Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/165

This is edition 2026/165 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: The politics of meh

Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project

• 🪧 Francesca Rudkin, driving around Auckland as the election hoardings went up, told Newstalk ZB she likes elections and is excited her son will vote for the first time on 7 November. She is already worried there are only nine more weeks of a contest that will be "frightfully dull, and short on ideas."
• 🏷 Her line for the campaign so far: "It's politics by warning label."
• 📉 The latest Taxpayers' Union-Curia poll has National on 29% and Labour on 25.9%. Between them, 54.9%. The Post says this is the first credible nationwide poll it can identify, since the Labour-National duopoly emerged, in which both parties sit below 30%.
• 📉 It is one poll, but it fits a pattern. National is weak, and Labour is not harvesting that weakness. Both went backwards, while the Greens and ACT made strong gains.
• 😐 Toby Manhire spotted the personal version in July. A 1News-Verian poll had Christopher Luxon on 18% as preferred prime minister and Chris Hipkins on 16%. "Basically, two in three people prefer neither Chris." The next prime minister could arrive on "a wave of meh."
• ⚠️ Edwards says the meh now covers the two large parties, not just the two leaders. There is plenty of anger and anxiety about the country. Enthusiasm for either party proposing to run it is harder to find.
• 🎯 National campaign chair Simeon Brown steers almost every conversation toward Labour's supposed new taxes, bundling Labour, the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and Opportunity as "Labour and their mates." Labour warns of another round of cuts to schools, hospitals and services, discovered after the election. Fear works when the positive programme is thin.
• 🕯 Peter Dunne and Chris Trotter both read the caution. Trotter's point is that a low political temperature can keep "unhelpful" voters at home. Edwards sees no evidence National is deliberately boring people to suppress turnout, but a first-term government under 30% has little reason to open a huge argument about transforming the country.
• 🏠 Hipkins, after the 2023 defeat, is deliberately modest: jobs, health, homes, some cost-of-living relief. Labour wants a judgment on National, not a referendum on an ambitious Labour programme. Housing, infrastructure, productivity, health, power prices, an ageing population and young people leaving are not minor problems. Boring politicians are sometimes what a country needs. The politics still feels unusually tentative for the circumstances.
• 🔒 Takeaway: the free preview pins a politics of meh on both major parties nine weeks out. Paid sections continue into the Hyperpolitics argument, what the polls suggest about disengagement, and who gains from a fragmented system. Do not invent the locked parts.

2. RODNEY HIDE: Not the same thing

Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell

• 🏳️‍🌈 Hide says he supported the liberal ask when gay people wanted to be left alone: two adults, same sex, the state had no business in it. He might regard it as a sin, but "we don't outlaw sin," and we do not lock sinners up or throw stones.
• 🔤 Then gay, lesbian and bisexual were rolled into a longer string, and people were told the next letter was the same fight. Hide says it is not.
• 🧑 A gay man knows he is a man. A lesbian knows she is a woman. Their argument was about who they love, not what they are. Nobody had to rewrite the word woman for them to exist. Nobody had to put a healthy child on medicine.
• 🚻 The trans claim, he writes, says a person's inner sense outranks their sex. Accept that as the definition of man and woman and you are not being asked to tolerate a neighbour. You are being asked to reorganise law, sport, prisons, changing rooms, and the language used about children.
• 🚪 The friction showed up first among lesbians. A lesbian space used to mean women. If a male who identifies as a woman has a right to that room, the room is no longer what it was. Calling that "inclusion" does not make the boundary disappear. It tells the women they are not allowed to notice.
• 🤫 He can wish every trans adult a quiet life, free of thugs and of the state poking them. That is not the same as agreeing that sex is a costume, or that a girl must share a changing room with a boy who claims to be one.
• 🎯 Takeaway: accepting gay people asked others to mind their own business. This asks people to pretend. Those are not the same demand, and "kindness does not require you to lie."

3. When Activist Judges Were Conservatives (and outlawed the minimum wage)

Roger Partridge - LawNews

• 🥖 In April 1901 a Bavarian immigrant baker, Joseph Lochner, was arrested in Utica, New York. Unlike larger bakeries on two shifts, he ran one crew. One worker, Aman Schmitter, had worked more than 60 hours in a week. New York's Bakeshop Act of 1895 barred more than 10 hours a day or 60 in a week. Second offence. Fine $50.
• 🏭 The Act was not a whim. Much of the city's bread was baked in tenement cellars, low-ceilinged and thick with flour dust. A journalist's exposé united reformers with the bakers' union. Both houses passed it unanimously.
• ⚖ Lochner lost in the Appellate Division and then in the New York Court of Appeals. In 1905 the US Supreme Court rescued him, five votes to four (Lochner v New York). The Fourteenth Amendment says nothing about bakeries, hours or contracts. Justice Peckham found freedom of contract inside the Due Process Clause.
• 🔁 For about three decades the Court guessed. It upheld a 10-hour day for women in Muller v Oregon, struck a law protecting union membership in Coppage, upheld Oregon mill hours in Bunting, then in Adkins (1923) struck the minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia. Morehead (1936) struck New York's minimum wage. No reading of "due process of law" separates a bakery from a flour mill. The judges' views did.
• 🏛 West Coast Hotel (1937) upheld Washington's minimum wage, five to four. Justice Roberts had voted to uphold on 19 December 1936, seven weeks before Roosevelt announced court-packing. The papers complicate the tidy "switch in time that saved nine." Roosevelt still named seven of the nine justices within five years. Carolene Products presumed economic legislation constitutional.
• 📜 The words of the amendment never changed. One majority made freedom of contract a trump over legislation. The next left it a liberty like any other, subject to regulation. The method did not die with the economic phase. Within a generation the Court was reading substantive content into the same words for personal liberties.
• 🇳🇿 Partridge's warning, in this LawNews column, is for people who welcome "our Supreme Court's jurisprudence" because they share its values. For three decades the American labour movement watched wage laws and union protections die in a courtroom, by a method applauded today when it faces the other way.
• 🎯 Takeaway: five judges decided the bakers' health did not require the 60-hour limit, outvoting Justice Harlan's medical evidence. A court whose direction can be corrected only by choosing its members has become a political institution, whichever party does the choosing.

4. The Gish Gallop

Seeby Woodhouse - Seeby's Ruminations

• 🗣 Duane Gish, a creationist debater in the 1970s and 80s, flooded the stage with falsehoods, half-truths, cherry-picked statistics and non sequiturs, delivered fast and without pause. A critic named the tactic in 1994: the Gish Gallop.
• ⏱ It takes about ten seconds to make a false claim and several minutes to refute one properly. In a timed debate you cannot keep up. By the time argument three is dismantled, fifteen more have arrived. The audience sees someone who looks like they are losing, even if every word they say is accurate.
• 🌊 In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, researcher Christopher Paul watched something other than old-style propaganda. Not one clear message, repeated. A flood: contradictory stories, wild theories, outright lies sitting next to things that are true. He called it firehosing. The incoherence is the point. The aim is to exhaust people until nothing can be known.
• ⚖ Both tactics exploit Brandolini's Law: the energy needed to refute a false claim is an order of magnitude larger than the energy needed to produce one. The correction is slow, expensive, and less interesting. Most people never see it.
• 🤖 Woodhouse says this was already a problem before social media. AI-generated content, feeds tuned for engagement rather than accuracy, and a news cycle that never stops make the incoming volume essentially infinite. Our capacity to process it is not.
• 😶 RAND researchers on firehosing found the cynicism is the product. Overwhelm is the intended outcome. Sliding toward "who knows what's true anymore" is the warning arriving on schedule. Woodhouse names Trump as the master of the form.
• 🎯 Takeaway: you cannot refute everything, and you are not supposed to be able to. Pick a small number of sources you actually trust, go deep, and be honest about what you have thought through versus what you have only absorbed. A debate forces you to answer every claim. Real life does not.

5. RODNEY HIDE: Eleven to One - And Still No Shared Moral Language

Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell

• ⚖️ In January 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, then threw herself from a window and was left paralysed. She does not deny the killings.
• 🧠 The trial was not about whether she did it. It was about whether she could be blamed. The defence said postpartum psychosis: a male voice ordering her to kill the children and herself, a system that failed a woman who had sought help. Prosecutors said depression, not psychosis: still an agent, still answerable for three dead children.
• 🔢 In September 2026 the jury hung. A mistrial. On the defence account of the foreperson's notes the split was not six and six. It was eleven to one: eleven ready to find her not criminally responsible, one holdout who would not join an acquittal. The judge refused to remove that juror. Clancy stays in a psychiatric hospital. The children stay dead.
• 📚 Hide reads the commentary through Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. A culture keeps the forms of moral reasoning, courts, experts, closing speeches, words like responsibility and justice and care, after it has lost a shared account of what those words are for.
• 🏥 One tradition's end is therapeutic: heal the suffering agent, treat a medical catastrophe, do not condemn. Another is older and juridical: the human good includes answering for the taking of innocent life, and the primary victims are the three children. Compassion for illness does not erase judgment. Same vocabulary. Different ends.
• 📣 MacIntyre called the late-modern condition emotivist: moral utterance as strong approval or disapproval, dressed up as argument. Listen to the feeds. How can you not have compassion for her? How can you not see three murdered children?
• 🪞 Eleven to one need not mean a culture split down the middle. It can be a culture that has almost wholly absorbed one script, illness excuses, care not blame, with a single juror still running another. Nearly unanimous feeling is not a settled moral framework. Formal unanimity rules then freeze the result into a mistrial.
• 🎯 Takeaway: Hide does not diagnose Clancy, and he does not deny psychosis. He says put the children's names back in the centre before deciding what to do with their mother. Until we can say what a human being is, what a parent is for, and what justice is for, compassion and condemnation stay competing preferences.

6. Pauline Voss: Elon Musk's X Drove "Vibe Shift" That Led To Historic AfD Victory In Germany

Michael Shellenberger - Public

• 🧱 For years Germany's established parties, backed by nearly all major media, kept a firewall (Brandmauer) against the anti-mass-migration party Alternative for Germany. Pauline Voss, a politics reporter for NIUS, told Public that firewall is "probably the most important and the most powerful tool of the left parties in Germany."
• 🏛 She says the CDU, the conservative party, adopted and integrated that firewall "despite the two parties' overlapping agendas."
• 🗳 That began to break down on Sunday, when the AfD won a historic victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Voss: for the first time it was possible for the AfD "to gain power, to be the winner, not only the winner of an election, but maybe in the end to be part of the government."
• 📜 In 2020 a Free Democrat won the Thuringia premiership with AfD and CDU votes. Chancellor Angela Merkel called the vote "unforgivable" and said the result "must be reversed." The winner resigned within two days. Germany's Constitutional Court later ruled that Merkel's demand had violated the AfD's right to equal competition.
• 📊 Voss says AfD voters had waited a long time, and the party overperformed by about 1 or 2%. It took 43.8% of the vote, more than double the 20.8% it won in 2021, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU fell to 17.2%. The AfD also mobilised about 170,000 people who had not voted last time, its largest single source of new support.
• 📰 Still in front of the paywall, the Public subtitle says Voss argues the end of Twitter censorship allowed voters to learn of higher rates of migrant crime. The headline credits Elon Musk's X with the "vibe shift" behind the win. The fetched preview does not develop that claim.
• 🔒 Takeaway: isFreemail=false and audience only_paid. The free text stops at the subscribe line and a photo caption. The rest of the interview and the video are locked. These bullets stay inside the preview.

7. MY RECURRENT RASH(BROOKE)

John McLean - John's Substack

• 📰 John McLean takes on Max Rashbrooke's 5 September column in Stuff's The Post, "The uneasy tension between Parliament and the courts." Rashbrooke is a senior research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington.
• 🗳 Near the end Rashbrooke writes that even if, as he personally thinks, Parliament should continue to be supreme, "it remains an imperfect institution." McLean treats that as the free-speech-except move: the rest of the piece tries to undermine parliamentary supremacy.
• 🗞 Rashbrooke opens on the 2016 Daily Mail headline "ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE," aimed at three British Supreme Court judges who decided Britain could not leave the EU without Parliament voting to approve the exit. McLean says that looked like parliamentary supremacy and was not. It was a judicial hope that MPs would override the Brexit referendum.
• 💸 Rashbrooke treats Brooke van Velden's pay-equity changes as "essentially retrospective," and warns that people will not be able to act without fear Parliament will later undo them. McLean says the tweaks save taxpayers almost $13 billion "we simply couldn't have afforded," and that dislike of retrospective law is not an argument against parliamentary supremacy.
• 🚗 On Uber, Rashbrooke says governments should not legislate over cases already launched. McLean says the legislation deemed drivers contractors, a status many drivers wanted, and that Rashbrooke is really saying Parliament may never overrule the courts. That would be supremacy of the unelected judiciary.
• 🌡 The same pattern, McLean says, on activist Mike Smith's climate lawsuit against Fonterra and other "climate mega-polluters": the courts said the case should be heard, including a novel climate-pollution tort, and legislation over the top is treated as illegitimate. Dean Knight is quoted saying Parliament and the courts "sit in dialogue, and in tension."
• 🪶 On Peter Ellis, Knight treats the Supreme Court as catching up with the wider adoption of tikanga. McLean's reply is that the Court invented a Māori custom in order to quash the convictions of Pākehā Peter Ellis after his death. An anonymous retired High Court judge tells Rashbrooke the Adoption Act 1955 could become "stultified" if judges do not update it.
• 🏛 Rashbrooke calls claims that "the judiciary is running amok" an attempt to import UK and US culture-war arguments, and names Shane Jones among "would-be strongmen." He ends by saying the Waitangi Tribunal's powers are "merely advisory." McLean says the courts keep turning Tribunal utterances into binding Treaty principles and tikanga.
• 📋 Under the coalition agreement with New Zealand First, National committed to amend Waitangi Tribunal legislation back toward the original intent. An advisory group was set up in May 2025 and reported in late 2025. Cabinet has still not considered it. McLean files that as another National renege, beside support for "The Do-Nothing Nats" slipping under 30%.
• 🎯 Takeaway: McLean's through-line is that parliamentary supremacy means Parliament can overrule courts, including ones he thinks are activist. Rashbrooke's "I personally think Parliament should be supreme" does not survive the cases he treats as off-limits.

8. DON BRASH: A "House of Iwi Lords"? Te Pāti Māori's radical plan exposed

Don Brash - Brash & Mitchell

• 📜 Written as a Hobson's Pledge trustee, Don Brash says Te Pāti Māori's latest proposal is unlikely to become law. Labour, the Greens and TOP keep talking about Treaty primacy and racial preference, so he will not rule it out forever.
• 🚫 There is no parliamentary majority for it, and he thinks most New Zealanders would reject it outright. That is not the point. The announcement, he says, shows how radical the party's constitutional vision has become.
• 🏛 The proposal would make Waitangi Tribunal findings binding on governments, create a powerful new Treaty Commission, and place tighter constraints on elected representatives.
• 👑 For Brash this is no longer an argument for greater recognition of Māori interests inside the democracy. It is a different political system, and not a democratic one. Power would move from elected MPs to unelected iwi activists. "In effect, a House of Iwi Lords!"
• ⚖️ The Tribunal was established as a commission of inquiry that makes recommendations. Binding recommendations would mean a future government is not actually in control. Hobson's Pledge already wants the Tribunal ended, on the view its influence has gone past its original purpose and now acts as a voice for activists and a brake on democratic governance.
• 🗳 Democracy, he writes, rests on equal voting and equality before the law. It is already imperfect: the Māori seats, and too many cases of people treated differently by ancestry in health and education. What Te Pāti Māori and its activist allies want is more power in unelected commissions, tribunals and iwi bodies.
• 📉 It is tempting to ignore the party as fringe, and on current polling unlikely to hold all the seats it once held. That misses the point. They sit inside a wider landscape of parties obsessed with the supposed primacy of the Treaty and race-based decision-making.
• 🎯 Takeaway: parties reveal their ambitions when they describe the country they would build if they could. Brash wants one person, one vote, equal citizenship, and a Parliament accountable to all New Zealanders equally. "We are one people. We believe in equal rights."

9. A Dodgy Media 'Fact Check' Backfires & Exposes How Extreme NZ's Abortion Law Has Become

Brendan Malone - The Dispatches

• 🔎 Brendan Malone reviews a Stuff "fact check" by Paula Penfold of social media claims by Elizabeth Mundt, NZ First candidate for Selwyn, about the Abortion Legislation Act passed under the Ardern government in early 2020.
• 🎬 Mundt mixed up two 2022 documentaries. Penfold notes that Fire and Fury has no line about blonde girls or sourdough. Malone says the quote she meant is from TVNZ's Web of Chaos, where Kate Hannah, also prominent in Fire and Fury, warned viewers to "step back" from a fair-skinned blonde or red-haired child with braiding and flowers. He calls the mix-up innocuous, and the fact check petty for leading with it.
• 📜 Penfold says there was no bill titled the "full-term abortion bill." The statute is the Abortion Legislation Act, amending the 1977 Act, with its third reading on 18 March 2020, a week before the first nationwide lockdown, after reform work that began two years earlier. Malone says Mundt was describing the effect, abortion right up to birth, not the official title, and that the country was distracted by COVID and the looming anniversary of the Christchurch mosque killings.
• 🗳 The third reading passed 68 votes to 51, a conscience vote. Seven of NZ First's nine MPs voted against. Tracey Martin and Jenny Marcroft voted for. National MP Agnes Loheni's amendment, requiring pain relief for a fetus after 20 weeks, was never in the bill. It was defeated 76 to 43. All nine NZ First MPs, including Winston Peters, voted against that amendment. Peters also voted against the bill itself.
• 📅 New Zealand law sets no maximum number of weeks. After 20 weeks a qualified health practitioner may provide an abortion only if they reasonably believe it is "clinically appropriate." Malone says that phrase has no objective legal definition, so it is not a meaningful restraint. The old requirement that a doctor perform the abortion became the looser "qualified health practitioner," which can include nurses and midwives.
• 👥 Penfold says the second practitioner must be consulted and does not have to agree or approve. Malone's reading is that the current law is more permissive than Mundt thought: consultation, not a second approval, before an abortion after 20 weeks.
• 🔢 "Very few abortions occur after 20 weeks" is, for Malone, a red herring. The number being smaller than earlier abortions does not answer whether the permission should exist. He compares it to defending a serious legal permission by pointing out how rarely it is used.
• 🏫 On schools, Penfold says parental consent is not required, and that section 38 says nothing about schools, staff, transport or removing a student from school. A teacher, counsellor or nurse accompanying a student would be a support person, not exercising a special power under abortion law. Malone says that still leaves Mundt's core claim standing.
• 🎯 Takeaway: Malone's charge is that the Stuff piece ends up verifying Mundt's main claims, then spends its energy on titles, a documentary mix-up and wording, and calls the result a fact check. He treats that as an ideologically driven hit piece, and as a comment on standards at Stuff.

10. The AfD has smashed Germany's political cartel

Fraser Myers - spiked

• 🇩🇪 In Saxony-Anhalt's state election the AfD won 44 per cent of the vote, just short of a majority of seats. The victory-party slogan in Magdeburg was "Anything is possible." Fraser Myers says a small, struggling eastern state has smashed what the AfD calls the cartel of mainstream centrist parties.
• 👥 The AfD was the most popular party among every social group spiked lists: men and women, young and old, university educated and high-school educated, blue-collar and white-collar workers, civil servants and the self-employed. Turnout was 78 per cent, up from 60 per cent in 2021, pulling in people who usually stay home.
• 📉 The SPD managed 9 per cent. The CDU, in government at state and federal level, was cut to 17 per cent. In 2018, running for CDU leader, Friedrich Merz pledged to cut AfD support in half. In this state AfD support has more than doubled since the last election, and the CDU vote has more than halved. AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund called Merz "our most important campaigner."
• 🛂 Myers traces the surge to migration policy since Angela Merkel opened the borders in 2015. In 2022, total arrivals were 2.7 million and net migration 1.4 million, above the previous peak of the Syrian crisis. Crime has surged. Terror attacks are treated as the new normal, including the 2024 Magdeburg Christmas market attack by a Saudi-born terrorist: six killed, more than 300 injured. Voters are unimpressed by the CDU's promise to get a grip.
• 🏭 German industry has been in freefall since 2019. About 350,000 jobs have been lost as firms face Chinese competition and energy costs Myers ties to Net Zero. The state looks unable to do basic work: the Carola Bridge in Dresden collapsed in 2024, about 16,000 road bridges need urgent repair, and about 40 per cent of trains are delayed.
• 🧱 Under the Brandmauer, centrist parties refuse to form coalitions with the AfD or vote alongside it, so governments are stitched together from the liberal FDP to the Greens to the hard-left Die Linke. Myers says the firewall was meant to delegitimise the AfD and has done the opposite. It lets the party claim to be the only alternative to the cartel.
• 🕵️ The domestic secret service has designated the AfD a "right-wing extremist" organisation, which many voters read as political. Defence minister Boris Pistorius called for a ban in the week before the vote. A Der Spiegel front asked whether Ulrich Siegmund could be "the most dangerous man in Germany." He handed out signed copies at his rallies.
• ⚠️ Myers does not wash the AfD clean. The party contains figures who have downplayed Nazi crimes and toyed with Nazi symbols and slogans. It is divided over whether "remigration" means deporting illegal migrants or also reaches "unintegrated" migrants who hold German citizenship. Its Ukraine line, neutrality, can slide into hostility toward Ukrainians and admiration for the Russian invaders.
• 🎯 Takeaway: that a party with those black marks can dominate a state election is, for Myers, a further indictment of the political class. What happened in Saxony-Anhalt is not a local upset. Demonising voters, instead of heeding their concerns, is no longer a viable strategy.

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