This is edition 2026/173 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: National should let voters decide before signing the LNG deal
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 🛢️ Edwards says National should not sign a binding contract for its proposed LNG import terminal before the 7 November election. It is a billion-dollar, long-term bet with disputed benefits and an unsettled funding model.
- ⚡ Energy Minister Simeon Brown still insists a contract could be signed during the campaign because 'the government is the government right up until the election'. That states the power, not the wisdom.
- 📜 The Enabling Liquefied Natural Gas Bill has not been introduced and is not on the list for Parliament's final sitting week. Ministers still want the commercial deal first, then law written around a known site.
- ❓ The awkward question: what would New Zealanders owe if the contract were signed and the next Parliament refused to pass the bill? Break fees and compensation have not been spelled out.
- 💰 Major Electricity Users Group chief Karen Boyes warns that signing without an enabling law may load risk premiums into the deal that power users or taxpayers then pay.
- 🗓️ Cabinet papers from earlier this year already aimed to lock in as many approvals as possible before the election so a future government would find the project harder to abandon.
- 🚢 Edwards notes the ferry fiasco: KiwiRail's settlement with the shipbuilder hit $144 million after a signed contract was abandoned. National knows how expensive a U-turn can be.
- 💡 Takeaway: Real energy security is one thing. Signing a contested mega-deal mid-campaign before the law exists, and before voters speak, is another.
2. One Picture.
Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter
- 📸 Trotter opens on Richard Harman's photo of Chris Hipkins at a hastily called Remutaka meeting in Naenae on 9 September. The faces around him look bleak, not buoyant.
- 🏠 Turnout was under half what Christopher Luxon drew in the same suburb three weeks earlier, and only about 100 to 120 people. For a Leader of the Opposition with polling day under two months away, that is thin.
- 🏙️ Naenae was a First Labour Government showcase: state houses, electric rail, and Ernst Plischke's community centre. Trotter uses it as a mirror for how far Labour's social-democratic project has faded.
- 🔄 He argues Labour's polarities have flipped. Members are now social revolutionaries and economic reactionaries, while many Hutt Valley working-class voters care little for 'river to the sea' politics or body-politics.
- 🍞 Locals, he says, want cake not crumbs, and are tired of household-budget metaphors and Barbara Edmonds' thrifty-accountant instincts when Labour once thought bigger.
- ✅ He still credits Hipkins for not lying about the fiscal box, unlike National's 'nine new taxes' line that earned an Advertising Standards Authority rebuke.
- 💭 One frozen frame is not a whole night, but photography's power is to pull the singular image that explains the mood. Compared with Jacinda Ardern's 2017 electricity, the message is grim.
- 💡 Takeaway: Trotter's verdict is blunt. Chris Hipkins is not doing well, and Labour is going to lose.
3. Labour's 3-month repayment for retirement village units is stupid
Jenny Ruth - Just the Business
- 🏥 National appointed former Labour leader David Cunliffe to chair its Aged Care Ministerial Advisory Group, a bipartisan signal that long-term reform was the aim.
- 📋 The group issued 40 recommendations, including forcing retirement village operators to repay departing residents (usually estates) within 12 months of leaving.
- ⚡ Labour is promising a three-month repayment rule instead. National is more likely to take some of the working group's milder package if it leads the next government.
- 📈 Forsyth Barr's Will Twiss and Sam Averill say the big listed operators (Ryman, Summerset, Oceania) already repay within a year or less, so National's plan barely moves them. Labour's would.
- ⚠️ Under base-case housing assumptions the gearing hit looks manageable, but a three-month clock sharply raises exposure to another property downturn.
- 🏠 House prices are already soft: national values down 0.9% year on year and 17.1% from the 2021 peak, with Wellington and Auckland far worse. The OCR has risen twice since July.
- 🛑 Ruth calls a Labour three-month mandate incredibly stupid for a sector short of aged-care beds, with demand rising and smaller operators and non-profits hit hardest.
- 💡 Takeaway: Status quo will not meet demand, but slamming repayment windows for election optics risks fewer villages when New Zealand needs more.
4. The Tax Shitshow
Natalia Albert - Less Certain
- 💰 Albert calls tax the most important political statement, and also complex, boring and a nightmare to implement. Capital gains, wealth, land, income, inheritance, GST: the list itself becomes the fog.
- 🎯 Both sides oversimplify. One says the wealthy do not pay their share. The other says we have a spending problem and capital will flee. Neither, she argues, is reasonable or practical.
- 🧮 New Zealand's system is broad-based and low-rate: income, consumption, and almost no tax on holding assets. No comprehensive CGT, land tax, wealth tax, stamp duty, or inheritance duty since 1992.
- 📊 Inland Revenue's look at 311 of the wealthiest families found a median effective rate of about 8.9% on economic income (about 9.5% with GST). A middle earner pays around 20%.
- ⚖️ Fairness arguments never end, she says. Democracy's primary job is stability: losers must accept the result and come back. A nurse-pays-more-than-billionaire system fails a patience test.
- 🏠 Tax productive work hard and asset holding lightly, and the rational Kiwi piles into housing that produces nothing. Then we act surprised at flat productivity and unaffordable homes.
- 🏦 Left and Right both treat government like a giant household. Albert wants land tax, a nudge up at the top income and company rates, then ruthless focus: health, housing, infrastructure, seniors, children, disabled.
- 💡 Takeaway: Nobody is selling that combination in November. The Left has taxes without discipline. The Right has discipline without taxes. The shitshow continues by design.
5. Bending the Knee
David Harvey - A Halfling's View
- 📰 Harvey revisits the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund (2021-23): 73 projects, 219 journalist roles, and a lasting fight over whether state money bought compliance.
- 📝 As PIJF wound down, Willie Jackson pushed a Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill so publishers could force deals with digital platforms for carrying their news.
- 🚫 Labour never enacted it. The Coalition picked it up, Melissa Lee wanted it dropped and lost Broadcasting, and Paul Goldsmith left it idling on the Order Paper in wait-and-see mode.
- 🎦 Meanwhile the predicted MSM collapse after PIJF did not arrive. TVNZ, RNZ, the Herald and The Post are still publishing. So why the emergency law?
- 🏦 Chris Hipkins has now recommitted to the stalled bill as an election plank, warning 'the media is going to disappear' without central government support.
- 👍 Stuff owner Sinead Boucher cheered, casting the bill as sovereignty against the richest platforms and asking where other parties stand.
- 🛡️ Harvey reads it as a state subsidy dressed as bargaining, built to keep a compliant press, not to restore public trust in the marketplace.
- 💡 Takeaway: Call it media sovereignty if you like. He hears bending the knee.
6. RODNEY HIDE: Clapping in heaven
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 👏 Hide opens with Jim Anderton clapping in heaven. Labour wants to outlaw 'price gouging' at the checkout. National wants to carve up Foodstuffs. Both sound like him.
- 🛒 Hipkins has discovered excessive prices, substantial market power, a Commerce Commission with teeth, and butter as villain. Regulation is the cure.
- 🔨 Luxon and Willis have discovered structural separation: Pak'nSave one way, New World and Four Square the other, three nationwide chains if you squint, first 100 days.
- 🎭 Ostensibly an election fight. Really a reunion tour for Alliance economics, with Labour in the coat and National in the trousers racing to out-Anderton each other.
- 🤔 Willis swears politicians will not play supermarket executive, then camps the Commission outside Foodstuffs to recommend the split she is campaigning on.
- 💸 A Foodstuffs breakup, Hide says, rearranges logos and adds lawyers. 'Excessive' is a speech, not a number. Tax, regulation, land, labour and energy, the other half of the grocery bill, stay off-stage.
- 💡 Takeaway: In 2026 Labour and National are campaigning on Alliance economics. Hide never would have picked that.
7. Tobacco tax disaster
John Humphreys - Death & Taxes
- 🚭 Humphreys says Australia's tobacco tax debate is really about prohibition by stealth: stamp out smoking without the honesty of an outright ban.
- 🧪 He compares it to the 1937 US cannabis 'tax' that piled a $100 levy on a $10 ounce and birthed a black market still running today.
- 💵 Legal cigarettes now carry about $35 tax on a $10 underlying pack, a 350% hit. Few people pay it when cheaper illicit supply is everywhere.
- 🧪 Wastewater nicotine measures suggest smoking and vaping have risen even as legal cigarette sales collapse and commercial vapes stay banned.
- 🔥 The payoff has been organised-crime profits and a wave of fire-bombings, not a smoke-free utopia.
- 📉 Tobacco tax revenue has crashed from $16 billion in 2019/20 to about $4 billion in 2025/26: a textbook Laffer Curve own-goal.
- 🏛️ One Nation wants a 75% excise cut, the Coalition topped that with 80%, both want legal vapes, and even NSW Labor is joining the cut-tax chorus.
- 💡 Takeaway: The disaster was predicted for years. The political winds are finally catching up with reality.
8. EXCLUSIVE: French Lawmaker Who Triggered Criminal Probe Of X Says He Was Targeting Elon Musk's Politics, Not Foreign Interference
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- 🔍 In July 2025 Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau opened a criminal probe of X, citing complaints that the platform's algorithm was used for foreign interference. Months later X's Paris office was raided and Elon Musk summoned.
- 📰 Global headlines followed Le Monde's line: France probing X over foreign interference as the investigation closed in on Musk.
- 🏦 Public spoke to Deputy Eric Bothorel, the National Assembly member behind the first complaint. He says he was not alleging foreign interference at all.
- 📝 Bothorel shared his January 2025 letter: he complained of deliberate interventions by X's owner or staff that seemed to alter how the algorithm worked.
- 📊 Late 2024, he and other longtime users felt rising posts were 'more and more politically oriented, all going in one particular direction.'
- 🇫🇷 The public justification was foreign interference. The complainant's stated target was Musk's politics and X's feed design.
- 🚩 Public's free preview stops there behind a paywall pitch. Subtitle hints Macron's government is now using similar logic for wider domestic censorship.
- 💡 Takeaway: FLAG thin/paywalled. From the free text alone, the foreign-interference framing and the deputy's own words do not match.
9. Ed Sheeran Tried to Keep Politics Off His Stage. That Became the Scandal.
TheMossadIL - Inside TheMossadIL's Space Laser
- 🎵 TheMossadIL notes Sheeran did not endorse Israel, condemn Palestinians, or (by his account) even make the call to drop Macklemore. He wanted concerts free of political warfare.
- 🎤 On 4-5 September Macklemore opened at MetLife Stadium with Free Palestine messaging, Hind's Hall, and Gaza footage on the stadium screens, later saying the tour's scale was part of the point.
- 📢 Some Jewish and Israeli fans felt blindsided. Venues and the Israeli-American Council pushed back. Promoters warned some shows would not proceed with Macklemore still on the bill.
- 🤝 The promoter removed Macklemore. Sheeran said he was deeply disappointed and had spent days hunting a compromise. That is messier than 'Sheeran fired him for Free Palestine.'
- 🎙️ Sheeran's line was boring on purpose: the war is a human tragedy, he keeps personal views off the professional stage, and kids and mixed crowds should feel safe.
- 🔎 Critics note he is not apolitical (Corbyn, Brexit, Ukraine). TheMossadIL says that still does not oblige every venue to host every war.
- 🤺 The Noa Argamani backstage meeting got spun as proof of secret Zionism. She was a Nova festival hostage rescued after 245 days. No Netanyahu speech required.
- 💡 Takeaway: Once neutrality is treated as sin, silence, hostage meet-and-greets and refusing a sermon all become 'statements'. Some people still just want the music.
10. Ed Sheeran has done nothing wrong
Brendan O'Neill - The Spectator Australia
- 🎸 O'Neill says refuse the Gaza cult's keffiyeh-and-chant liturgy and they will hound you. Ed Sheeran is the latest exhibit.
- 🎤 Macklemore turned New Jersey openers into lectures on Israel's wickedness with Gaza destruction on the stadium screens. Venues then told Sheeran: ditch him or lose the gigs.
- 🚪 Support acts walked out 'in solidarity' and even the backing band left. A tour burned at the altar of Israelophobia, O'Neill writes.
- 🔍 Leftists who cheer blacklisting Israeli artists now cry that Macklemore was censored. O'Neill says the knives are really out for Sheeran.
- 📱 Online he is a 'Zio-cuck' with blood on his hands. Billy Bragg warns he risks becoming a pariah. Paloma Faith says cancelling the tour is 'ideologically' right, and that she tells her children 'Free Palestine' every night.
- 🚫 BDS calls remaining dates a 'complicit tour'. An Irish Mirror writer says the 'gutless coward' should never feel welcome in Ireland again.
- ⚖️ Sheeran's sin that truly enraged the mob was saying there is suffering on 'both sides'. In that worldview, humanising Israelis after 7 October is the unforgivable heresy.
- 💡 Takeaway: Peacenik branding, inquisitor behaviour. Imagine if Sheeran just carried on with a guitar and some musical joy.
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