Your Daily Ten@10

This is edition 2026/129 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. National Is Weak but Still Winning

Bryce Edwards — The Democracy Project

📉 RNZ-Reid: National 28.7% (lowest under Luxon; down from 38.1% in 2023) vs Labour 34% — yet Nat/NZF/Act still model 61 seats to Labour/Greens/TPM 59.
📊 BusinessDesk poll-of-polls ~Labour 31 / National 30; Herald-Motu gives the coalition a 62.9% chance of return — probability falling; June Verian had a centre-left majority only via TPM overhang.
🗣️ Tim Murphy: “Shots fired. But, so far, all targets missed” — Budget, India FTA, conference, KiwiSaver, solar, roadshows… no National bounce. Mood: “not angry, just disappointed.”
⚠️ Audrey Young: no MMP first-term parallel — Clark/Key/Ardern were 50%+ before second elections; Henry Cooke: “No main governing party has ever been this low at this point”; historic late-cycle drop averages −4.1 pts.
👤 Jo Moir: National “baked in… 30 or below” — “Luxon might need to consider whether he’s the problem”; Janet Wilson: vehicle not just driver — “Pandora’s Policy Box from Eras Past.”
🎯 Takeaway: National is weak; the right bloc as a whole is not — still the favoured path to power, but on an unprecedented knife-edge. (Further sections paywalled.)

2. Debt: The Dark Matter of the Political Cosmos

Grant Duncan — Politics Happens

🏦 Everyone is borrower and lender; a $500k+ mortgage disciplines young couples for decades — student debt first, then housing, then cards.
📊 2025 survey: 76% torn between “living now” and future responsibility; 90% of Gen Z and 82% of Millennials feel socially isolated by money constraints.
⚖️ Politics as struggle between creditors and debtors — tax-the-rich as “repaying debt to society” vs surpluses to keep international finance confident.
📜 Orthodox “money invented to fix barter” story lacks evidence (Graeber); Duncan frames market theory vs state theory of money ahead of the NZ election.
🎯 Takeaway: “cost of living” is debt, interest and prices — and debt is the election’s hidden matter. (Full argument paywalled.)

3. Everyone Is a Winner with TOP

Oliver Hartwich — Brash & Mitchell / NZ Initiative

🧮 TOP’s “Tax Reset” calculator: $19,400 Citizen’s Income per adult funded by 1.75% land tax — Hartwich tried to invent a net loser and failed.
🏠 Tenants win (cash, no land tax); retirees can defer until death; farmers pay 0.5% with exemptions; most homeowners still ahead once cash is netted.
💰 Even a dual $500k-income couple on $1m urban land got a $5,455 net cut — land tax $17,500 crushed by $38,800 free cash despite higher top income tax.
📐 Land-only tax + 70% land-share rule of thumb means few lose until homes pass ~$3m; falling land prices would shrink the revenue base.
⚠️ Scheme needs ~$24bn/year; TOP says one in ten pay more — calculator rarely shows it. Friedman’s free-lunch warning applies.
🎯 Takeaway: shiny policy that “cheerfully disagree[s]” with basic economics — idea-party calculator vs properly costed reality.

4. Looking Back

Chris Trotter — Substack / The Good Oil

🕰️ Rebuts Hartwich’s anti-1970s “hellhole” framing: yes road deaths fell (843→272), but old unsafe fleets + brewery “booze barns” explain the carnage, not nostalgia’s sin.
👶 Infant mortality and life expectancy improved everywhere the West predicted — “nice try… no cigar.”
🏭 Real clash is productivity: 1970s NZ was ready to leap from protected infant industry to self-sustaining manufacture — Rogernomics dismantled that infrastructure instead.
📉 Hartwich’s 1990s productivity bounce attributed by Trotter more to Employment Contracts Act deunionisation (work harder for less) than heroic reform genius.
🗣️ “The past is a foreign country… and better” — young Kiwis then still believed government put their future at the centre of state policy.
🎯 Takeaway: nostalgia is not denial of progress stats; it is grief for a New Zealand-centred development path closed after the sunny Seventies.

5. The Corruption of Privilege (and Why It Matters)

Roger Partridge — Plain Thinking

🚶 “Privilege walk” rituals treat two parents, books at home and family dinners as unearned knapsacks — borrowed from McIntosh 1988, generalised far beyond her race-focused paper.
📜 Historic privilege = Latin privi-legium (private law): guild monopolies, slaveholder law, sex disabilities — liberalism’s project was to abolish legal privilege (Smith, Mill, Hayek).
🔄 Modern usage keeps the moral charge while dropping the transfer story: a stable home takes nothing from anyone; no statute to dismantle — only guilt.
⚠️ McIntosh herself warned against step-forward guilt exercises and preferred “dominance” language; the school-hall script ignored her.
📉 Two-parent homes have become rarer especially among the least well-off — the framework claims to defend the poor while pathologising the goods they most need.
🎯 Takeaway: corrupting the word privilege lets politics avoid hard questions about family formation, welfare design and what should be the norm.

6. Trump’s Speech: Voting Machines, the CIA and China

Roger Simon — American Refugees

🗳️ Trump speech flagged Chinese mega-hack of ~220 million US voting records — Simon says the deeper villain is CIA elements allegedly hiding it from the President.
🧾 Personal history: writing on machines brought lawsuit threats, Epoch Times censorship, and Encounter Books pulping/reprinting American Refugees without the machines chapter.
🔌 At Atlanta’s 2020 recount, VoterGA’s Garland Favorito showed him a Dominion unit accepting an Ethernet cable to a server a few feet away — Dominion staffer reportedly nodded.
🇻🇪 Venezuelan contact showed Jorge Rodríguez demo: fix an election in ~45 seconds; later ID’d as Delcy Rodríguez’s brother — dictatorship logic: show the public they are powerless.
📄 UPDATE from WhiteHouse.gov: CIA reporting on Maduro plot to digitally rig 2020 Venezuelan totals undetectable even by audit; France banned machines in 2008.
🎯 Takeaway: Simon feels vindicated — and expects a partisan donnybrook as released docs hit the wall.

7. Orwell, Spain and the Totalitarian Left

Michael Crowley — spiked

📅 Ninety years after Franco’s 18 July 1936 revolt: ~35,000 International Brigade volunteers; Orwell rejected by CPGB’s Pollitt as “politically unreliable,” joins POUM militia instead.
🇪🇸 Barcelona then a workers’ city of red/black flags and collectivised shops; Aragón front mostly stalemate; May Days 1937 — Republican/Communist forces crush anarchists and POUM as “Franco’s Fifth Column.”
🔫 Shot in the throat 20 May; while recovering POUM outlawed, Nin murdered, Orwell charged in absentia with “rabid Trotskyism” — flees Spain 23 June.
📚 Spain made the anti-fascist into an anti-Stalinist: Homage to Catalonia, then Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four; English left press swallowed the Communist line.
🎯 Takeaway: Orwell’s vigilance against left totalitarianism, middle-class managerial “socialism,” and manufactured truth is more urgent than ever — hold the works closer.

8. Why OpenAI and Anthropic Will Never See Wall Street

Will Bennett — The Spectator Australia

📉 Chinese model breakthroughs (Moonshot etc.) challenge the “insurmountable tech lead” thesis; AI stocks reel; Musk’s AI stake (via SpaceX) reportedly −50% from peak.
💸 Token price war + CEOs warning firms not to hand proprietary data to OpenAI/Anthropic (they may build competing products).
🏗️ Physical constraints: power grids, trades, memory chips, copper, community NIMBY — and regulation (Trump admin clash with Anthropic/Claude in government).
⚖️ Apple sues OpenAI over alleged trade-secret recruitment; 100+ copyright suits over training data; harm cases unresolved.
🕶️ Easier to defend valuations in private secondary markets than daily public marks — IPOs face delay or abandonment; “Elon may have taken the last IPO parachute.”
🎯 Takeaway: commercial, physical, political and legal risk stacks against a clean Wall Street debut.

9. The Ann Widdecombe Investigation Has Been Embarrassing for the Police

Paul Birch — spiked

🏠 Murder of Ann Widdecombe (Reform immigration spokeswoman) at her Dartmoor home with severe head injuries stunned Britain — after Jo Cox and Sir David Amess.
🔄 Official story shifted: first no foul play; then Friday presser (delayed) arresting a 26-year-old and claiming no political motive — all later wrong.
🚗 26-year-old released without charge; 28-year-old from Rotherham arrested after driving ~300 miles; counter-terror takes over.
🗣️ Public told not to “speculate”; terrorism law reviewer Jonathan Hall KC: police broke a “golden rule” by firm early assertions on a live case.
⚠️ Southport information vacuum lesson ignored — premature certainty and managed messaging breed distrust and make every later appeal for calm harder.
🎯 Takeaway: ex-cop Birch — treat the public as adults or lose the consent on which policing rests.

Kevin Donnelly — The Spectator Australia

🇦🇺 Albanese’s Royal Commission on antisemitism also probes “social cohesion” — PM talks unity around essential Australian values; Donnelly says actions contradict words.
📜 Multiculturalism from Whitlam/Fraser turbocharged under ALP into cultural relativism that cannot judge foreign customs against mainstream Australia.
✝️ Founding story: KJV Bible and Blackstone with the First Fleet; Westminster democracy, common law, individual dignity rooted in Western/Christian inheritance — not interchangeable with every imported creed.
⚠️ Post-war European migrants largely joined “team Australia”; Opera House antisemitic chants after 7 Oct, campus fear, child brides, FGM and machete gangs show failures of difference-as-policy.
🎯 Takeaway: neither Hanson’s monoculture mantra nor empty “we are multicultural” slogans — defend Australia as a Western liberal democracy or drift toward ghettos and tribes.

What our members are saying about Ten@10

Elizabeth
These articles are compulsory reading for me and the perfect addition to the usual list of Goodoil items!

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