This is edition 2026/178 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: In defence of Nicky Hager's Dirty Work
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 📚 Edwards calls Dirty Work the weakest of Hager's trilogy after The Hollow Men and Dirty Politics, but says it is still well worth reading for what it tells us about the organisations around Jordan Williams.
- 🔍 He argues the fight over errors and Three Waters has crowded out the book's most valuable contribution: tracing the founders, staff, campaign suppliers and sometimes the money behind groups presenting as grassroots movements, student groups or independent trusts.
- 🗣️ Critics get a hearing. In the Listener, Danyl McLauchlan writes 'Everyone does this' and says Hager treats 'the ordinary, pedestrian work of politics as shocking crimes', while the Herald's Thomas Coughlan notes the reliance on vague anonymous former staff.
- 🎙️ Henry Cooke reports Hager 'could not, obviously, argue that the Taxpayers' Union had been working in secret', and on Newsroom's Raw Politics, Sam Sachdeva singles out the tobacco connections for further investigation.
- 🌱 Edwards says the real issue is astroturfing, which Hager defines as an orchestrated political operation 'disguised as a spontaneous grassroots movement', and that the question arises when a campaign hides its sponsorship, direction or constituency.
- 🧾 The Union rejects the claim it is a 'fake' organisation and says about two-thirds of its donations come from grassroots donors. Ani O'Brien argues Williams would not be so public if he were hiding something.
- 🗳️ Hager's early example is the 2011 Vote for Change campaign against MMP, which he calls 'essentially a three-person initiative' of Williams, Simon Lusk and Cameron Slater, and 'the model for establishing the TU two years later'.
- 🏢 The Campaign Company, set up in 2021 and sharing the Union's Auckland office, turns petition signers into database contacts and then donors, and has worked for Hobson's Pledge, Groundswell, the Sensible Sentencing Trust, the Free Speech Union and the Union itself.
- 🔒 The paywall cuts in before sections on Big Tobacco and the dairy owners, the return of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, and questions of control.
- 💡 Takeaway: Edwards is no cheerleader for the book, but says groups claiming to speak for taxpayers, students or small businesses deserve checking.
2. We can’t explain the Super problem, let alone solve it
Natalia Albert - Less Certain
- 🎤 Albert went to an IDEA panel, 'What should we do about the Super age?', with Cameron Bagrie, Susan St John and Bill Rosenberg, hoping for clarity. She 'came out with a headache'.
- 🔢 Official figures for what NZ Super costs now do not line up: Treasury's Long-term Fiscal Statement says 5.1 per cent of GDP, its May Budget update about 5.6 per cent, and Inland Revenue 4.4 per cent, with roughly $4 billion riding on whether tax is netted off.
- 🙋 When she asked how to make the debate accessible, she was told better communication from economists was a stretch and that understanding it was the younger generations' responsibility.
- 🧭 Drawing on Deborah Stone's Policy Paradox, she says each panellist defined a different problem: Bagrie political economy, St John distribution (claw it back from high earners), Rosenberg revenue.
- 📐 Treasury modelling says holding the cost steady by age alone means an eligibility age of 72 by 2065 and 75 by 2100, so the 65 versus 67 argument is 'a fight over a couple of sixteenths'.
- 📉 The bigger lever is indexation. Dropping the wage floor would cut the 2065 cost to about 5.7 per cent of GDP instead of 8, but leave the pension about a quarter lower, and around 40 per cent of over-65s have virtually no other income.
- 🏛️ Nobody owns the analysis: the 2025 Retirement Commission review terms left out the age, indexation and means testing, responsibility is split across Willis, Upston and Brewer, and the main longitudinal survey was discontinued after 2010.
- ⚖️ At 65, Māori men can expect about 15 more years of life, compared with nearly 20 for non-Māori men, yet Treasury's notes do not break results down by ethnicity or occupation.
- 🗳️ Blame avoidance explains the silence: an RNZ Reid Research poll found 58 per cent want the age kept at 65, National released compulsory KiwiSaver and sat on the unpopular half, and Winston Peters calls 65 'a top line'.
- 💡 Takeaway: Ask every candidate who knocks on your door three questions: which number, which lever, and who pays.
3. Your Business, Their Election Promise
Roger Partridge - Plain Thinking
- ⚠️ Partridge says National, Labour, the Greens and NZ First have each promised to intervene in private commercial arrangements: supermarket ownership, retirement village contracts, commercial leases and the price of food.
- ⚖️ None of it rests on a finding that anyone has broken the law. No court judgment, no Commerce Commission determination, nothing.
- 🛒 The Greens would take 120 supermarkets into public ownership for $2.8 billion, Labour would outlaw 'excessive' food prices, NZ First proposed cutting Foodstuffs in half in April, and National agreed on 16 September.
- 🚚 Foodstuffs was formed by Auckland grocers in 1922 and still belongs to the grocers running 500-odd stores, with one distribution centre and truck run serving New World, PAK'nSAVE and Four Square.
- 📊 The Government's analysis assumes, rather than measures, that New World and PAK'nSAVE hold each other's prices up, and assumes a split adds one per cent to cost of goods sold. At two per cent, most of the promised gain vanishes.
- 🇺🇸 Answering Liam Hehir, he notes Standard Oil and AT&T were broken up by courts after antitrust suits, not by Parliament dividing a lawful business by statute.
- 🏗️ The real barrier is entry: ten district plans contain fourteen provisions capping supermarket numbers, and Eric Crampton told a select committee large-scale entry was close to impossible.
- 🏡 On retirement villages, National would force repayment to departing residents within nine months and Labour within three. Officials estimate three months could need up to $4.1 billion of extra capital and add up to $118,000 to a unit's price.
- 💡 Takeaway: 'Nobody builds what they cannot keep.'
4. MURIEL NEWMAN: STRATEGIC VOTING TO WIN
Muriel Newman - Brash & Mitchell
- 🗳️ Newman recalls the wasted votes of First Past the Post: Bob Jones's New Zealand Party won one vote in eight in 1984 but no seats, wasting 256,000 votes, and Social Credit won one in five in 1981 but only two seats.
- ➕ Under MMP, party votes are wasted only below the five per cent threshold or when a party wins more electorates than its party vote entitles it to, creating an overhang, as happened in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2014 and 2023.
- 📉 The combined National and Labour party vote has slumped from 81 per cent in 2017 to around 55 per cent in the latest 2026 polls.
- ✂️ Vote splitting is growing: almost 36 per cent of voters split in 2023, up from 27 per cent in 2020, including over 70 per cent of ACT and NZ First party voters.
- 🧮 Quoting Oliver Hartwich, she says National is on track for about 37 electorates, so close to 900,000 National party votes may yield no extra seat. If one National voter in four switched, the coalition could win 69 seats in a Parliament of 132.
- 📊 On the Herald's poll of polls, both blocs sit on 60 seats. If National held all 44 of its electorates, an overhang of eight would give the centre-right 68 seats in a 128-seat Parliament.
- 🎯 She lists six Labour seats where the combined 2023 ACT and NZ First vote exceeded Labour's winning margin, including Mt Albert, Nelson and Wigram, plus six narrow National seats such as Hutt South and Banks Peninsula.
- 🪶 She notes the Māori Party is campaigning on vote splitting to exploit the overhang.
- 💡 Takeaway: With up to 900,000 centre-right party votes at risk of being wasted, Newman says the way voters use their two votes could decide the balance of power.
5. Don’t Call It Capitalism.
Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter
- 🛒 Trotter asks how New Zealand's supermarkets became 'the catalyst for draconian state interventionism'.
- 🟢 He says the Greens veering towards 'that Old Time Socialist Religion' might have been anticipated.
- 🔵 Few, he argues, would have predicted the National Party 'slipstreaming them quite so blatantly'.
- 🏭 He describes the largest conservative party's 'sudden conversion to the doctrines of "Comrade State"'.
- 🔴 The upshot, he writes, is to make Labour, which once favoured nationalising all farmland, 'look like the soul of moderation'.
- 🇷🇺 His subtitle: 'Policies worthy of Soviet Russia circa 1926, seem ludicrously heroic in the New Zealand of 2026.'
- 🔒 Only the two opening paragraphs are free. The rest of the column is for paid subscribers.
- 💡 Takeaway: 'Truly, the 2026 General Election grows weirder with every passing day.'
6. RODNEY HIDE: Israel is The Great Decolonisation
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🗺️ Hide says Chlöe Swarbrick wants 'decolonisation' language for Palestine and a map with no Israel on it, and that applying her own standard honestly makes Israel the decolonisation.
- 📣 At Auckland Domain in November 2023 she led the chant 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free', and called objections a 'purposeful distraction'.
- 📺 On Q+A she kept the line that 'Palestinian freedom is necessary', treating pushback as an 'intentional misunderstanding'.
- 🌊 Geography is not subtle, he writes: the river is the Jordan, the sea the Mediterranean, and the chant names the whole strip Palestine. It does not say two states.
- 🏫 Kadimah School had told her years earlier the phrase was 'at best, a call for the destruction of the Jewish state'.
- 📜 Jews are not a 1948 import, he argues. Empires from Rome to Britain layered over them, 1948 restored Jewish self-rule, and hundreds of thousands of Jews then arrived as refugees from Arab and Muslim countries.
- ⚖️ He says consistency matters: you cannot treat seventh-century conquest as permanent title and Jewish reconstitution as 'occupation'.
- 💡 Takeaway: The slogan 'is not the decolonisation of the Middle East. It is the demand to undo the one that already happened.'
7. RICHARD PREBBLE: Is breaking up Foodstuffs consistent with centre-right values?
Richard Prebble - Brash & Mitchell
- 🛒 Prebble answers a 'National Party apologist' in the Herald who argued that being in favour of markets does not mean being in favour of big business.
- ❓ He asks when National believes a successful company becomes too big to enjoy property rights, freedom of contract and the protection of the rule of law.
- 📊 Foodstuffs has about 55 per cent of the supermarket sector, which he says is far from a monopoly.
- 🏛️ The Commerce Commission found the barriers include planning restrictions and restrictive land and lease covenants, which are being removed. It says new competitors are entering, and it has not recommended a breakup.
- 📞 Telecom is no precedent, he says: it separated Chorus so it could take part in the Government's fibre rollout.
- 🚫 No previous National government has ordered the dismantling of a lawful business.
- 🔍 Christopher Luxon says the breakup has been thoroughly investigated. Prebble asks 'By whom?' and says the only evidence he knows of is the polls.
- 💡 Takeaway: 'Poll-driven parties do not have conservative principles. They are populist.'
8. Left Ramps Up War On Free Speech With Lawfare, Legislation, And Films Attacking Zuckerberg and Musk
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- ⚖️ A Santa Fe jury on Friday found Meta liable for deceiving New Mexicans when it promised greater censorship.
- 💰 The law allows a fine of up to $5,000 per violation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez says the total could be $219 billion, with up to $76 billion for 15,293,184 alleged violations in three speech categories.
- 🎙️ Shellenberger frames it as a fine partly for not censoring the free and legal speech of Americans, including Joe Rogan, more than Meta already did.
- 🧑⚖️ Law professor Jonathan Turley tells Public the litigation aims 'to achieve indirectly what they could not achieve directly through government censorship', using the courts to copy the EU.
- 🌐 The verdict comes amid bipartisan demands for AI regulation and calls from the UK, Europe and Australia for more government censorship of legal speech online.
- 🏛️ Barack Obama is quoted saying 'We're going to have to create new town squares' with 'certain rules'.
- 🎬 In two weeks Sony releases Aaron Sorkin's film The Social Reckoning, which Shellenberger says portrays Zuckerberg as a villain for supporting free speech and falsely suggests the censorship is to protect children.
- 🔒 The free preview covers the verdict, Obama and the Sorkin film. The legislation and Musk sections promised in the headline sit behind the paywall.
- 💡 Takeaway: On Shellenberger's telling, courts and Hollywood are doing the censorship work governments could not.
9. Douglas Murray: How the West Lost Its Will to Reverse Mass Migration
Douglas Murray - The Free Press
- 🗳️ An editor's note from Mene Ukueberuwa says polls show moderate voters revolting against the White House on the Iran war, the economy and immigration ahead of the midterms, but Murray argues an urgent issue demands perseverance.
- ⚖️ Murray asks whether a country can allow mass lawbreaking and retain its integrity, noting no country would let people walk into another person's house.
- 📉 A Gallup poll in June found support for deportations had fallen to 39 per cent from 47 per cent in 2024, with opposition up from 51 to 58 per cent.
- 🚨 He says ICE tactics have turned off many would-be supporters, and Republicans are now distancing themselves well beyond condemning the worst excesses.
- 📺 Representative María Elvira Salazar released an ad excoriating the president for detaining illegal migrants who 'had no criminal record'.
- 🛠️ He concedes that reversing illegal migration is 'a logistically difficult and often unsightly business'.
- 📖 Researching The Strange Death of Europe a decade ago, he found almost no politicians, however 'right-wing' or 'populist', had thought much about how to actually reverse mass migration.
- 🔒 The free preview ends there. The rest of the essay is for paid subscribers.
- 💡 Takeaway: Murray's case, per the subtitle, is that there is 'no other way to undo the harms of unchecked migration and reassert the law'.
10. ‘Fauda’ Tells the World the Truth
Peter Savodnik - The Free Press
- 📺 Savodnik says Fauda, the Netflix series about an Israeli counterterrorism unit, was compelling and smart through seasons 1 to 4 (2015 to early 2023), but 'an escape'.
- 🕯️ Then October 7, 2023, happened, he writes, and Fauda 'became something much bigger'.
- 📅 The fifth season, out earlier this month, opens two years after the Hamas attack on the Jewish state.
- 🎭 For the first six episodes you see little of the violence, just hints and fragments, yet death presses in on everyone: 'The dead loom larger than the living.'
- 🍇 Unit commander Doron Kavillio has retreated to his grape farm with his wife and kids, 'a broken soul attempting and mostly failing to repair himself'.
- 🧠 He cannot remember several hours from that day, and it is unclear whether the brokenness comes from the near wipeout of the unit at the end of season 4 or somewhere else.
- ❓ The subtitle asks whether, in an era when facts lose out to narratives, a drama about an Israeli counterterror unit can change minds about the Jewish state.
- 🔒 Only the opening of the piece is free. The rest is for paid subscribers.
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