Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/187

This is edition 2026/187 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: What Luxon’s debate revealed about the next month

Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project

• 🎤 Luxon has two more head-to-heads with Hipkins before voting begins, on Three next Wednesday and on Stuff the following Tuesday. The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan called the TVNZ debate “maybe his best”, but added that “even when Luxon is at his best, he still loses.”
• 📺 TVNZ’s studio panel of undecided voters split 49% for Hipkins and 24% for Luxon, and most commentators gave the debate to Hipkins on points.
• 🛒 BusinessDesk’s Dileepa Fonseka said Luxon was at his best on education and law and order, but those are not the issues this election is being fought on. September’s Ipsos Issues Monitor had the cost of living a concern for 63% of voters and healthcare for 44%.
• 🗣️ Asked whether people are better off than three years ago, Luxon said they were “better off than they would have been if Chris had stayed in charge”. Former National minister Maurice Williamson called that bland, saying the Government should first admit most people feel worse off.
• 🏥 RNZ’s Farah Hancock recalled Luxon calling it “quite outrageous” in 2023 to deny a health crisis. This time Hipkins used the word six times, while Luxon said the system “is challenged”.
• ⛷️ The Post’s Henry Cooke said Luxon had a strong story on Investment Boost, but using Coronet Peak ski field to illustrate it “was not wise”. The Herald’s Audrey Young noted Investment Boost was funded by cancelling pay equity claims.
• 💸 Newsroom’s Marc Daalder counted Luxon using National’s “nine new taxes” line just once. His “where is the money coming from?” line seemed to move some women on the panel towards him, a senior TVNZ production executive told Newsroom’s Mark Jennings.
• 📑 But National still has not published a fiscal plan, and Coughlan suggests Luxon “may very well have lost on the issue of fiscal credibility.” Economist Brad Olsen made the same point.
• 🗳️ Vote Compass, surveying 6467 viewers, had Hipkins ahead 44% to 25%. Hipkins won 86% of Labour voters, while Luxon won only 66% of National supporters, 54% of ACT supporters and 34% of NZ First supporters.
• 💡 Takeaway: commentator Esther Robinson says the real question is whether National and Labour can win voters back from the minor parties, and she is not sure the debate did enough.

2. JOHN RAINE: THE INDOCTRINATION MUST STOP BUT LABOUR WOULD DOUBLE DOWN

John Raine - Brash & Mitchell

• 🏛️ More than three years ago Raine warned of New Zealand’s drift towards cultural authoritarianism and thought we might quickly pass peak woke. “Not so fast, some warned - they were right!”
• 🚶 He calls it an extension of Rudi Dutschke’s 1967 “long march through the institutions”, this time cultural re-engineering framed around race and identity rather than economics.
• 🎓 A 2026 Social Studies course in a University of Canterbury law bridging programme includes “Understanding White Supremacy”, “Racism in Aotearoa” and “Bodies and Society - Fatphobia”. Students are told that saying “Not all white people are racist” is another form of white supremacy.
• 🧾 One tutorial asks how fatphobia and anti-fatness intersect with racism. Raine says the UC course is just the tip of a massive iceberg.
• ⚖️ Auckland’s Waipapa Taumata Rau Stage 1 course is still mandatory for accredited programmes from Engineering and Nursing to Business and Law. Since Semester 1, 2025, Tikanga Māori content has been compulsory in all core LLB courses, and AUT law dean Khylee Quince says its redesigned curriculum aims for a “third law of Aotearoa”.
• 📝 Massey tells staff in their development plans that it is “a Tiriti-led University and all staff are expected to implement the principles in their work and practice.” Raine says universities, unlike wānanga, should foster secular, open enquiry.
• 🧠 He notes the New Zealand Psychological Society and College of Clinical Psychologists apologised to Māori for “structural racism and monoculturalism” in psychology. “No evidence was provided.”
• ✅ He wants Erica Stanford’s Coalition education reforms embedded and extended, and recommends Professor Dame Elizabeth Rata’s YouTube series on the history of New Zealand education.
• 🔄 Hipkins, he says, has said Labour would undo the reforms and revert to a more strictly Te Tiriti-based system, which Raine argues would lead inevitably to mediocrity.
• 💡 Takeaway: Raine says our democracy has a higher probability of remaining intact if the Coalition is re-elected in November.

3. The Israelis Who Never Left October 7 Behind

Polina Fradkin - The Free Press

• 🕯️ The return of the last hostages brought Israelis relief but not closure. Three years on, survivors and their families are still learning to live with what happened.
• 🪦 On 1 August 2026, Lihi Asraf found her brother Bar lying on the grave of his best friend, Liron Barda.
• 🎶 Liron was murdered in the Nova music festival massacre on 7 October 2023. She was buried in Elkana, in the West Bank, where she and Bar grew up in neighbouring towns.
• 💔 Lihi shouted his name, thinking he had fallen asleep at a place he often visited. He had shot himself in the heart. He was 30.
• 🗣️ “We couldn’t even cry,” she told Fradkin. “We were too shocked.”
• 🪖 She spoke on a break from guard duty on Israel’s border with the West Bank, where she serves in a light infantry defence unit.
• 🏠 “My family has fallen apart,” she said. The five Asraf siblings used to regularly return to their parents’ house on weekends. Now there is less reason to.
• 💡 Takeaway: “We went from being the happiest family in the world... and suddenly it’s extinguished. The house isn’t fun like before.”

4. There Once was a Civilisation

Olivia Pierson - OliviaPierson.org

• 🏛️ Pierson describes a civilisation brutally hollowed out by two world wars that still limped on, because one of its leaders, Winston Churchill, was “a freakishly beautiful giant among men”.
• 🇬🇧 Britain, she writes, kept saying the true thing while others made excuses, until they had to care or die. Churchill held the moral line like Atlas.
• ✝️ “This is not about Churchill.” It is about the Christian civilisation he protected, worked over for 2000 years, whose everyday freedoms came to be taken for granted.
• ⚠️ In 2026, she argues, Islamic immigration is quite literally the biggest threat to that way of life. Not because Muslims are strong, but because enough are aggressive and cunning, with attitudes to women, girls, Jews and ‘infidels’ she calls beyond despicable.
• 🗡️ Jihad, she writes, is a central tenet of Islam, not a critic’s nickname, and treating that obsessive interest in the West as an accident was never honest.
• 🇳🇿 New Zealand paid heavily in both world wars, then assumed the result was guaranteed in perpetuity.
• 😷 She blames “a mentally ill liberal toxic compassion” on the left for opening the country to be looted and calling the looting ‘tolerance’.
• 🛡️ Churchill’s people did not get to feel tolerant, polite or comfortable while holding the line against totalitarian Germany and fascist Italy. “Neither do we.”
• 💡 Takeaway: the inheritance will not police itself, and what was rescued last century needs rescuing again “because the threat is well inside the gates.”

5. The forensic pathologist who volunteered in Israel after October 7

Michael Dickson - Special Briefing from Israel

• 🩺 Michael Dickson interviews Dr Carl Wigren, a forensic pathologist who worked in an Israeli morgue in the aftermath of the 7 October massacre.
• 🚫 Wigren is not Jewish or Israeli, calls himself a “lefty progressive”, and had held ill feelings towards Israel. When the news broke he told his wife there was “no way” he was going on their planned trip.
• 📧 About a week later his medical examiners’ listserv called for forensic pathologists. Chen Kugel, director of the Abu Kabir forensic institute in Tel Aviv, interviewed about 20 Americans and chose him.
• ✈️ On the 15-hour flight he read the 1988 Hamas charter, which he says essentially set the goal of eliminating Jews, not only in Israel but worldwide.
• ⚰️ The morgue took about 30 victims each morning, to give Israeli staff a break after seven days around the clock. In some 3,500 autopsies since 2005 he had never seen such “premeditated carnage”.
• 🦶 One body bag held a burned foot later identified as Ruth Peretz’s, a young woman with cerebral palsy who used a wheelchair and went to music festivals with her father.
• 🚀 At his hotel he sheltered from rocket attacks from Gaza, yet saw The New York Times portraying the attackers as victims. Back home a neighbour asked, “But what about the poor Gazans?”
• 📺 A planned CNN interview at LAX fell through, which he thinks happened because his account no longer fitted the narrative.
• 💡 Takeaway: “things aren’t always the way you think they are,” Wigren says. Be a very careful consumer of information and, if you can, see it on the ground.

6. GRAHAM ADAMS: Is criticism of Māori culture permitted at Massey Uni?

Graham Adams - Brash & Mitchell

• 🎓 A member of the public has filed a formal complaint against Massey University’s Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, testing whether staff may publicly criticise aspects of Māori culture.
• 📨 The 3100-word letter to the Vice-Chancellor targets five columns he co-wrote three years ago on university funding, decolonisation and mātauranga Māori, published on the Bassett, Brash and Hide website.
• 📄 The columns stated the opinions were the writers’ own, not their universities’. The complainant acknowledged the disclaimer but dismissed it, and Massey has opened a formal investigation.
• 🏛️ Adams says Massey invited this by declaring itself “Tiriti-led”, and its watered-down Academic Freedom Policy lets her invoke “mana-enhancing civility”.
• 👩‍🎓 The complainant, who is Māori, says her daughter has Massey on her shortlist for Māori Studies but she no longer feels confident about her enrolling. Adams notes the daughter would be unlikely ever to meet a theoretical chemistry and physics professor.
• 🌿 Maramataka, rongoā and spiritual healing are worth studying as anthropological phenomena, he argues, but not taught uncritically, any more than biblical creation as just another “knowledge system”.
• 🗣️ Te reo has been taught at New Zealand universities since 1929, but Adams says reviving it is not a university’s job. Nobody expects universities to promote sign language, also an official language.
• 📜 He calls colonisation’s benefits to Māori indisputable, and notes the Tohunga Suppression Act was driven by Māori politicians including Sir James Carroll, with all four Māori electorate MPs, Apirana Ngata among them, voting for it.
• 🎙️ Schwerdtfeger told Sean Plunket on The Platform he is “a little bit of a voice for all the academics who don’t dare to speak out”, and is positive about Massey’s new Vice-Chancellor.
• 💡 Takeaway: a ruling is expected by the end of the month. Adams says it should be deeply embarrassing for Massey to convene a panel at all.

7. RODNEY HIDE: Raine showed us the lecture room. Here's the staffroom.

Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell

• 🎓 Hide says John Raine laid bare what our universities teach students. The University of Auckland’s new gender equity plan shows the same machinery aimed at staff: hiring, promotion and annual reviews.
• 📑 He points to Raine’s examples: UC’s “Understanding White Supremacy” and “Fatphobia” topics, Auckland’s mandatory Stage 1 course, and Massey telling staff to implement Te Tiriti principles in their work.
• 📘 Auckland’s Gender Equity Strategy and Plan 2026-2029 runs to 15 pages. Its vision: “A university where gender equity is real, visible, and sustained.” Try measuring that, he says.
• ✔️ There are 29 deliverables. Number 26 is that the plan itself is published. “The plan delivers itself. Tick.”
• ⏳ Fifteen deliverables do not start until November 2027, and measures “will be established as part of the development of each initiative”.
• 🧑‍💼 Job ads will show “a visible commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion”, decision makers get implicit bias and DEI literacy programmes, and staff will be offered “suggested DEI-related goals” for annual reviews.
• 💰 The problem being fixed? The university’s own pay gap page says “There is no evidence of unequal pay within academic role categories.”
• 🔍 An OIA response said there is no specific EDI budget. Its one figure, $436,350 this year for the Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity’s office, leaves out the HR diversity team, equity posts in eight faculties and institutes, and committees.
• 💡 Takeaway: the true cost, Hide says, is the loss of rigour and critical thinking. “Read the list and weep for what was once our higher education system.”

8. En garde! China and AI

Fearghus Keogh - The Spectator Australia

• 🤠 Keogh opens with Butch Cassidy politely discussing fight rules with Harvey Logan, then kicking him in the groin. The lesson: know when to talk and when to fight.
• 🤖 That, he says, is roughly where the US stands with China on advanced AI. Both are racing towards something closer to superintelligence, and both talk the conciliatory language of limitation in public.
• 🐉 In Beowulf, Grendel will not parley. China is not Grendel: in July 2026 Beijing hosted the founding of the World AI Cooperation Organisation in Shanghai, drawing in 29 countries.
• 🌐 The UN has held its Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and the US State Department has convened successive Pax Silica Summits.
• 🤨 Washington’s suspicion is that China’s preferred “governance” would constrain American progress while Chinese programmes carry on. “Rules for thee, but not for me.”
• ☢️ Arms control offers limited comfort. SALT rested on rough parity and mutual destruction, but AI may be “winner takes considerably more”, algorithms cannot be counted like silos, and the technology is dual use.
• 🤺 Fencing is the better analogy: rivals cooperate just enough to keep competing. Around 1900 the French and Italian schools had to accept shared rules for the Olympic sport.
• 🇦🇺 Australia’s interest is direct, he says, given Chinese power in its region, the US alliance, its research base and critical minerals. Even limited rules leave middle powers more room to manoeuvre.
• 💡 Takeaway: the time for paralysis through analysis has passed. Can Washington and Beijing find a language to negotiate “before one side decides that the only remaining option is a kick to the groin”?

9. London’s 7 October celebrations exposed the patheticness of the Gaza cult

Hugo Timms - spiked

• 🚶 On Wednesday around 100 ‘anti-Zionist’ students from London’s top universities gathered at King’s College London on the Strand, then marched through central London surrounded by police.
• 👮 Police had asked them on four separate occasions to pick another date. They insisted on 7 October, the third anniversary of Hamas’s murder of 1,200 mostly Jewish people.
• 📢 They promised to “smash the Zionist settler state” and bellowed “Resistance is glorious”.
• 🛑 At Russell Square they met counter-protesters, most of them British Jews. Within 20 minutes the marchers had cleared off, before even reaching University College London.
• 🗣️ There was no physical violence. An Israeli with his own megaphone shouted, “Come here and debate an Arab Israeli, you cowards!” Nobody took him up on it.
• 🎤 Marchers refused to speak to journalists, one dismissing spiked as ‘right wing’, and raised umbrellas and banners as though terrified of being photographed.
• 🤷 The real humiliation, Timms says, was indifference: no solidarity from Londoners, and hundreds of fellow students simply brushed past on their way to class.
• 📅 A Palestine Solidarity Campaign march is set for London on Saturday and is expected to draw large crowds.
• 💡 Takeaway: stand up to a bully and you see the coward. Patience, Timms says, is wearing thin with these “sad and sinister cry-bullies”.

10. Hamas: Triumph of the intellectuals

Rebecca Weisser - The Spectator Australia

• 📹 On 7 October 2023, Weisser writes, the world saw in a real-time livestream what the absence of a secure Jewish state means.
• 🗺️ Hamas’s war became a seven-front war: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the West Bank and Iran itself.
• 🕊️ A ceasefire began on 10 October 2025 and the last 20 living hostages were freed three days later. Yet Hamas still controls roughly a third of Gaza, Hezbollah is still armed and the Houthis still attack Saudi oil exports.
• 🧠 Hamas’s triumph, she argues, is persuading leftist intellectuals to erase its conduct, so Israel’s attempt to eliminate it is branded genocide.
• 📢 Green Left advertised Australian rallies marking “three years of genocide and resistance”, starting the clock on the day of the massacre itself.
• 🔍 For these intellectuals, genocide was the premise, not the conclusion. Warnings, evacuation corridors, phone calls, aid and aborted strikes simply disappeared from the narrative.
• ⚖️ Genocide requires specific intent to destroy a group. Israel warned and evacuated civilians and investigated its own soldiers, while Hamas’s Ghazi Hamad promised 7 October would be repeated until Israel was eliminated.
• 📚 Citing Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, she traces a transmission belt from activist academia through NGOs and the UN into the newsroom.
• 💡 Takeaway: Hamas has not destroyed Israel, but persuading the West that Jewish determination not to be destroyed is a crime goes a long way towards its goal.

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