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# Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/180
- URL: https://goodoil.news/your-daily-ten-10-2026-180/
- Published: 2026-09-29T21:00:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T21:00:20.000Z
- Description: 10 News Stories They Chose Not to Tell You
- Author: Cam Slater
- Tags: Ten@10, NZ Politics, Election 2026, Polls, Economy, Culture Wars, Religion, AUS Politics, Free Speech, Censorship, Israel, Sport, USA Politics, China, Technology

**This is edition 2026/180 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_!0zqZ!,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%2Fd8cb9443-b0be-423e-847e-71b1e4d7ae4d_1920x1080.avif)

## 1\. Democracy Briefing: Major parties in name only

*Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project*

- 📉 Labour and National are on 28% each in the 1News-Verian poll, giving them just 56% of decided voters between them. Christopher Luxon is preferred prime minister on 19% and Chris Hipkins on 14%.
- 🗓️ The poll was taken between 23 and 27 September, mostly before both parties' Auckland campaign launches on Sunday, so it shows the slump the launches were supposed to turn around. Edwards says neither launch suggested they know how.
- 😨 Both leaders spent Sunday mostly talking about the other. Luxon told his audience 'You can't afford Chris Hipkins', and Hipkins said he had 'never felt more strongly in my life that the National Party is a risk to the future of this country.'
- 📢 Edwards says the 'politics of meh' he wrote about three weeks ago hasn't disappeared. It has simply become louder and more negative, built around fear of what the other lot might do.
- 📊 The pair's combined 1News support has gone from 67% in April to 61% in June, 59% in August and 56% now. Repeated on 7 November, it would be their lowest combined vote since National was formed in 1936\. The MMP low was 62% in 1996, and in 2017 they took about 81%.
- 🌿 The votes are going to the smaller parties: the Greens on 16%, their best ever result in the poll, Act on 11%, NZ First on 9% and Opportunity on 6%. Chlöe Swarbrick's response: 'No political party is entitled to anything.'
- 🧾 Newsroom's Sam Sachdeva counted the word 'tax', or variants of it, about 64 times in 54 minutes of National's speeches, and Luxon was introduced as 'Mr No New Taxes'.
- 📋 The Herald's Jamie Ensor and Adam Pearse wrote that beyond no new taxes 'there also wasn't much new of anything else', with the pledge card reading as if the 2023 pledges had been copied and changed up a tad.
- 💡 Takeaway: Edwards says the launches were an obvious chance to move beyond the politics of meh, but Sunday largely confirmed the problem, just at much greater volume.

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

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UMwg!,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%2F3669627f-0a1b-46c4-bb1e-38f7767fc7d7_2048x1152.png)

## 2\. Could Opportunity really work with the Right?

*Ani O'Brien - Thought Crimes*

- 🟦 Opportunity calls itself 'centrist', 'teal' and a 'blue-green party', and pitches itself as a constructive MMP kingmaker rather than an appendage of either bloc.
- 📝 Leader Qiulae Wong has now named five 'non-negotiable' bottom lines: a stronger, more independent Commerce Commission, lobbying regulation and donation caps, a ten year health plan, beginning a phase-out of bottom trawling, and recommitting to the Paris Agreement while protecting the Climate Change Commission.
- 💰 Its Land Value Tax and Citizen's Income are not bottom lines. O'Brien describes the Citizen's Income as up to $370 a week for everyone, funded in the party's ideal world by a land tax of 1.75% a year on urban land and 0.5% on rural land.
- 🏠 The party forecasts its policies would cut property prices by 10 to 15%, and says some 'asset rich, cash poor' people will need to make 'different choices'. O'Brien calls that socially and economically coercive.
- 🏗️ She finds real overlap with National on infrastructure maintenance and project appraisal, and on competition policy since National's Foodstuffs break-up plan, but Opportunity also wants up to $60 billion in extra infrastructure borrowing over ten years.
- 🌍 On climate it wants the 2050 biogenic methane target reset to 35 to 47% below 2017 levels, against the 14 to 24% the Government legislated, and wants more authority for the Climate Change Commission that Act would abolish.
- 📜 It would reverse the coalition's Takutai Moana changes, build Treaty analysis into lawmaking, and use a citizens' assembly on constitutional reform with Māori taking part 'as a Treaty partner'.
- ⚖️ It opposes Three Strikes, wants money moved from military-style academies into prevention and rehabilitation, and supports legal recreational cannabis. A policy to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 25 was walked back after blowback.
- 👥 O'Brien finds five of its top six candidates have spent much of their careers on wellbeing economics, regenerative food, environmental regulation, Treaty and indigenous governance, climate justice or the blue economy, including He Puapua co-author Kayla Kingdon-Bebb. Any coalition deal also needs 75% of the party board to approve it.
- 💡 Takeaway: O'Brien sees some bridges to the right, but concludes Opportunity's platform has far more synergy with Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, and that a vote for it is very likely to help the opposite of this Government's return.

[Read More](https://aniobrien.substack.com/p/could-opportunity-really-work-with-right)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bz91!,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%2F9b7c181e-33da-42a1-8aba-200ddc73dfc5_1920x1080.png)

## 3\. Strategic Voting in the New Zealand 2026 Election

*Penny Marie - Penny Marie NZ*

- 🗳️ Marie traces New Zealanders' fear of a 'wasted vote' to First-Past-the-Post. In 1981 Social Credit won over 20% of the vote but just two seats, and in 1978 and 1981 Labour won the national vote while National formed the government.
- 😰 She says threshold anxiety still squeezes minor parties at the wire, citing the Conservatives in 2014, NZ First in 2008 and the Christian Coalition in 1996, each of which polled above 5% in some pre-election polls.
- 🎯 This time TOP is walking the 5% tightrope. If it gets in, the left bloc may be able to form a four-party government; if it misses, its party votes are spread across all the other parties.
- 🔵 On the right, the problem is vote efficiency. National is polling around 30%, worth roughly 36 seats, but holds 44 electorates, and some commentators predict it will win 38 to 40.
- ➕ A party never loses an electorate it wins, so the House expands. She says an overhang of as many as eight National seats is not unrealistic, and an overhang raises the majority target: 66 seats in a 130 seat Parliament.
- 🪤 Her 'triple threat': under current polling a party vote for National adds no MPs, electorate votes for Act or NZ First candidates are almost always wasted, and splitting the candidate vote in swing seats hands Labour a path through the middle.
- ☕ In Epsom, she argues, electing National's Paul Goldsmith would add an overhang seat, while a David Seymour win adds nothing to the bloc. In Nelson in 2023, Labour won by 29 votes while Act and NZ First candidates took over 4,300.
- ✂️ Her prescription for right-bloc voters is a candidate vote for the National candidate in each electorate and a party vote for Act or NZ First.
- 🤔 She suspects self-interest behind National's 'two ticks blue' campaign, noting an overhang would force list MPs Nicola Willis (ranked 2nd) and Chris Bishop (ranked 3rd) out of Parliament, and reports rumours that candidates in tight seats are told to focus only on the party vote.
- 💡 Takeaway: If TOP reaches the 5% threshold, Marie says a significant National overhang may be the only way for the right to form a majority government.

[Read More](https://pennymarie.substack.com/p/strategic-voting-in-the-new-zealand)

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/31/f4/31f4e20a-0315-499e-83ff-139e8eab53bf/content/images/2026/09/images--9-.jpeg)

## 4\. Splitting your vote - It’s the only way

*Peter Allan Williams - Peter's Substack*

- 🙄 Williams takes aim at John Key telling National's campaign launch that anything other than 'two ticks National' could mean cabinet ministers from other parties. Isn't that, he asks, the whole point of a coalition government?
- 📉 He lists National's results in six polls since 14 August: 28, 27, 30, 29, 31 and 29, an average of 29.
- 🧮 That would entitle National to about 35 seats against the 44 electorates it holds now. Winning 40 in tight races would create a five seat overhang.
- ✂️ His 'utter no-brainer': National should encourage voters to return its electorate MPs and party vote Act or New Zealand First.
- 💸 He calls Nicola Willis 'dreadful' as finance minister, saying she began with tax cuts we couldn't afford and is borrowing more in actual dollars than Grant Robertson was in 2022/23.
- 🏦 With no Willis or Bishop after an overhang, he argues the best qualified finance minister would be NZ First rookie Craig Stobo, who developed the portfolio investment entity concept behind KiwiSaver's tax regime and built BT Funds.
- 🇨🇦 To those who say a first-term MP can't take such a role, he points to Mark Carney, whose first job in politics was Liberal leader before becoming Canada's prime minister.
- 🔢 With NZ First and Act around 21 or 22% together and about 25 seats, plus 40 National electorates, he counts 65 centre-right MPs, just enough in a Parliament of up to 127 or 128.
- 💡 Takeaway: Williams says getting as many National electorate MPs over the line is now the only route to winning, and asks whether the party hierarchy actually wants to lose.

[Read More](https://peterallanwilliams.substack.com/p/splitting-your-vote-its-the-only)

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![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VA3W!,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%2F18be28e6-d03a-479a-9ea3-744a8877743b_2086x966.png)

## 5\. The Matters That Actually Matter... like the cost of bread and butter.

*Grant Duncan - Politics Happens*

- 🗳️ Duncan says the polls are finely balanced, unlike 2011, when John Key's National polled in the high 40s or over 50%, turnout fell to 74.2% and National won 59 seats.
- 🥊 Both leaders told voters on Sunday they 'can't afford' the other. Luxon will rely on a return to economic growth, while Hipkins can point to rising unemployment.
- 🧩 He expects a good election for the smaller parties, and a big opportunity for the Opportunity Party in particular.
- 🛒 The cost of living is the leading issue. A Consumer NZ survey found food budgets under strain for 82% of households, and 67% had low confidence in government policies to improve things.
- 🔪 He sets out three supermarket models: a vertical split into three chains (National, NZ First), the state buying outlets to create a public low-price chain (Greens), and a horizontal split of wholesalers from retailers (Labour).
- 🐕 Labour, NZ First and the Greens also float a price-gouging watchdog with teeth, and he notes the irony of the left backing a more competitive market while National backs serious state intervention.
- 🆓 Act offers the laissez-faire option, arguing state intervention would deter a new competitor and cutting red tape would help more.
- 🤷 Very few voters, he says, can work out which policy is most likely to lower prices, and some economists are sceptical any of them will.
- 💡 Takeaway: Duncan suggests the policies might all be right, or all futile if food prices are driven by global commodity markets, diesel and weather rather than supermarket structure.

[Read More](https://grantduncanphd.substack.com/p/the-matters-that-actually-matter)

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## 6\. RODNEY HIDE: The Madness Didn't Land on Barren Soil

*Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell*

- 🧠 Hide says he has spent ten years trying to understand the madness engulfing New Zealand and the West, which he describes as an ideology that can't be argued with.
- 🚩 Question whether a child can be born in the wrong body, or argue for the same law for everyone, and every word is taken as proof of guilt. 'There is only confession and re-education.'
- 📚 He went to the source and read Marcuse, Foucault and the critical race theorists, but says that explained what the activists believe, not why everyone else went along with it.
- ⏱️ Fringe ideas once confined to faculty lounges took over universities, the public service, professional bodies, boardrooms and newsrooms within barely a decade. He cites cultural safety modules for doctors and a real estate agent who lost her licence for declining a tikanga course.
- ✝️ His best answer comes from historian Tom Holland's book 'Dominion': the modern West still thinks in Christian terms, having absorbed sympathy for the weak and the victim over two thousand years.
- 🌱 The West gave up God but kept the Christian conscience, so critical theory landed on very fertile soil, offering a new home for guilt and the urge to confess and repent.
- ⚖️ Christianity teaches that all have sinned and offers forgiveness to anyone who repents. Wokeness, he says, divides people into oppressors and oppressed by skin colour and sex, makes guilt inherited, and forgives nothing.
- 🐸 The change came in small steps, a 'principle' slipped into a statute, a mandatory course, a new name for a department, none of them put to voters. He recommends Patrick Baker's book 'At The Crossroads'.
- 💡 Takeaway: You can't argue someone out of their faith, Hide concludes, only offer a better one, and he wants the cross back at the centre.

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/rodney-hide-the-madness-didn-t-land-on-barren-soil?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-2296078640.jpg)

## 7\. Australia’s soft launch of authoritarianism

*Tony Morley - The Spectator Australia*

- 🐌 Morley argues authoritarianism rarely arrives overnight. It comes as a steady series of reasonable-sounding bills packaged in the language of safety, protecting children, reducing harm and preventing hate.
- 📜 He names the Online Safety Act 2021, the proposed misinformation and disinformation bill, and Digital Duty of Care legislation as part of a larger plan to stifle objection.
- 🏷️ Those who object are called un-Australian, undemocratic, far right and misguided, which he calls a play taken straight from the dictator's handbook.
- 📉 He says the Albanese government has ramped up surveillance and control as the economy declines, citing Milton Friedman's finding that political and economic freedom are mutually dependent.
- 💸 Government debt has climbed from roughly $50 billion in 2006 to over a trillion dollars, and the Institute of Public Affairs says a budget surplus may not return until 2046, with debt stretching to 2080.
- 🛒 While families struggle to pay for accommodation, food and energy, he writes, Labor is pushing full speed ahead on climate policy, the Digital Duty of Care and policing free communication.
- 🔍 History offers no example, in his view, of a government that acquired the power to define and manage truth and then used it to better the lives of everyday people.
- 📻 He quotes Albanese telling 3AW's Neil Mitchell in August 2023 that, as dictator for five years, 'maybe ban social media, would be handy.'
- 💡 Takeaway: Morley says Australia's declining freedom is by design, not accident, and the public forum is the last place everyday Australians can fight for a freer country.

[Read More](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/australias-soft-launch-of-authoritarianism/?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://www.spiked-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-2263430405-1536x864.jpg)

## 8\. Free Ireland from ‘Free Palestine’

*Brendan O'Neill - spiked*

- 🍺 Around 140 Irish pubs refused to show Ireland's Nations League clash with Israel, which O'Neill calls not normal but a sickness.
- ⚽ Ireland thrashed Israel three-nil, yet he says legions chose to miss it rather than watch Israeli players.
- 📣 In the run-up, protesters demanded 'Stop the Game', and a mob outside the Castleknock Hotel in Dublin, where the team was staying, urged the players with megaphones to boycott Israel.
- 🗣️ Manager Heimir Hallgrímsson said 'We're not playing with genocide, we're playing against genocide.' The Israel FA replied that it was playing 'against the coach who embodies' ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity.
- 🖤 The team refused to shake the Israeli players' hands, wore black armbands and bowed their heads during Israel's anthem. O'Neill asks why the keffiyeh classes were unbothered when the Irish cricket team played Afghanistan a few weeks ago.
- 📺 He cites journalist Laura Perrins' finding that four media outlets, including RTÉ, published 3,007 reports about Israel and Palestine between January and May, almost 20 a day.
- 🏛️ He points to politicians calling Israelis 'the Nazis of the modern world', and to Israel shutting its embassy over the 'extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government'.
- 🎗️ The Irish never mention, he says, Emily Hand, a nine-year-old Irish-Israeli girl held by Hamas for 50 days, whose stepmother was killed on 7 October.
- 💡 Takeaway: O'Neill argues Ireland's descent into Israelophobia reveals far more about its own moral disarray than about Israel.

[Read More](https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/09/28/free-ireland-from-free-palestine/?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-2275301746.jpg)

## 9\. They’re not Menzies’ forgotten people, they’re One Nation’s fed-up people

*Michael de Percy - The Spectator Australia*

- 📺 De Percy takes issue with a Landline episode that presented 20th century cane farmers and workers as the people who built Australia.
- 🌾 He calls their North Queensland story a genuine migrant success, but objects to a narrative that treats the people who came before them as a blank, or a disgrace.
- 🐑 His own great-great-great-grandfather appeared on the ration books at Ollera Station near Guyra in the 1850s as a shepherd, and the family went on to become graziers and shearers.
- 🏗️ Twentieth-century migrants, he writes, 'did not inherit a wilderness. They inherited a prosperity someone else had already sweated into being.'
- 📖 He invokes Harold Bloom's defence of judging literature on merit rather than political tests, and James Allan's observation that his mainstream views are now regarded as far right.
- 🏛️ Menzies' 'forgotten people' were the middle class. Under Albanese, he says, they have been crowded out by a client class of grant recipients, public-sector dependants and subsidised NGOs.
- 🗣️ He cringes a little at Barnaby Joyce's delivery but says the message is right, and that people have stopped trusting the polish.
- 🧼 Stories from his bread run, a Springdale truck-stop cleaner who puts out soap and his mate Phil the Milko, stand in for the everyday multi-generational Australians he means.
- 💡 Takeaway: Those moving to One Nation are the fed-up people, fed up with narratives that write their families out, with the idea that government has all the answers, and with Labor taking a bow over a one per cent undershoot on a near-trillion-dollar debt, achieved by collecting more tax.

[Read More](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/theyre-not-menzies-forgotten-people-theyre-one-nations-fed-up-people/?ref=goodoil.news)

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![](https://media.breitbart.com/media/2026/09/9-22-26-Speaker-of-the-House-Mike-Johnson-R-LA-getty-640x335.jpg)

## 10\. Mike Johnson Claims Opposition to Data Centers ‘Coming from China’

*Paul Bois - Breitbart*

- 🏛️ Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed on Fox Business on Monday that opposition to data centres is 'coming from China'.
- 🗣️ Responding to host Cheryl Casone, he said: 'This is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That's not a conspiracy theory.'
- 🗳️ He framed it as a Democrat tactic: 'Every election cycle they find something to glom onto and say that this is doom and gloom.'
- 🔎 Bois writes that while Russia and China have an interest in stoking opposition, all available evidence suggests the debate is entirely homegrown.
- 📊 A YouGov poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose data centres in their local communities, and Data Center Watch reported nearly 120 projects blocked or delayed over six months.
- 🕵️ Former intelligence official Jessica Brandt told the New York Times in July that foreign actors 'aren't manufacturing American debates over the future of A.I., they are exploiting them.'
- 📈 A Gallup poll in May found 71% of Americans opposed a data centre near them, almost 20 points more than opposed a nearby nuclear power plant.
- 💡 Takeaway: The Times reported broad concerns about A.I.'s effects on jobs and the climate, locals calling data centres noisy eyesores, and moratoriums on new construction in some cities and counties.

[Read More](https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/09/28/mike-johnson-claims-opposition-data-centers-coming-china/?ref=goodoil.news)

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