This is edition 2026/120 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. Don’t Underestimate NZ First and Michael Laws
Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project
- 🗳️ NZ First is having its best polling performance in decades and could materially shape the election and next government.
- 📉 Edwards warns against sneering at populists: dismissal and disdain from the political bubble tends to make populism stronger, not weaker.
- 🎙️ Michael Laws rejoined NZ First on Friday, standing in Waitaki and likely getting a winnable list spot; he intends to keep his show on The Platform.
- 📰 Andrea Vance’s Sunday Star Times column called NZ First’s recent recruits a “doomscroll through the darkest, most aggrieved corners of the internet” and described Laws as a man who “spent almost his entire adult life being paid by your rates or your taxes.”
- 🗣️ Peters responded by calling Vance part of a “Wellington Bluesky bubble” of “lanyard-wearing woke lefty losers” and boasted NZ First was “packing the halls with ordinary Kiwis.”
- 📊 The Herald editorial argues NZ First is doing well because of its moderate nature and that Laws risks that with his polarising history.
- 🎙️ Heather du Plessis-Allan wrote two columns condemning the Laws move, calling him “fringe” and “a reheat from 1996.”
- ⚠️ Edwards concedes much criticism of Laws is justified, but says the tone of the coverage is itself campaign material for Peters.
- 🌍 The international context: One Nation in Australia and Reform in Britain have moved from fringe to serious forces by channeling anti-establishment sentiment.
- 🎯 Takeaway: whether you like them or not, NZ First and Laws should be analysed seriously, not just mocked, if opponents want to understand their appeal.
2. Open Letter to Rural Women New Zealand
Emmy Maxwell — A B’Old Woman
- ✍️ Rural woman, farmer and mother Emmy Maxwell writes an open letter to Rural Women NZ over its opposition to the bill defining “woman” and “man” in legislation.
- 📣 Maxwell says she was never consulted, saw no member survey, no online discussion, and no invitation for feedback before RWNZ lodged its submission.
- 📄 RWNZ’s submission was only placed on its website after submissions had effectively closed.
- ⚖️ She argues the submission reaches broad conclusions without evidence and largely ignores sex-based rights, privacy, safety, fairness in sport, single-sex spaces, and healthcare.
- 👩🌾 “A woman is an adult human female. These definitions have never been controversial until recent years, yet they form the foundation of our lives and of many laws that exist to protect women and girls.”
- 🗣️ She asks who RWNZ represents — its members or a small board that did not ask rural women first.
- 📬 RWNZ CEO Sandra Kirby replied, defending the board’s judgement and noting members hold a range of views.
- 🌾 Commenters, including other rural women, expressed anger that an organisation claiming to represent them took a position without consultation.
- ⚠️ The dispute highlights a split between grassroots rural women and a national body on a core sex-based-rights question.
- 🎯 Takeaway: Maxwell frames RWNZ’s submission as top-down activism dressed up as membership representation.
3. Five Years On, the Tide Turns Against Ideological Censors
Graham Adams — Brash & Mitchell
- 📜 Five years ago, seven Auckland University professors wrote the Listener letter “In Defence of Science,” arguing mātauranga Māori is valuable but “falls far short of what we can define as science itself.”
- 🔥 The letter sparked a firestorm: an open letter backed by over 2,000 academics, public criticism from Siouxsie Wiles, and a Royal Society disciplinary investigation into the professors.
- ⚖️ Now the editors of the Journal of the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists have retracted a 2025 article by Dr Arna Mitchell after arguing psychology should rest on a scientific base, not “Māori ways of knowing.”
- 🗣️ This time the censors are taking the flak: Mike Yardley called the retraction “the most outrageous, belated form of censorship”; Richard Dawkins told his 2.8 million followers it was “utterly contemptible.”
- 📉 The 2,000 academics who backed mātauranga Māori as equivalent to science in 2021 have “fallen silent.”
- 🏛️ The NZCCP told Mitchell the article could “perpetuate harm to Māori” and did not reflect the College’s commitment to Te Tiriti, while claiming to support “open and rigorous dialogue.”
- 📜 ACT has picked up the issue, announcing a policy to protect free speech in every profession and require regulators to remain neutral on ideology.
- 🩺 Health Minister Simeon Brown has restructured the Nursing Council and declined to reappoint Medical Council leaders over alleged ideological distraction.
- ⚰️ Three of the original “Listener 7” — Robert Nola, Michael Corballis and John Werry — have since died, but Adams says their stand continues to reverberate.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the political weather has shifted; the same institutions that pilloried the Listener letter in 2021 are now being criticised for censorship themselves.
4. Arguments For and Against RBNZ Raising the OCR
Jenny Ruth — Just the Business
- 🏦 Economists are unusually divided ahead of the Reserve Bank’s next monetary policy decision.
- 📈 BNZ’s Stephen Toplis and ANZ’s Sharon Zollner want the OCR hiked to 2.5%; Westpac’s Kelly Eckhold, ASB’s Mark Smith and Kiwibank’s Jarrod Kerr want it held at 2.25%.
- 📉 At the last meeting in May the MPC was split and Governor Anna Breman used her casting vote to hold.
- 🛢️ Brent crude has fallen from above US$100 to a little above US$70, easing oil-driven inflation fears.
- 💳 Paymark data showed card spending down 0.5% in June 2026 on a year ago, with hospitality hit hardest.
- 📉 Westpac-McDermott Miller employment confidence fell 12.5 points to 83.1, the lowest since the survey began in September 2004.
- ⚖️ Zollner wants a “neutral-to-dovish hike” to get the OCR back toward neutral; Toplis warns stimulatory policy could add to inflation.
- 🗳️ Zollner also questions whether the market would be comfortable hiking the OCR immediately before the November 7 election.
- 🚗 New car registrations were up 19% in the June quarter, with hybrids up 170% and EVs up 162%, suggesting consumers are moving away from oil dependency.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the OCR call is genuinely close, with low growth and high unemployment arguing for a pause, while inflation jitters and a weak NZ dollar argue for a hike.
5. How Much Does Money Count in an Election?
Grant Duncan — Politics Happens
- 💰 Large donations are flowing ahead of the November election, and the unequal distribution reflects underlying social inequality, Duncan argues.
- 📊 In 2026 declared donations so far, the three coalition parties took about three quarters of donations of $20,000 or more.
- 🦁 ACT received 40% of those large donations — over $1.5 million — despite winning only 8.6% of the party vote in 2023.
- 📈 2025 total declared party donations:
- National: $6,275,234.46
- ACT: $2,445,255.79
- Labour: $2,403,241.93
- Green: $1,848,678.65
- NZ First: $1,360,272.56
- TOP: $179,401.24
- TPM: $141,986.50
- 🏗️ GMP Environmental Ltd, active in oil, mining and engineering, gave $100,000 to each coalition party.
- 🐎 Sir Peter Vela gave $150,000 to NZ First.
- ⚠️ Duncan notes money alone does not buy success: Gareth Morgan, Colin Craig and Kim Dotcom blew millions without winning a seat.
- 🎯 Takeaway: donations reveal who has political access, but dollars-per-vote does not translate cleanly into electoral success.
6. What The Opportunity Party Is Attempting Is Nearly Impossible. Yet…
Natalia Albert — Less Certain
- 🗳️ Natalia Albert, who stood for TOP in Wellington Central in 2023 and won 5.5% of the electorate party vote, says the real story is how hard it is for any new party to break through MMP.
- 📉 TOP got 2.22% nationally in 2023; under Qiulae Wong it is now polling higher than ever.
- 💸 Gareth Morgan self-funded TOP with an estimated $2–4 million in 2017, got 2.4%, then resigned and pulled his funding, nearly killing the party.
- 📉 In 2020 TOP hit 1.5%, its worst result; 2023 recovered only to 2.22%.
- 🔄 Albert compares TOP and the Conservatives as two versions of the same story: a party built around one wealthy, combative founder can spike fast, then crash.
- ✅ The current model under Wong and general manager Iain Lees-Galloway deliberately avoids a single mega-funder.
- 📈 She points to ACT’s decade-long rebuild under David Seymour from near-death to multi-election force as the model TOP needs.
- 📺 Albert acknowledges Ani O’Brien’s critique that TOP gets favourable coverage compared with the New Conservatives, but argues the comparison flattens two different eras.
- ⚠️ Across seven MMP elections, minor parties that survived averaged around 7.7% for the Greens and 7.6% for NZ First; TOP’s current polling sits around or below that.
- 🎯 Takeaway: TOP’s momentum matters, but the structural barriers for small parties remain brutal — media fairness is a secondary question.
7. Eco-Hysteria Is the Real Threat to Humankind
Brendan O’Neill — spiked
- 🌡️ O’Neill argues the heatwave is rough, but the elites’ apocalyptic handwringing over it is far worse.
- 📰 He mocks media framings such as “hell on Earth,” “global boiling,” and a “hound from hell” dragging the heat of the Underworld into the world.
- ❄️ The latest panic is “heat-stress denialism,” with George Monbiot attacking the “billionaire press” for not taking the heatwave seriously enough.
- 🏥 O’Neill highlights a Wall Street Journal report on European hospitals where the ill and elderly “are forced to endure heatwaves” because air conditioning is treated as an energy-hungry enemy of the climate fight.
- 📉 Bjørn Lomborg’s data: climate-related disaster deaths fell from roughly 500,000 per year in the 1920s to 14,000 in 2020 — a 96% decline in the era of industry.
- 🛠️ O’Neill says the technologies that protect people from weather — air-con, modern housing, medicine — are precisely what eco-ideologues want to roll back.
- 🧠 He frames eco-alarmism as “medieval lunacy” that sees all weather as punishment from Gaia for human sin.
- 🗣️ The core claim: “The elite panic about modernity is far deadlier than modernity.”
- ⚠️ He concedes heatwaves cause excess deaths, but blames the anti-AC preaching classes more than emissions.
- 🎯 Takeaway: O’Neill treats the heatwave as real discomfort but the cultural response as a misanthropic attack on the technologies that keep people alive.
8. White Guilt Is Vanity Posing as Virtue
Patrick West — spiked
- 🎤 Katharine Birbalsingh’s speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London argued that some young people are “so consumed by white guilt that they will do crazy, irrational and inhumane things rather than risk being seen as racist.”
- 🇬🇾 West, reviewing the speech, says it was met with adulation because it identified the real villains of recent political discord: affluent white liberal elites, not ethnic minorities or immigrants.
- 📚 The article traces the vilification of white men from Michael Moore’s 2001 book Stupid White Men to today’s hyper-liberalism.
- 🎭 West argues ostentatious white guilt is “showy self-regard,” a way for wealthy liberals to signal moral superiority over the white working class and Daily Mail readers.
- ⚠️ He says this guilt politics fosters resentment among both ethnic minorities (encouraging grievance) and the white majority (who feel traduced for their “wicked whiteness”).
- 🇳🇿 Birbalsingh is New Zealand-born, mixed-race, with an Indo-Guyanese father and Jamaican mother; West notes the irony that it took someone with her background to state this “terrible truth.”
- 🇪🇺 The piece also notes Europe’s lurch to the right: AfD could take its first state government in Germany this year, and National Rally may win the French presidency in 2027.
- 🗣️ Remainers are accused of ignoring both Europe’s economic woes and its political shift.
- ⚠️ West’s argument is that liberal white guilt has poisoned race relations while claiming to heal them.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the article frames anti-racist performative guilt as a class signal that deepens, rather than bridges, social divisions.
9. Will There Be Justice for Henry Nowak?
David Shipley — The Spectator Australia
- ⚖️ Britain’s Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating two officers who attended the scene of Henry Nowak’s death; disciplinary proceedings are now possible.
- 🎥 New video and transcript show Vickrum Digwa being politely questioned while Nowak lay dying nearby, handcuffed behind his back.
- 🗣️ When Nowak said he had been stabbed, an officer replied, “I don’t think you have mate.”
- ⏱️ It took police eight minutes from arriving to search for and discover Nowak’s stab wound, despite him telling them he had been stabbed and losing consciousness.
- 🔗 Digwa was not handcuffed even when arrested on suspicion of attempted murder; Nowak was cuffed while dying.
- 📜 The IOPC is also investigating whether race or religion impacted officers’ actions and decisions.
- 👩💼 IOPC director of investigations Nicola Marfleet has a controversial record: she was governor of HMP Woodhill when it was put into special measures, and a 2018 employment tribunal criticised her evidence as “wrong and prejudicial.”
- 🎖️ Despite this, Marfleet received an OBE in December 2025 and now oversees police-misconduct investigations.
- ⚰️ Coroner Jason Pegg says the inquest will probe whether police acts or omissions caused or contributed to Nowak’s death.
- 🎯 Takeaway: the case is becoming a test of whether British policing’s anti-racist handling may have delayed treatment for a dying white victim.
10. Why This Space Race Is Just As Important As the Last
Mike Haridopolos — Daily Wire
- 🚀 As America marks its 250th anniversary, Congressman Mike Haridopolos argues the new space race is already underway and the Space Coast is central to winning it.
- 🌙 Florida’s Space Coast history: first launch from Cape Canaveral in 1950, Explorer 1 in 1958, Alan Shepard in 1961, Apollo 11 in 1969, Space Shuttle 1981–2011, SpaceX crew launch in 2020, Artemis now.
- 🇨🇳 China is “aggressively investing” in space and openly challenging American leadership beyond Earth.
- 💼 Haridopolos says every launch supports thousands of high-paying jobs and reinforces US strategic advantage.
- 🏛️ As chairman of the House Space & Aeronautics Subcommittee, he has backed the NASA Reauthorization Act and $250 million for Kennedy Space Center infrastructure upgrades.
- 💰 The “One Big Beautiful Bill” includes more than $10 billion for NASA.
- 📜 The Commerce Department’s Mission Authorization proposal is being advanced to streamline regulations and keep America the top destination for space innovation.
- 🌕 Artemis III will return American astronauts to the lunar surface; Haridopolos frames this as proof “free people pursuing bold goals can accomplish what others only imagine.”
- 🛰️ The article frames space as a critical domain of national security, economic strength and technological superiority, not a luxury.
- 🎯 Takeaway: for Haridopolos, the Space Coast is not just history — it is the launchpad for American exceptionalism in the next century.
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