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# Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/192
- URL: https://goodoil.news/your-daily-ten-10-2026-192/
- Published: 2026-10-15T21:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-15T21:00:04.000Z
- Description: 10 News Stories They Chose Not to Tell You
- Author: Cam Slater
- Tags: Ten@10, NZ Politics, Free Speech, Media, Culture, Economy

**This is edition 2026/192 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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## 1\. Democracy Briefing: The election now revolves around Opportunity

*Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project*

- 📊 The latest 1News-Verian poll has Opportunity on 8% and ten projected MPs, with National and Labour both on 28% and Act and NZ First on 10% each.
- 🧮 On Henry Cooke’s calculation, National, Act and NZ First would have 58 seats, three short, and Labour and the Greens 52\. Opportunity’s ten would give either bloc a majority.
- ⚠️ Entry is not assured: Stuff counted all but two of 13 polls since August with Opportunity at or above 5%, but the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll had it on 4.8%.
- 👑 Edwards says the kingmaker story gives Peters too much credit: only two of ten MMP elections have given one party a clear choice between governments.
- 📞 Luxon still rules Opportunity out, but RNZ’s Jo Moir says: “There is no planet on which Christopher Luxon does not pick up the phone if he needs to.”
- 🛑 In the debate Wong pitched Opportunity as a restraint on National, while Swarbrick said the Greens were “not interested in reinstalling Christopher Luxon as Prime Minister”.
- 📉 Labour and National’s combined 56% is below their lowest combined MMP election result, 62.1% in 1996.
- 😊 Cooke says most Opportunity policies “are not really all that middle-ground”, but Wong offers “a kind of affective centrism” that makes her “very hard to dislike”.
- 🔍 Opportunity’s demands on competition, donations and lobbying could matter beyond Cabinet jobs, and Edwards says its coalition-approval rules should be easy to inspect.
- 💡 Takeaway: Opportunity is asking to be trusted with the deciding votes, and voters are entitled to answers “before 7 November, while they can still act on them.”

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

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## 2\. The Herald leaders’ debate: why Hipkins failed to make his case

*Grant Duncan - Politics Happens*

- 🥊 The cynic’s view: two unpopular leaders, both around 20% as preferred prime minister, fought a grudge match that damaged their parties.
- 🙂 Duncan found the debate better than that, and at times enjoyable.
- 🎩 Luxon kept a cheerful, statesman-like tone and spoke up clearly for his government’s record, plans and competence.
- 👊 Hipkins threw side-punches and interjections that lacked authority, and did not explain how listeners would be better off under a Labour-led government.
- 🔄 He could not deploy the “coalition of chaos” line because it would be thrown straight back at him.
- 🏛️ Since 1935 every prime minister has led Labour or National, and Duncan says the present pair fall into a long line of “average white males”, with emphasis on average.
- 🤝 On election night we may not get a clear answer to who won, and it may take lengthy negotiations.
- 💡 Takeaway: Hipkins did not lose altogether, he just did not win. He failed to justify a change after one term, so the incumbent Luxon takes the debate.

[Read More](https://grantduncanphd.substack.com/p/the-herald-leaders-debate)

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## 3\. OWEN JENNINGS: When Idiocy Beats Common Sense

*Owen Jennings - Brash & Mitchell*

- 🌲 Jennings says we let foreigners buy farmland and plant trees to offset their emissions, but do not let our own farmers count their plantings against theirs.
- 🐑 His example is a typical Hawke’s Bay sheep and beef farm, John and Jill Smith’s: 650 ha, 2,500 ewes, 180 cows and methane of 1,100 t CO₂-e a year.
- 🌿 He cites a study by AUT’s Dr Bradley Case finding that 90% of that methane would be offset by the bush, woodlots, shelter belts and riparian plantings on the property.
- 📏 The LUCAS method ignores much native growth that does not meet an international size standard. “A tree is a tree whether it stands alone or in a cluster.”
- 💸 About $500 million has gone into methane mitigation research in recent years, much of it taxpayer money, with no suitable tool yet for the Smiths.
- 🌱 Subsidising five more hectares of natives such as manuka, kanuka and horopito would offset the farm’s whole shortfall, he says. “Job done.”
- 😠 Farm cooperatives have spent farmers’ rebates and dividends on mitigation research without consulting them, which he calls a “directors’ club” approach.
- 💊 The nearest solution is a three-month bolus for cattle, and he warns that inhibitors risk “pollution swapping” that could alarm the very customers demanding mitigation.
- 💡 Takeaway: we let extremists dictate a regime that is now “an ugly millstone”, so “Can you blame John and Jill for questioning our corporate sanity?”

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/owen-jennings-when-idiocy-beats-common-sense?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 4\. ERIC NESS: Labour, the Greens and Wellington’s most popular $10.5 billion

*Eric Ness - Brash & Mitchell*

- 🏠 Election-year economics has a reassuring new word, Ness says: headroom. Labour says almost $10.5 billion of future operating allowances is still unallocated.
- 🛏️ Plenty already want the spare room: the unexpected, pay equity, public-sector wages, health, education, defence and possibly the Greens. “In most households it is called promising the spare bedroom to four different relatives.”
- 💼 Labour has funded the immediate $4-an-hour rise for care and support workers, but the wider pay-equity settlements have no final price yet.
- 🧾 “We don’t know what it costs yet, but there is room in the Budget” is not the same thing as “it is fully costed.” He jokes that the money needs a union.
- 🟢 The Greens’ tax package, including a wealth tax above $10 million and a bank levy, would raise an estimated $5.15 billion in 2027/28, rising to $5.73 billion.
- 🚫 Hipkins has ruled out virtually all the extra taxes his potential partners promote, so the Greens could arrive with a shopping list and a tax plan Labour is not buying.
- ⚖️ Any net extra coalition spending would mean cuts, using up headroom, a smaller surplus, more borrowing, or Labour changing a position it took into the election.
- 🌦️ Treasury forecasts are “a bit like weather forecasts with accountants”, and they will be redone once a new government’s actual policies are known.
- 💡 Takeaway: everybody is interested in the $10.5 billion. “Nobody has married it yet.”

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/eric-ness-labour-the-greens-and-wellington-s-most-popular-10-5-billion?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 5\. RODNEY HIDE: I asked AI to find Marama Davidson's worldview

*Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell*

- 🤖 After Luxon, Swarbrick and Hipkins, Hide set his AI on Marama Davidson, who cites no theorists or books but tells stories.
- 🏛️ Her parents “met on these very steps of Parliament”, she said in her 2015 maiden statement, young urban Māori protesting the loss of land and language.
- 🔗 Her core idea is connection: “My well-being is supposed to be connected to yours,” and “The challenges that we are facing today are born from disconnection.”
- 🏭 The villains are capitalism, colonisation and patriarchy. At the Oxford Union in 2025 she said colonisation had been “a vessel to carry out the cruelty of capitalism.”
- 📜 She puts the Treaty above everything: “The Green party is a Tiriti party.”
- 🗣️ After her 2023 “white cis men” remark she said she “could have been clearer”, but told RNZ: “I am not going to apologise to cis men.” The AI says she withdrew the wording, not the thesis.
- ⚖️ Tensions it found: opposing capitalism while working with Māori business, respect for all versus blaming groups, and grassroots control versus more state.
- 🧩 Its verdict: “a relational-structural radical”, who sees the state’s job as redress, redistribution and handing power back to the collective.
- 💡 Takeaway: Hide says she has “a remarkably undeveloped political view”, and “It must be uncomfortable to be a white man in her family and her party.”

[Read More](https://www.brashandmitchell.com/post/rodney-hide-i-asked-ai-to-find-marama-davidson-s-worldview?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 6\. Art is More Important than Politics

*Matt Taibbi - Racket News*

- 🎸 At the Las Vegas Sphere, James Hetfield said Metallica was not there “to influence you” and its agenda was “love, energy, and heavy music”. Activists lined up to denounce him.
- 🎤 Roger Waters said “‘I’m apolitical’ is not an option”, and Taibbi says Waters and the Metallica-bashers are as bad as those who cancelled an Ed Sheeran show over Macklemore’s “Free Palestine” speech.
- 📚 He sides with the artists who held that art speaks to something higher than politics, from Chekhov’s “posing the question correctly” to Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
- ⭐ Mayakovsky began with the wonder of Listen! in 1914 and ended with “I am a citizen of the Soviet Union!”, then wrote in 1930 that he had stepped “on the throat of my own song.”
- 🔁 The moral: a revolution can quickly become an even worse status quo.
- 🎭 Shakespeare teaches that authority and moral self-regard make people stupid: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
- 🧱 Tom Morello’s “every artist is political” is the musical version of Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that nothing is race neutral, Taibbi says.
- ☭ Trotsky denounced “pure art” and Lenin wanted art in the “great social democratic mechanism”, which he says produced lots of dead writers and bad art.
- 🎶 Lennon mocked McCartney’s lightweight songs, and McCartney answered with Silly Love Songs, the top American hit of 1976.
- 💡 Takeaway: love is “a higher form of politics” that “does not insist on its own way”. “No, not everything is political. Aren’t most things better?”

[Read More](https://www.racket.news/p/art-is-more-important-than-politics?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 7\. Where have all the bands gone?

*Neil Davenport - spiked*

- 🎸 Forming a band was once practically compulsory for teenagers, Davenport says: a few mates, three chords and an inflated sense of your own importance.
- 📉 In March 2021 just nine groups featured in the UK Top 100 singles chart, and only two made the Top 40.
- 📱 Today’s aspiring pop stars dream of a million followers. “Why endure a drummer’s personality disorder when you can become a brand all by yourself?”
- 🏘️ He borrows Anthony Giddens’ idea of “disembedding”: TikTok lets musicians find an audience without ever leaving their bedrooms.
- 💚 The internet is not all bad. Charli XCX’s Brat in 2024 became a genuine cultural moment, and PinkPantheress found millions of listeners from her bedroom.
- 😰 Yet the OECD’s 2018 PISA survey found 56% of 15-year-olds worried about what others think when they fail. Punk taught that making a fool of yourself was practically a moral obligation.
- 🎤 The Music Venue Trust says 30 grassroots venues closed permanently in 2025, and 175 British towns and cities no longer get regular touring shows.
- 💡 Takeaway: the real loss is the impulse to go out and take risks. The world “could do with a few more terrible bands.”

[Read More](https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/10/14/where-have-all-the-bands-gone/?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 8\. The wretched men of safety and the demise of the West

*Jason Thomas - The Spectator Australia*

- ⚔️ Thomas opens with Xenophon in 401 BC: those whose one aim is to keep alive “usually find a wretched and dishonourable death”.
- 🐂 An Arabic parable of three bulls divided by a lion’s whispers illustrates the strategy he says is being used against the West, and Australia.
- 🕌 He says Australian authorities fund a Melbourne cleric alleged to have had the FlyDubai hijacker pilot as a congregant, while an estimated $300 million has gone on pursuing SAS soldiers.
- 🌍 In 2014 the UAE Foreign Minister warned that more Islamist radicals would emerge from the West than anywhere else. “He was right.”
- 🎖️ At the Australian War Memorial, marking 25 years since Australia’s Afghanistan service, Ben Roberts-Smith laid a wreath while the politicians who pursued him sat and clapped.
- 🏫 He warns Islamist networks are gaining influence in mosques, schools, universities and politics, and children are chanting “globalise the intifada”.
- 🇬🇧 He sees the UK as the best example of a Western nation on the cusp of being lost, and soon an unreliable Aukus partner.
- 🦁 The gravest threat is erosion from within, he argues, not tanks from China.
- 💡 Takeaway: a nation that chooses safety over courage will, as Xenophon warned, “find only a wretched and dishonourable end.”

[Read More](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/10/the-wretched-men-of-safety-and-the-demise-of-the-west/?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 9\. Greta Thunberg is a protest addict

*Gareth Roberts - The Spectator Australia*

- 🇫🇷 Greta Thunberg turned up outside a school in Saint-Denis, Paris, telling the crowd: “Our future is being robbed away from us!”
- 🎬 Roberts notes few child stars sustain an adult career, and at 23 the “How dare you!” UN speech of 2019 must seem geological epochs ago.
- 🙏 Back then, he says, anyone who questioned her was met with howls: what kind of monster would attack the sacred child?
- 🏍️ He expected her to grow up into either a Hayek fan on a smoking Harley or a bog standard adult activist. “Sadly, the latter turns out to be the case.”
- 🤒 His diagnosis is “demo-itis”: presenting yourself at any ruckus for any cause.
- ⚡ He cites Just Stop Oil co-founder Indigo Rumbelow on her first mass action: “You have an adrenaline rush like you have never felt before.”
- 📖 None of this is new, he says, comparing it to medieval dancing manias and children’s crusades as described in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium.
- 💡 Takeaway: her causes grow more prosaic, from the end of the world to Palestine to French school upholstery. “Potholes?”

[Read More](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/10/greta-thunberg-is-a-protest-addict/?ref=goodoil.news)

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## 10\. Biden Administration Pushed Banks To Target Conservative And Religious Groups, Report Finds

*Brecca Stoll - The Daily Wire*

- 🏦 The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency examined nearly 100,000 complaints and about 420,000 pages of documents from nine major banks.
- ⚠️ It found the banks denied service to customers whose political or religious affiliations posed “reputation risk”.
- 🕵️ The Daily Wire traces federal debanking to Obama’s 2013 Operation Choke Point, followed by a Biden-era “Operation Choke Point 2.0”.
- 📺 PNC refused a media company a line of credit in 2021 over its owners’ views, which an employee said were “very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values”.
- ✝️ TD Bank flagged a Christian health care sharing ministry whose “moral and religious requirements” appeared “to conflict with TD’s values of diversity and inclusion”.
- 🔫 Wells Fargo staff noted that “Under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure” over firearms lending, and declined the business, citing a lack of revenue.
- 🛍️ A JPMorgan-owned payment firm closed a pro-Trump merchant’s account in 2021\. JPMorgan says that process “did not meet its expectations” and the business no longer operates.
- 🔄 All nine banks say they have changed policy, but the OCC is “unable to say with confidence” they will not return to the practices.
- 💡 Takeaway: Republican lawmakers cheered the report, with Rep. Andy Barr saying “No law-abiding American should be debanked for their beliefs.”

[Read More](https://www.dailywire.com/news/countless-maga-religious-groups-were-debanked-during-biden-administration-explosive-report-finds?ref=goodoil.news)

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