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# Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/179
- URL: https://goodoil.news/your-daily-ten-10-2026-179/
- Published: 2026-09-28T21:00:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-28T21:00:15.000Z
- Description: 10 News Stories They Chose Not to Tell You
- Author: Cam Slater
- Tags: Ten@10, NZ Politics, Election 2026, Economy, Media, Free Speech, Censorship, Israel, UK Politics, EU Politics, AUS Politics, Technology

**This is edition 2026/179 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!

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!D8sA!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe2d5f3ac-ff72-4d81-bf8d-9e9889cd300f_2250x1276.png)

## 1\. Democracy Briefing: The campaign to engineer a National overhang

*Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project*

- 🏗️ Edwards picks up Henry Cooke's front page report in the Post that Harry Mowbray, father of the siblings behind Zuru, has been calling around to get a campaign going that exploits the MMP overhang to help the coalition parties. Mowbray reportedly believes 'anywhere from 10 extra MPs to 30 is possible'.
- 🗳️ The pitch is 'electorate vote National, party vote Act or New Zealand First'. None of the three coalition parties will put its name to it, and National is openly hostile.
- 🧮 He sets out the mechanics: a party that wins more electorates than its party vote entitles it to keeps them, and Parliament grows. In his hypothetical, a 58 to 62 result becomes 64 to 62 in a 126-seat House without the coalition's combined party vote rising.
- 📻 Advocates he names include Don Brash ('The right would be unstoppable'), Michael Laws, Peter Williams, Ashley Church, Act candidate Paul Henry, Muriel Newman's NZCPR, Cameron Slater at the Good Oil, and a 'Two Votes, Two MPs' website that names Dieuwe de Boer in its authorisation statement.
- 📊 Much of the arithmetic comes from Oliver Hartwich of the New Zealand Initiative, whose modelling found that if one National party vote in nine moved to a coalition partner, the Government could win a majority even with fewer total votes than the opposition.
- ⚖️ Edwards accepts that splitting your vote is legitimate, but objects to coordinating votes to produce a Parliament less representative of the party vote, likening the risk to the 1978 and 1981 first past the post results.
- 📜 Electoral law is an obstacle. Cooke writes that a paid pamphlet telling people how to vote would likely count as an election advertisement, and outside campaigners promoting a party need its written permission. Mowbray was looking at spending $17,000, which matches the unregistered third-party limit.
- 📱 Edwards has been told some on the right are considering paying social media influencers, but the Electoral Commission's exemption only covers people publishing personal views 'without making or receiving payment'. He wants the Commission to spell out the rules now.
- 🏛️ He says the next government should review the third-party campaign rules and the overhang itself through an independent, cross-party process.
- 💡 Takeaway: Edwards backs Michael Swanson's advice: 'vote for the person you want in your electorate, and give your party vote to the party you actually want in Parliament.'

[Read More](https://www.democracyproject.org.nz/p/democracy-briefing-the-campaign-to?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7b14b8_c6a1be880ec143f7ae0ecebfd9a4b726~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_189,h_195,al_c,lg_1,q_85/7b14b8_c6a1be880ec143f7ae0ecebfd9a4b726~mv2.png)

## 2\. RODNEY HIDE: Whatever they come up with

*Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell*

- 🎤 Hide says it took thirty seconds. Asked under a marquee whether he agreed with the ICC arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, Christopher Luxon said New Zealand supports the ICC and the ICJ, 'and that's why we support whatever they come up with.'
- 🔁 He notes Luxon said in December 2024 that New Zealand supports the ICC 'and we would be obligated to do so', and nearly two years on he had not moved an inch.
- 🏛️ Hide argues Luxon is treating the court's judgment as New Zealand's judgment, sight unseen, something no prime minister would say about our own Supreme Court, and handing it to a court no New Zealander elected or can remove.
- 🇮🇱 Israel has never joined the ICC. The court claims jurisdiction because it chose in 2015 to treat 'Palestine' as a member state, which Hide calls a political decision that many serious international lawyers dispute.
- ⚖️ Under complementarity the court should only step in when a country cannot or will not deal with its own people, yet Israel's independent judiciary struck down the Netanyahu government's own judicial reform in 2024.
- 🌍 Enforcement is selective, he says: Mongolia hosted Vladimir Putin in 2024 despite a warrant, France says Netanyahu has immunity, Hungary welcomed him and announced it was leaving the court, and Germany's Chancellor said he would find a way for him to visit.
- 🇺🇸 The rules-based order was built and underwritten by American power after 1945, he notes, and the United States has never joined the ICC, rejects its claim over Israel and has sanctioned its officials.
- 🗣️ Drawing on his years fielding doorstop questions, Hide says the question was predictable, and Luxon could at least have said New Zealand would meet its legal obligations and decide any actual case on its facts.
- 💡 Takeaway: Hide calls 'whatever they come up with' a blank cheque written to strangers, and says decisions affecting New Zealand should be made by people New Zealanders elect and can throw out.

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/rodney-hide-whatever-they-come-up-with?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7b14b8_6a8b6e67a31b4feb8b1c60d8cae0a2b6~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_416,h_237,al_c,lg_1,q_80/7b14b8_6a8b6e67a31b4feb8b1c60d8cae0a2b6~mv2.jpg)

## 3\. RICHARD PREBBLE: Who really pays tax?

*Richard Prebble - Brash & Mitchell*

- 📊 Prebble points to a poll this week finding only 4 per cent of people think they should pay more tax, while 64 per cent support a wealth tax.
- 🧾 He notes New Zealand has a progressive tax system: the more you earn, the higher the proportion of your income you pay in tax.
- 💰 The top 10 per cent of earners pay 48 per cent of all personal income tax.
- 🔄 Government transfers are progressive too, with those in greatest need receiving the most.
- 🧮 When IRD subtracts the benefits and tax credits people receive from the tax they pay, the top 10 per cent account for 101 per cent of net income tax.
- ❓ The figure tops 100 because the other 90 per cent, taken together, receive slightly more in benefits and tax credits than they pay in income tax.
- 🗳️ He wonders whether 64 per cent would still say yes if the poll had asked: 'The top 10 percent of earners provide 101 percent of net income tax. Do you think they should pay more?'
- 📝 Short one: this is a brief column of around 200 words, and these bullets cover all of it.

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/richard-prebble-who-really-pays-tax?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/2026/09/Flounder-fishing-in-Massachusetts.jpg)

## 4\. Everything you ever wanted to know about the popularity of flounder in Massachusetts

*Karl du Fresne - Karl du Fresne*

- 📰 Du Fresne goes through that day's Stuff-owned Wairarapa Times-Age: 32 tabloid pages, of which seven are exclusive local content, including a sports page, a gardening page and a half-page of reader material.
- 🗞️ The rest is generated centrally by Stuff: two pages of national news, one of world news, three of sport, and what he calls filler or 'editorial dross', published because it is cheap, readily available and fills space.
- 📋 His list includes a full-page AP feature on the US and China AI contest, opinion pieces by Wellington academics and an industry lobbyist, a cruise ship travel spread, three pages of puzzles (one replacing the weather page) and two pages on streaming TV.
- 🐟 The headline comes from last Friday's paper, which ran a 1700-word AP feature on flounder's resurgence on Massachusetts restaurant tables. He doubts it gripped readers in Eketahuna and Carterton.
- 👷 He credits the paper with still having an editor and four reporters, notes the editor has no control over non-local pages, and says seven local pages is better than many Stuff regionals manage.
- 🎓 Stuff's opinion pieces, he argues, suit dry academic journals more than readers who are hairdressers, bank tellers, nurses, farmers and truck drivers, and he suspects they run because writers want exposure and supply them for nothing.
- 📧 He emailed Stuff owner and CEO Sinead Boucher, accusing Stuff of treating regional readers with contempt and asking why the star reporters she boasts about never appear in the Times-Age.
- 🧱 Her reply, as he describes it, confirmed Stuff runs print and digital as separate silos. Stuff Digital is owned 50/50 with Trade Me, and its content is not available to Stuff newspapers.
- 😤 He calls her tone prickly and defensive, says she suggested he was a cranky old has-been, and says he simply wants newspapers to survive and flourish.
- 💡 Takeaway: Du Fresne calls Stuff 'a corporate train wreck' and says nothing its executives do or say gives him any confidence.

[Read More](https://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2026/09/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know.html?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hJ_R!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0d9a9616-e7dc-4171-ad02-139094b11144_2870x1308.png)

## 5\. Censorship Advocates Seek To Use Bots And Anonymous “Sock Puppet” Accounts For Themselves While Denying Them To Others

*Michael Shellenberger - Public*

- 🌍 Shellenberger says Western leaders have spent a decade demanding an end to online anonymity to shut down bots and fake accounts, particularly Russian ones.
- 🇩🇪 He quotes German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in February ('I want to see real names on the internet') and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at Davos in January 2025, who proposed tying every social media account to a European digital identity wallet.
- 🇬🇷 Greece's digital governance minister proposed in April 2026 linking every profile to a verified identity, and Emmanuel Macron has called for 'the disappearance of fake accounts'.
- ⚠️ He argues the same advocates of censoring legal speech now want the legal power to wage information warfare through anonymous accounts and an explicit 'sock puppet' strategy.
- 🇦🇺 Buried in the Australian government's new censorship bill, he says, is a definition: 'A sock puppet identity is a false or fictitious identity assumed by a person' using an online service.
- 🕵️ The bill then authorises eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to create and use sock puppets to 'disseminate' information, he writes.
- 🤖 The subtitle says Democrats both used and demanded censorship of bots and funded research into them, and that Australia's governments now want to use bots in violation of the platforms' own policies.
- 🔒 Paywalled: only the opening is free, so this covers just that part. The rest is for paid subscribers.

[Read More](https://www.public.news/p/censorship-advocates-seek-to-use?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 6\. RODNEY HIDE: One job ad

*Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell*

- 💼 Hide points to a Department of Conservation Seek listing for a Principal Iwi Strategy and Partnerships Advisor: Wellington, permanent, $110,033 to $145,000.
- 📜 The ad asks the appointee to strengthen Treaty partnerships, embed Te Tiriti o Waitangi principles across DOC, drive organisational change and give expert Treaty guidance, and mentions a new 'DOC Treaty Operating Model'.
- 🏛️ He notes Parliament has risen for the election after nearly three years of a government that promised to end co-governance, with ACT losing its Treaty principles vote in the House, National talking about ending race-based preference and NZ First thundering against co-governance.
- 🤔 Either the bureaucracy is a law unto itself, he writes, or the politicians are telling the public one story and the departments another.
- ❓ If the principles were unclear enough that Parliament debated a bill to define them, he asks, how does a department 'embed' them across the organisation?
- ⚖️ He accepts settlements are law and must be honoured, but says this role is about strengthening partnerships and changing the culture of a Crown agency from the inside.
- 🗣️ He calls phrases like 'Treaty partners' and 'organisational capability' the vocabulary of a parallel constitution administered by people who never face the voters.
- 🔁 Ministers can repeal a clause here and there, he says, but the job ads keep coming, and three years is long enough to change a department's hiring brief.
- 💡 Takeaway: One Seek listing will not decide an election, Hide says, but it should decide whether you believe a word they say.

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/rodney-hide-one-job-ad?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 7\. The Left’s Frail Prophet.

*Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter*

- 📕 Trotter reviews Dirty Work, Nicky Hager's latest book, calling it a 'low-voltage thunderbolt' and 'far-and-away his worst book ever'.
- 🔚 He suggests starting at the end, where the final chapters reveal Hager's reasons for writing and releasing it.
- 😔 What emerges there, Trotter says, is a man who cannot reconcile himself to his cherished ideology's impotence.
- 📈 In his view, the unforgivable sin of Jordan Williams and the Taxpayers' Union is their effectiveness: far more New Zealanders respond to Williams' messages than hang on Hager's every word.
- 🌈 He says Hager shares Martin Luther King's faith that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, and that an indifferent universe would make his life-long crusade meaningless.
- 📣 Greenpeace, Amnesty International and the Taxpayers' Union all run on the same practical considerations, he argues: attracting attention, igniting emotions, proffering solutions, inviting participation and asking for money.
- 🐟 Book readers, documentary festival goers and café debaters are not the most promising pool for 'dial-shifting dollars', he writes, yet that is Hager's pool, and even there he is an odd fish.
- 🔒 Paywalled: only the opening is free, so this covers just that part. The rest needs a paid subscription or free trial.

[Read More](https://christrotter418256.substack.com/p/the-lefts-frail-prophet)

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![](https://www.spiked-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/hamas-1536x864.jpg)

## 8\. The Hamas terrorist granted British citizenship

*Tom Slater - spiked*

- 🕵️ Slater writes about 'Mr X', an anonymous Hamas operative arrested in central London last November over an alleged plot to attack Jewish community centres, Israeli diplomats and pro-Israel demonstrations in Germany and Austria. He awaits trial and faces extradition to Germany if convicted.
- 🛂 X came to the UK more than a decade ago and was granted asylum, indefinite leave to remain and then citizenship, despite being a former bodyguard of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, the son of another Hamas official, and previously arrested in Egypt for allegedly smuggling guns into Gaza.
- 📰 The Sunday Times, whose exposé he draws on, says all of this was 'public knowledge' when he settled in Britain.
- 🔫 X is accused of moving handguns and ammunition to a storage depot in Vienna. Security sources told the paper he was 'essential' to a plot 'overseen by senior figures in Hamas', and he recorded a masked, armed video in front of a Hamas flag.
- 🇩🇪 After Israeli and German intelligence got wind of the plot, Germany worked with Austria, Denmark and the UK to arrest seven suspects and recover weapons including an AK-47.
- 🏠 Slater also names Muhammad Sawalha, a Hamas leader in the West Bank who arrived in the 1990s, is still in Britain despite a 2004 US indictment, co-founded the Muslim Association of Britain, and bought his Colindale council house under Right to Buy.
- ⏳ Hamas's military wing was proscribed in 2001 but its political wing only in 2021, he notes, and in the meantime Britain became a destination of choice for Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood figures claiming asylum.
- ⚖️ A judge originally granted X anonymity for 100 years, until The Sunday Times challenged it. The public will learn his name once legal proceedings conclude.
- 💡 Takeaway: Slater says a Britain that rolls out the red carpet to people who want to kill Jews cannot expect to survive, and calls for a reckoning over decades of Islamist appeasement.

[Read More](https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/09/27/the-hamas-terrorist-granted-british-citizenship/?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://www.spiked-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-2271673081-1536x864.jpg)

## 9\. The EU’s anti-democracy shield

*Norman Lewis - spiked*

- 🏛️ Lewis says the European Parliament this week endorsed a Special Committee report on the European Democracy Shield, effectively voting to make it a permanent institution, and hardly anybody noticed.
- 📅 Ursula von der Leyen proposed the Shield in 2024 and the Commission unveiled it in November 2025 to counter disinformation, foreign interference and hybrid threats. Its key legal instrument is the Digital Services Act.
- 🎯 Its stated target is 'foreign information manipulation and interference' (FIMI), which the EU defines to include a largely 'non-illegal pattern' of coordinated manipulative behaviour.
- 🇪🇺 Lewis argues the real focus is Europe's domestic information environment, and that labelling opposition to EU immigration policy as FIMI lets Brussels delegitimise it.
- 🏢 The vote gives the European Centre for Democratic Resilience its own mandate, a dedicated budget and the 'capacity to act'.
- 📄 The report refers to disinformation from 'foreign and domestic actors', wants 'due prominence' for 'verified sources', and seeks to protect 'information integrity' 'during and outside election periods'.
- ✅ He points to 'trusted flaggers', a network of fact-checking NGOs, €5 million for a European Fact-Checking Standards Network project and €2.5 million to continue the European Digital Media Observatory.
- 🗣️ The report's author, Swedish MEP Tomas Tobé, insists the aim is countering foreign interference, Russian bots and electoral manipulation. Lewis calls that disingenuous in the extreme.
- 💡 Takeaway: Lewis says a better name would be the Ministry of Truth, and that the free speech fight in Europe is now about who decides what Europeans see and whom they trust.

[Read More](https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/09/27/the-eus-anti-democracy-shield/?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-517322836.jpg)

## 10\. Defiling Asimov’s Laws

*Alexandra Marshall - The Spectator Australia*

- 🤖 Marshall says people assume AI is being designed loosely around Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but a sizeable chunk of AI is tilting toward violence by design.
- 📚 She recounts that Asimov coined 'robotics' in his 1941 story Liar!, introduced the Three Laws in Runaround, and expected the laws to be the part of his work that survived a century.
- 🎯 In her view AI has two chief objectives: replacing human mental labour and, in the defence industry, harming human beings under the banner of national defence.
- 💣 She says military AI deliberately rejects Asimov's protective framework, pointing to footage of AI drones chasing soldiers down on uncensored social media feeds.
- 🎭 She accuses CEOs and world leaders of fear-mongering about an AI apocalypse while reaching for public money and pushing regulation that shuts out competition.
- 🌡️ She calls AI doomsday the new climate change grift, a way to sell spending that would not win votes, especially as AI erases middle and working class jobs.
- 💵 Global AI spending was an estimated $1.7 trillion in 2025, rising to $2.7 trillion in 2026 and $3.6 trillion in 2027, and she says many defence and policing contracts are undisclosed.
- 🇦🇺 Australia earmarked something like $460 million for its National AI Plan in 2025, she writes, with about $2 billion more in areas that could include AI and possibly tens of billions in defence.
- 🪖 She argues Western governments want AI to replace soldiers as recruitment struggles, because AI-powered robots do not complain and take orders.
- 💡 Takeaway: Marshall wants politicians to drop the fabricated apocalypse line, stop pretending to care about digital safety, and be honest about what our money is buying.

[Read More](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/defiling-asimovs-laws/?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 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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