This is edition 2026/194 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. JOHN RAINE: The Left is Up for Co-Governance. Could this Mean a Future Ethnocracy?
John Raine - Brash & Mitchell
- 🧭 Raine says most New Zealanders want one country with equal rights under the law, while respecting the cultures of the more than 200 ethnicities counted in the 2023 census.
- ⚖️ He has the left backing co-governance down the track, and ACT, and perhaps NZ First, wanting one law for all. ACT gets called racist when it is “simply against discriminatory race-based rights under the law.”
- 🔬 His example from science funding: to score a 7/7 “excellent” in MBIE’s Transitional Research Fund, researchers need “outstanding recognition” of Māori contributions, including Mātauranga Māori, or a good explanation of why it isn’t relevant.
- 📜 Te Pāti Māori’s proposed Te Tiriti Commission could investigate Crown decisions, issue orders halting executive decisions, and make the Crown go to the High Court if it disagrees.
- 🏛️ Raine says that would hand de facto ultimate governing authority “to Māori alone”, and in practice to “a group of powerful iwi”, not Māori at large.
- 🌏 Go down that road, he warns, and we start to look like Malaysia and Sri Lanka, where the privileged group gets the university places, the public service jobs and the economic advantage.
- 🗳️ He says the whole issue has been “buried by the mainstream media”, and National has been unwilling to grapple with it openly.
- 💡 Takeaway: Raine is no fan of National’s “unkept 2023 election promises”, but he still reckons our democracy has a better chance of surviving intact if the coalition goes back in.
2. RODNEY HIDE: Raw data that isn't raw. Australia catches up with what we were told to ignore
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🌡️ The Australian’s Graham Lloyd reported a forensic audit that found chunks of the Bureau of Meteorology’s “raw” temperature data copied from one period into another. Sydney Observatory’s August 1867 minimums match August 1907.
- 🔎 The auditors, Tom Berger and Geoffrey Sherrington, claim hundreds of red flags. The Bureau admits errors and will fix them, but won’t commit to a full review. Hide is careful: “Keep the two apart.”
- 🇳🇿 In 2009 the Climate Conversation Group and the NZ Climate Science Coalition plotted NIWA’s own unadjusted data for its seven-station series. NIWA’s graph showed 0.92C of warming a century. The unadjusted trend came out at 0.06C.
- 🚪 At a closed MP briefing that December, Nick Smith ordered Hide’s adviser, Dr Vincent Gray, out of the room. NIWA’s people stayed, and agreed the unadjusted trend was basically flat.
- 💾 The adjustments traced back to Jim Salinger’s 1981 PhD thesis, and Wayne Mapp told Parliament the computer records behind it were no longer available. Hide: “what scientist loses the records for the most important graph in his country’s climate debate?”
- 📈 NIWA’s rebuilt 2010 series came out at 0.91C, peer reviewed by Australia’s Bureau. A 2011 audit put it at 0.34C and a 2014 reanalysis at 0.28C, which NIWA scientists called “substantially too low”.
- ⚖️ The Coalition’s trust lost in court in 2012 and was ordered to pay $89,238.90 in costs, though Justice Venning said the science was “not suitable for determination by a Court”.
- 💡 Takeaway: “Show your working.” That was all anyone asked of NIWA, and for it they got called deniers. Now it is on the front page in Australia and “nobody is pretending the question is illegitimate.”
3. Coalitions of Chaos: do they represent the new New Zealand?
Grant Duncan - Politics Happens
- 🗳️ Duncan expects a good election for the smaller parties. Under Clark and Key the big party won 49 to 60 seats. This time it could be as low as 34, “or 37 on a good day”.
- 📊 In 2023 a Reid poll had 59.1% calling a National, ACT and NZ First government “chaotic” and 26.4% “stable”. Duncan says both were right: it lasted the term, but Peters and Seymour often looked like they were calling the shots.
- 🐕 “Tail wags dog” became the go-to line, and nobody is using the coalition of chaos jibe this time because both big parties have their own agents of chaos.
- 🏍️ Hipkins’ likely partners in Te Pāti Māori and the Greens posed for photos with a gang, “making themselves look unfit for office.” Hipkins has kept them out of law and order portfolios, which Duncan says only raises the question of which ones they are fit for.
- 🛒 The Greens want to buy 120 supermarkets and want Chlöe Swarbrick as finance minister. “A green tail is already trying to wag the red dog.”
- 🤝 Kieran McAnulty wants a deal with just the Greens and Opportunity, without TPM, but Duncan says Hipkins couldn’t say no to everything the Greens ask for, and Labour might barely hold a majority around its own cabinet table.
- 🧩 He says fractious coalitions are what a more polarised country votes for, and no partner wants the blame for a messy collapse and a snap election.
- 💡 Takeaway: “Coalitions of chaos represent the new New Zealand. We may as well get used to it.” Fair enough, but voters still pick which chaos. One lot lasted a full term. The other has spent the campaign explaining photos at a gang pad.
4. Scaremongering unions have a bad case of amnesia
Ani O’Brien - Thought Crimes
- 🏥 O’Brien accepts the health system is struggling. What she rejects is the story that it suddenly fell apart under this government through underfunding and understaffing, “because that just isn’t true.”
- 👶 Starship’s Ward 27B ran below its staffing target on 791 shifts in 2023, under Labour, on figures NZNO itself publicised. This year it hit 85% in a bad August, then fell to 73% in September and 33% in early October.
- 📉 NZNO’s press release left out the recovery after August. RNZ ran the same data, then updated its graph once the framing was pointed out.
- 🩺 An Infometrics report commissioned by NZNO put the average daily nursing shortfall at 631 FTEs per shift in 2022, 684 in 2023 and 587 in the first 11 months of 2024.
- 🎯 From April to June 2026, all five health targets improved on a year earlier. Electives inside four months rose from 63.9% to 72.6%, and the six-hour ED target from 73.9% to 76.3%, after falling from 89.5% to 71.1% under Labour.
- 💰 Health funding for 2026/27 is $33.031 billion, up 8.4% on $30.476 billion. Labour’s first budget had $18.2 billion and its last $26.5 billion, and every budget since has gone up again.
- 🔢 The “only 54 new nurses” line compares 29,404 FTEs in March 2024 with 29,458 in March 2026, a window picked to leave out the hiring surge just before March 2024.
- 🗂️ She also reminds us NZNO demanded Andrew Little admit a health crisis in 2022, and Gisborne nurses went on strike under Ayesha Verrall in 2023.
- 💡 Takeaway: “inadequate performance and improving performance are not mutually exclusive.” The unions just never call for Labour to be voted out. A part two on their “masterclass in misinformation” is coming.
5. Two Solicitors-General, Two Constitutional Visions.
David Harvey - A Halfling’s View
- ⚖️ Retired Solicitor-General Una Jagose KC spoke at a Law Association breakfast in July. Her successor, Anna Adams KC, gave a formal paper on 3 September called “Black Letter Law: The Orthodox Methodology of the Crown”.
- 🤝 Both back parliamentary supremacy, the separation of powers and judicial independence. Neither argues for judges ruling over Parliament.
- 📏 They part ways on the rule of law. Jagose takes the “thick” view that folds in rights and substantive justice. Adams sticks to the “thin” view: clear, stable, predictable law, applied equally.
- 🏛️ Jagose cites Sir Michael Cullen’s view that Parliament’s authority is “maintained” and “moderated” by constitutional norms, and asked whether Parliament could legitimately define the Treaty without Māori taking part.
- 🗣️ She sees the courts and Parliament in a healthy dialogue. Harvey points out it was Parliament that gave the courts the power to make declarations of inconsistency in the first place.
- 🌿 Tikanga is the sharpest split. Jagose treats the Ellis case as the law evolving. Adams prefers the older Loasby approach and rejects tikanga as a general source of law for every question of interpretation.
- 😴 Jagose’s breakfast talk was full of warnings about “sleepwalking” and fragile constitutional fabric. Adams’ paper was formal, systematic and heavily footnoted.
- 💡 Takeaway: two people, one job, two very different roads for public law. Harvey asks whether we take the one “more attractive to judges, lawyers and politicians” or the one that serves the public. Adams’ road leaves the big calls with people we can vote out.
6. The Teaching Council Disgrace
Peter Williams - Peter’s Substack
- 🏫 After Katherine Anderson KC’s report on the Timothy Fisher case, new Teaching Council chair Patrick Walsh went on Newstalk ZB, and Mike Hosking opened by noting Walsh “only arrived in July this year”.
- 🔍 Williams says it takes little digging to find Walsh, a former Secondary Principals Association president, was an elected Council member from 2019, in the years the Council knew about Fisher and did nothing.
- 🎙️ Asked if it could never happen again, Walsh paused, then said: “I couldn’t, hand on heart, say that.”
- 📜 The back story: registration arrived with Tomorrow’s Schools in 1989. Mallard’s 2002 Teachers Council had 7 of 11 members elected, National made all 9 appointed in 2015, and Hipkins brought elections back in 2018, giving the unions a 7 to 6 majority.
- 👥 Ripeka Lessels, now NZEI president, was deputy chair from 2022, and Erica Stanford says she’s “not sure” Lessels’ union role is tenable any more.
- 💸 CEO Lesley Hoskin resigned this year after her husband’s company, Clemenger, was found to have won $1.7 million in consultancy contracts.
- 🙈 Williams doesn’t spare Stanford either. Her earlier chair, David Ferguson, had $750,000 in government funding to set up a private teacher training outfit. “Has she never heard of a concept called conflict of interest?”
- 💡 Takeaway: Williams says “the country’s largest radio audience should have known” Walsh’s history. Stanford now picks the members herself, and if Hipkins wins, the PPTA and NZEI will want the keys back.
7. RODNEY HIDE: I asked AI to find David Seymour's worldview
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🤖 The latest in Hide’s series. He told AI to read Seymour’s maiden speech, speeches, bills and votes, quote him exactly, and keep what he said apart from what it thinks it means.
- 💰 The 2014 maiden speech opens with a test: “Is it possible for anybody to create new wealth?” Seymour says yes, and calls his opponents “the zero-sum game brigade”.
- 📚 The AI finds Hayek all through it, plus Popper, Bastiat and Mencken, and notes Seymour entered a Hayek essay contest in 2008.
- 🏛️ He isn’t anti-state. He gave government three jobs: “protector, regulator, and insurer.”
- ⚖️ Equal citizenship is the second pillar, from the maiden speech to the Treaty Principles Bill, which lost its second reading 11 to 112 on 10 April 2025.
- ✅ On choice he carried the End of Life Choice Act, backed by 65.1% at the 2020 referendum, and was the only MP to vote against the 2019 semi-automatic gun ban.
- 💉 The AI’s hardest tension is Covid. In October 2021 ACT proposed letting businesses require vaccine certificates, protected from claims of “privacy or discrimination”, though Seymour opposed government mandates as “blunt” and called the final law a “constitutional outrage”.
- 🧾 The AI’s verdict: “a Hayekian classical liberal who governs as a pragmatist.”
- 💡 Takeaway: Hide thinks the AI is too hard on the deal-making and not hard enough on the jab. Fear is “a well used tactic of tyrants”, and he’d hoped Seymour had Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety “ringing in his head”.
8. RICHARD PREBBLE: Those about to be defeated
Richard Prebble - Brash & Mitchell
- 🏛️ The Association of Former Members of Parliament says time served has dropped under MMP, and for list MPs it is “about four years”.
- 📉 The Association lost $2,806 this year, but its treasurer expects things to pick up “as more MPs leave Parliament following the 2026 General Election.”
- 💼 Many former MPs struggle to find work. Prebble notes there are few other jobs that need no qualifications or experience and pay $181,200 plus perks.
- 🚕 Plenty never go home and settle in Wellington instead. One used to drive Prebble to the airport in his taxi.
- 🇺🇸 Robert Caro tells how Lyndon Johnson was horrified to find a former congressman running a lift in the Capitol.
- 🚆 His advice to those “about to be unemployed in 22 days”: “Take a job. Any job.” Sacked on a Saturday, he took a pitch to Vietnam Rail on the Sunday and was in Hanoi by Thursday.
- 💡 Takeaway: his sympathy is for the electorate agents and staffers, because “Having worked for a defeated MP is not the best CV.” List MPs on the cusp might want to dust theirs off now.
9. How I’d Build Elon’s Amazon
EKO - EKO LOVES YOU
- 🤖 Amazon turned away an AI bot shopping for its owner, telling it access by an “unauthorized AI agent” breaks its Conditions of Use.
- 🛒 EKO says Amazon really sells the shelf. Sellers pay for eye level, a bot walks straight past it, and Amazon made $68.6 billion from advertising in 2025.
- 📦 UPS said its average domestic package in 2025 earned $13.21 and cost $12.14 to deliver, about $8 of it people and around 60 cents fuel. “Physics charges cents. People charge dollars.”
- ⚖️ In August the Ninth Circuit ruled in Amazon’s case against Perplexity that the user, not the bot, was accessing Amazon. EKO compares it to the 1968 Carterfone ruling against AT&T.
- ✈️ Don’t buy FedEx for $69 billion, he says. It buys 700 planes for a problem that’s mostly on the ground, and FedEx and UPS are already walking away from Amazon’s volume.
- 🚀 His home for a real Amazon rival is SpaceX, which now holds xAI and X, plus Tesla’s fleet: the customers, the shopping bots, the wallets and “the cars at the door”.
- 🌙 The plan: own the customer, rent the trucks, sell proof of origin, and put idle Robotaxis on a night shift, for under $5 a box against UPS’s $12.14.
- 💡 Takeaway: Amazon chose to protect the shelf, and “Kodak and Blockbuster made the same choice”. Worth a read for anyone who still thinks the shop of the future has aisles.
10. Every Bad Idea Australia Ever Had About the Internet, Now in One Bill
Dan Frieth - Reclaim The Net
- 📜 Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 went into Parliament last Thursday. Minister Anika Wells says “It moves the safety net upstream” to the people who design the product.
- 💸 It runs to 90 pages, with civil penalties of up to $109.2 million for failing the duty.
- 🔇 Reclaim The Net says the words “encryption”, “freedom of expression” and “free speech” appear nowhere in it, and section 26A(3) says the cost of safety measures “must not be taken into account.”
- 🇬🇧 Even the UK’s Online Safety Act makes platforms weigh freedom of expression. Australia’s has no such duty, so a platform gets fined for removing too little but never for removing too much.
- 🚪 Wells says the minister’s power to define new harms is gone, but section 25E(1)(f) still catches “any other material or conduct” that may cause serious harm to children.
- 🕵️ eSafety and approved researchers get to run fake “sock puppet” accounts, even where that breaks a platform’s own terms of service.
- 🤐 Anyone summoned by eSafety is examined in private, can’t rely on the right against self-incrimination, and faces 12 months in jail for refusing to answer.
- 🗣️ Nationals leader Matt Canavan: “No politician should get to decide for themselves what lawful speech is harmful”.
- 💡 Takeaway: Wells says “We are not controlling free speech.” The bill sets up a regulator that writes its own rules, in secret, with the police. Keep an eye on it, because Wellington has a habit of copying Canberra.
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