roger Simon - American Refugees
- 🕯️ Writing on the eve of Yom Kippur, Simon says he senses the recent rage, fad or mania for antisemitism has peaked, and with it the habit of blaming Israel for everything.
- ⚠️ He keeps 'for now' in the title. Antisemitism is the world's oldest calumny and the canary in the coal mine; October 7 ended any soft reading of 'never again'.
- 📉 Still, his gut says its days as an internet obsession are numbered. Diehard podcasters will keep at it, but culture has sell-by dates.
- 🔁 He likens the fade to BLM slogans losing force, mask habits collapsing, and other cyclical online fixations burning out.
- 💰 One reason is economics: for a while there was money in endlessly attacking Jews. Less so now, though Qatar still has cash for nefarious causes.
- 🧠 Bigotry, like everything else in the feed, loses uniqueness when overplayed. The market for the mania narrows.
- 👀 He still wants vigilance. Peaked is not gone. Stay alert and oppose outbreaks as with all bigotry.
- 💡 Takeaway: Cautious optimism, not victory laps. The oldest hatred may be losing its viral premium, for now.
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