This is edition 2026/176 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: What's in Nicky Hager's Dirty Work
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 📚 Edwards summarises Nicky Hager's new book Dirty Work: The Taxpayers' Union and New Zealand's Hard Right, launched in Wellington with copies sold out in about 20 minutes.
- 🧭 He still backs Hager's past work as democratically useful, but says this book especially should not be taken on trust: it rests heavily on former staff interviews plus documents, not a single documentary leak.
- 🏛️ Chapter One opens at Alan Gibbs's Kaipara property for the Union's tenth anniversary, then traces Jordan Williams's education under Brash, Lusk, Slater and Franks, including Vote for Change and a post-quake 'sacrificial lambs' exchange.
- ⚖️ Chapter Two leans on the Colin Craig court record: Williams sharing confidential claims, Whale Oil posts, a $1.27m jury award later set aside, and Hager's claim the Union board paid out a sexual harassment case, which Williams and Ruth Richardson deny.
- 💧 Chapter Three casts Stop Three Waters as the breakthrough: petition growth, co-governance rhetoric, supporter lists leaping past 150,000, and staff talk of money 'pouring in like a pokie machine'.
- 🧾 Hager links Hobson's Pledge payments to Williams's Campaign Company and argues Act and Luxon shifted toward race politics once the Union showed there were votes and money in it; Farrar disputes key staff claims.
- 🧱 The free preview ends mid-book; paid sections cover Williams's showmanship, apprentices, tobacco, money trails, supporters and media 'enablers'.
- 💡 Takeaway: A chapter guide that treats Dirty Work as both a public-interest dossier and a contested brief, with the sharpest fights still behind the paywall.
2. RICHARD PREBBLE: Nicky Hager's new book reminds me of my shameful mistake
Richard Prebble - Brash & Mitchell
- 🔥 Prebble says every Hager 'hit job' reminds him he was once a target, and the memory still burns with shame.
- 📖 Hager wrote that Roger Douglas and Prebble were part of a conspiracy to appoint Don Brash as Reserve Bank Governor.
- 🏛️ Prebble says a basic check would have shown Governors were appointed by the Governor-General in Council, meaning the Prime Minister, not the finance ministers.
- 👤 David Lange knew Brash and chose him; Prebble says he only knew Brash from the media and opposed the appointment.
- ✅ He now calls Brash New Zealand's greatest Governor for years of low inflation, and admits he was wrong.
- 📞 Had Hager put the allegation to him, something Prebble says Hager never does, he would have confessed the mistake.
- 💰 Instead of buying the new book, Prebble donated straight to the Taxpayers' Union for exposing waste.
- 💡 Takeaway: A one-page blast that treats Dirty Work as recycled hit-job method: allege first, never check with the named.
3. What's so wrong with Taxpayers Union?
Peter Allan Williams - Peter Allan Williams
- 🧾 Williams defends the Taxpayers' Union as a lobby that calls out waste and proposes better ways to spend taxpayers' money, with 'union' used as a deliberate piss-take of left sacred cows.
- 🏌️ He recalls asking Jordan Williams years ago to probe Major Events Fund golf subsidies, still sees that slush as indefensible in a fiscal hole, and wishes the Union had pushed harder.
- ⚖️ He stresses the Union has attacked National-led governments as well as Labour, and names Simon Watts as a regular target over council accountability.
- 🗣️ Disclosure: he sat on the TPU board in 2022-23, still writes occasional member letters and does paid podcasts, and says Hager never approached him.
- 📣 On day one of Dirty Work he sees no explosive scoop: Williams's Campaign Company crossover with Hobson's Pledge, Groundswell and the Free Speech Union is already known in media circles.
- 🛡️ He backs Williams's pre-release fundraising to fight alleged untruths or distortions, and notes Hager again offered no right of reply, citing book 'sabotage' risk Williams says publishers were promised against.
- 🧓 Hager's 'angry old men' line about Maori rights lands on Williams personally: living by the Clutha, he cites Ngai Tahu's unresolved freshwater claim as a real stakes issue, not a fever dream.
- 💡 Takeaway: A former insider's rebuttal that Dirty Work is personality politics, while the Union remains an ideas factory in a contest the left should answer with better ideas.
4. Sunset for the Broadcasting Standards Authority
A Halfling's View - A Halfling's View
- 📜 The Broadcasting (Disestablishment of Broadcasting Standards Authority) Amendment Bill was introduced on 22 September 2026, a day before the House rises for the election.
- ⏸️ It will not get a first reading this session; the hope is a returned coalition picks it up. For now it is a symbolic sunset notice.
- 🚫 What replaces the BSA? Nothing. Complaints culture loses its state-funded forum; the industry is expected to self-regulate, including via the New Zealand Media Council.
- 💸 The broadcasting levy would end. If the Media Council inherits complaints work it will need more money, but that becomes an industry problem, not a Crown one.
- 🏷️ Classification and labelling duties for broadcast content are repealed, with audiences still expected to choose, and objectionable content still caught under Classification Act strict liability.
- 📅 If enacted after the election, commencement is 1 September 2027 or earlier by Order in Council, with time to wind down BSA files and adapt on-demand rules.
- 📡 The Halfling says the BSA doomed itself by stretching jurisdiction online against The Platform, and warns Internal Affairs not to invent a renamed online regulator.
- 💡 Takeaway: A coalition marker that the BSA's sun can set on 7 November, but only if voters return a government willing to finish the job.
5. How an overhang could change the election result
Centrist Editor - Centrist
- 🧮 Centrist explains an overhang: a party wins more electorates than its party vote buys, keeps those MPs, and Parliament grows past 120.
- 📊 Under MMP the party vote sets total seats; electorate wins usually reshuffle who fills them rather than adding seats, until an overhang breaks that pattern.
- ➕ Example: four seats on the party vote but six electorates means six MPs, a two-seat overhang, a 122-member House and 62 needed for a majority.
- 🎯 That opens tactical splits: electorate votes for one party, party votes for an ally, so the first keeps electorates while the ally gains list seats.
- 🟢 Te Pati Maori floated this at launch; Oliver Hartwich estimates three or four extra seats for the left under his polling assumptions.
- 🔵 An NZ Initiative report also models National winning more electorates than its party-vote share, letting some party votes shift to partners without cutting National's electorate haul.
- 📈 In that model, moving one in nine National party votes delivers a government majority; one in four yields 69 coalition seats in a 132-member Parliament even if the opposition wins more votes overall.
- 💡 Takeaway: Hartwich wants the Electoral Commission to balance overhangs with compensating seats so coordinated split voting cannot quietly rewrite proportionality.
6. Shrinking Options.
Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter
- 🏷️ Subtitle on the free teaser: 'Chris Hipkins has decided to go easy on the Landlord Class. Wondering why? Read on.'
- 🎭 Trotter labels the piece 'purely speculative political fiction', even if parts may feel persuasive.
- 📞 The open scene is the Monday after election Saturday: Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins compare notes on a call arranged weeks earlier.
- 📉 Both men, in this fiction, already saw major-party support trending down and knew winning 2026 could hurt almost as much as losing.
- 🧱 The free preview ends there; the argument about Labour easing off landlords sits behind the paywall.
- 🔒 Cam's link was isFreemail=false / only_paid; no usable mid-article excerpt beyond the setup.
- 🗳️ Read as campaign-season allegory about constrained centre-left options, not a reported leak.
- 💡 Takeaway: A thin public hook about Hipkins, landlords and post-election pain; the actual thesis is members-only.
7. CHRIS McVEIGH: The Thin Veneer
Chris McVeigh - Brash & Mitchell
- 📖 McVeigh frames the column with Lord of the Flies and a line about monsters wearing our clothes, then turns to Parliament's slipping standards.
- 🍼 He starts with the old image of Speaker Trevor Mallard bottle-feeding a baby in the chair, now a marker of cosy informality that aged badly.
- 🤬 Fast-forward: MPs ejected after the c-word in the House, while newsreaders still coyly say 'the c word'.
- 👕 He ties that to Maori Party come-as-you-are dress, a haka on the floor, and Greens in keffiyehs as progressive badges.
- 🎩 Dress, speech and behaviour, he argues, uphold civilised debate; drop them and you risk the whole orderly structure.
- 🗣️ He rejects swapping Shakespeare and Churchill for bar-room crudeness and street-kid attire in the debating chamber.
- 🇩🇪 The 'salami effect' of Weimar erosions is his warning: each slice sold as progressive until the protections are gone.
- 💡 Takeaway: The thin veneer of parliamentary dignity is what stands between a legislature and a creche, beer garden or costume party, and restoring it may already be late.
8. Trump Just Upped The Ante In His Fight With Left-Wing Media
Brecca Stoll - The Daily Wire
- 📺 After the White House press pool boycotted covering President Trump, the administration launched 'Trump TV' as a 24/7 stream of moments, announcements and archive clips.
- 🗣️ The White House posted: not every big moment made it onto your TV, 'now it can.'
- 🗻 The New York Post said the first broadcast was Trump's 3 July Mount Rushmore speech, after a day of teaser posts including a satellite truck rolling in.
- 🚫 On Friday Trump barred Politico, CNN and MSNOW from the White House.
- 📡 On Monday the TV pool (Fox, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC) suspended pool coverage, including for the UN General Assembly trip, so no shared TV crew.
- 📝 The five networks jointly said the public needs independent information and no administration should punish outlets for reporting it objects to.
- 📷 The Washington Post and New York Times joined a photo blackout of that day's presidential events in solidarity, due to resume after midnight Eastern.
- 💡 Takeaway: Trump answers a pool walkout with his own channel, hardening the standoff between the White House and legacy TV news.
9. The Hager story implodes even more
David Farrar - Kiwiblog
- 🧨 Farrar says he was done blogging Dirty Work until three fresh collapses landed in one day.
- 🙅 Toy boss Nick Mowbray denies ever donating to the Taxpayers' Union or entering its office, claims Hager stated as fact; Mowbray has now donated in outrage.
- 💸 Farrar jokes Hager may prove the Union's best fundraiser yet.
- ⚖️ The book said the TU board paid out at least one sexual harassment case against Jordan Williams; chair Ruth Richardson says past chairs and board members know of no complaint or payment.
- 📻 On Ryan Bridge, Hager then said his two sources claimed the payout was hidden even from board members.
- 🏦 Farrar calls that impossible: bank payments need at least two directors' authorisation, so there is no 'secret payout' lane.
- 📬 On the claim Farrar illegally gave National's database for a 2020 TU mailout, the Union produced the commercial invoice for the list it actually bought.
- 💡 Takeaway: Three concrete denials and a paper trail that leave Dirty Work looking, to Farrar, unserious.
10. John Cleese can say whatever the hell he wants about Islam
Brendan O'Neill - spiked
- 🎭 O'Neill says Britain now runs on Islamo-censorship, and John Cleese is the latest comic told he is unwelcome for mocking Islam.
- 🎬 Cleese is touring with a Holy Grail stage show; in Birmingham a group called Deenified branded him a 'hate preacher' and demanded Town Hall cancel for 'community respect'.
- 💬 His alleged sins include saying the Koran is about power, that British cultural heritage is superior, that 'Islamophobia' wards off criticism, and that fear of murder chills comics.
- ✅ O'Neill treats all of that as legitimate argument about an ideology, not a crime warranting civic exile.
- 🧱 He argues velvet talk of community respect hides a medieval intolerance for the liberty to speak and joke.
- 🇬🇧 The piece frames Cleese's late-career stage work as ordinary entertainment being policed by blasphemy activists in England's second city.
- 🛑 Ending the indulgence, he says, means refusing cancel demands and letting comics mock any religion, including Islam.
- 💡 Takeaway: If Cleese cannot take the piss after 65 years of comedy, free speech in Britain is already on life support.
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!
Lynne
Absolutely brilliant to receive these current and thought provoking articles.
Jonathan
Just wanted to let you know that I’m loving this new 10@10. Much appreciated from someone who chooses to read/watch almost NO mainstream media.
Murray
Cam, relish your output as the newspaper in Christchurch is so intent on non news. Thankyou
Fred
Thanks for Ten @ Ten, really enjoy reading it.Keep it up. All the best, keep healthy.
Jocko
Wonderful info not otherwise available in NZ. More power to your elbow! Thanks.
