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!
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.”
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.
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?”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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