This is edition 2026/193 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 Greens are back in the culture wars
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 🟢 The Greens hit record polling by talking supermarkets and power bills and keeping their social and cultural positions quiet. Edwards says the Mongrel Mob photos have put one of those, gangs, back on the front page.
- 📸 Mob life member Harry Tam posted photos of Green MP Hūhana Lyndon, Green candidate Michel Mulipola and Te Pāti Māori MPs Oriini Kaipara and Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke at a gang pad south of Auckland.
- ❓ He splits the row into three questions: should politicians talk to gangs at all, do the grinning photos and funding talk legitimise the gang, and was it a blunder. Most people agree on the first and third, and the second is the real fight.
- 💊 Marama Davidson says the party is “open to funding what works” on Mob-run drug rehab, adding: “We don’t change who we are as a political party just for the campaign, you know.”
- 🤐 Chlöe Swarbrick wouldn’t say whether the visit was wise, and the co-leaders look split.
- 🚔 Hipkins: “The gangs are perpetrators of misery.” He has ruled the Greens and Te Pāti Māori out of the police and corrections portfolios, and Luxon quipped that Hipkins has a new coalition partner, the Mongrel Mob.
- 📊 A Curia poll from October 2023 had 7% of Green voters viewing the Mob positively and 82% negatively. David Farrar: “Green voters are smart and get it. Green MPs do not.”
- 📉 Law and order ranked only eighth in September’s Ipsos Issues Monitor, which is why this is a gift for a National Party keen to change the subject.
- 💡 Takeaway: “The Greens’ economic message has wide appeal, but their stance on gangs is a much harder sell”, and the MPs who went to the pad have just made that sell a lot harder.
2. Democracy Briefing: The discontent election
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 😠 Edwards argues voter anger is “a rational anger”, an accurate read of wages, taxes and services, and it is scattering to smaller parties instead of swinging between Labour and National.
- 🧾 Otago University’s Consumer Lifestyles Study surveyed 1,096 adults from November 2025 to January 2026. Economic satisfaction scored 4.3 out of 10, and on the cost of living 22% were angry and 28% anxious.
- 💸 27% are now “Financial Strugglers”, up from 16.5% in 2020, and many are graduates, mortgage holders and full-time workers. 40% struggle to pay for essentials.
- ✈️ 48% say getting ahead means going overseas, up from 28% in 2020, and the share calling this a good country to live in has fallen from 80% to 68%.
- 🗳️ 1News-Verian has National and Labour on 28% each. Jenna Lynch notes the big two took roughly 75 to 80% of the vote from 2005 to 2020, 65% in 2023 and about 55% now: “The discontent is scattering.”
- 🏥 60% say they pay too much tax, yet 52% would pay more if it went to frontline health and education, and 71% say health spending is too low.
- 🛒 66% say businesses put profit ahead of customers, and 57% now buy the cheapest product, up from 45% in 2020.
- 📈 Reynold Macpherson: “A government can truthfully say that inflation has fallen while voters can truthfully say that life remains expensive.”
- 💡 Takeaway: the government can keep waving its inflation charts, but voters are reading their bank statements, and plenty of them are taking their party vote somewhere new.
3. MURIEL NEWMAN: Cultural Capture
Muriel Newman - Brash & Mitchell
- 🪖 In January the Army issued a bicultural policy with a Cultural Skill Framework for all ranks, under which soldiers had to memorise up to six waiata, perform karakia and learn te reo, with it tied to promotion.
- 📉 Retired Colonel Bernard Isherwood says NZDF surveys show lost confidence in senior leadership, and Army attrition for 2026 is expected to be almost 15%, with over 600 release requests.
- ✉️ ACT MP Todd Stephenson wrote to then Defence Minister Judith Collins, who replied that she hadn’t been briefed and that the framework had been paused.
- 🏛️ Newman says the problem is far wider. Labour brought Defence and Police under the Public Service Act 2020, and Te Arawhiti’s capability framework spread the same regime from the Reserve Bank to the GCSB and NZSIS.
- ⚖️ Her fix: repeal sections 14 and 15 of that Act, rewrite section 73 to strip out race-based hiring targets, and amend section 19 of the Bill of Rights to stop positive discrimination by race.
- 🗳️ She warns that Opportunity’s fourth-ranked candidate, Dr Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, was a co-author of He Puapua.
- ✅ Only ACT is promising to amend the Public Service Act, while ACT and NZ First both back a referendum on the Māori seats and abolishing the Waitangi Tribunal.
- 💡 Takeaway: Collins paused one Army policy and left the machine that produced it running. Newman wants ACT and NZ First to pledge to take race out of the statutes altogether.
4. Speaking as a former National voter...
Liam Hehir - The Blue Review
- ☕ The Press opened its “Mood of the Mainland” vox pops in a Balclutha café with Bryan Cadogan, 67, a long-time National voter now disillusioned with the government.
- 🔎 Hehir found an April post by Labour MP Ingrid Leary thanking “Bryan Cadogan, former five-term Clutha Mayor” as her campaign lead for the Clutha end of her electorate. The Press didn’t mention it.
- 🪧 Cadogan’s complaint about Labour hoardings being knocked over reads rather differently once you know that.
- 📰 Hehir goes easy on the reporter, who was on a road trip against deadlines, but says “the search of a former mayor’s name really shouldn’t be too much to ask.”
- 📱 Meanwhile the Instagram version was racking up thousands of shares, which he calls “functionally free, unlabeled advertising for the opposition”.
- ✏️ Correction since publication: Cadogan and Leary have both told The Press he had no official campaign role. Leary says he only puts up her hoardings, and Cadogan says he sat on a Labour policy committee as a rural representative.
- 💡 Takeaway: “These vox-pop election items come with the implied promise that these are ordinary voters telling you what they think.” This one turned out to be a Labour volunteer.
5. Thumbs Up for the Mongrel Mob. Middle Finger to its Victims.
Ani O’Brien - Thought Crimes
- 🗳️ O’Brien is a voting-rights purist who even opposes the prisoner voting ban, but says that doesn’t mean criminals should be “pandered to and legitimised” by politicians chasing their votes.
- 📸 Green and Te Pāti Māori MPs were photographed grinning with patched members under gang insignia, and Oriini Kaipara called the gang the “Whero Whānau” in social media posts.
- 🎣 She rejects the outreach excuse flat out: “They all visited the gang pad to fish for votes.”
- 🙋 She asks how many women’s refuges, families hit by meth, sexual assault services or intimidated business owners those MPs visited in the same weeks.
- 🎙️ Victims’ advocate Claire Buckley told Newstalk ZB: “No wonder gang recruitment is up when you get this kind of legitimisation from politicians.”
- ⚖️ She lists recent Mob cases, including Lou Harmer’s sentence this January of 12 years and 6 months for 14 counts of serious sexual offending against young girls.
- 🕰️ She notes Harry Tam, who posted the photos, was convicted in 1994 of assaulting his wife and was stood down from the Abuse in Care inquiry in 2019 after safety concerns were raised.
- 📣 In 2020 Tam toured gang pads urging members to vote Labour, telling one: “We can turn in to twenty or thirty thousand votes”.
- 💡 Takeaway: her subtitle asks the question the MPs keep dodging: “How many rapes does it take before politicians stop smiling?”
6. RODNEY HIDE: One law for Tamaki, another for the party of October 7
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 📹 Hide starts with a 2014 Auckland protest where a man shouted “Bash the Jews. Cut their heads off.” David Cumin and Paul Moon reported the Human Rights Commission didn’t think it worth investigating.
- ⚖️ Police have now served Brian Tamaki with three charges of inciting racial disharmony over his June video about Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.
- 🙏 Hide takes Tamaki at his word that he has “never advocated violence against anyone”, while saying the words weren’t the best choice.
- 🇵🇸 The Free Palestine Party got $82,011 of taxpayer broadcasting money, then on 8 October put out a release saying it “celebrates the Victory” of October 7.
- 🤐 Hide can find no response from a minister, the Electoral Commission, the Human Rights Commission or the Race Relations Commissioner. “Silence. Paid for.”
- 📜 Section 131 of the Human Rights Act covers race, colour and ethnic or national origin, not religion, and the Ministry of Justice counted 10 prosecutions between July 2018 and May 2022.
- 🔪 He backs Cumin: if Tamaki incited violence, charge him under the Crimes Act. Using a race law for words about faith brings blasphemy back by the back door.
- 💡 Takeaway: “Our government treats Jews as second class citizens. Prove me wrong.”
7. Not the campaign lead, just the hoardings guy?
Liam Hehir - The Blue Review
- 🔁 Hehir’s follow-up to his Mood of the Mainland piece, item 4 above.
- 🗞️ The Press’s follow-up story has Bryan Cadogan and Ingrid Leary both saying he had no official role in Labour’s campaign.
- 🪧 Leary says that despite her April post he only “leads on putting up” her hoardings, as he has for “a number of campaigns”. Cadogan says he doesn’t know why she described him that way.
- 🏛️ Cadogan confirms he has served as a rural representative on a Labour policy committee.
- ✅ Hehir: “We can only accept these accounts. The central point stands, however.”
- 🗳️ A Labour volunteer and policy committee member was still presented as a disillusioned former National voter, and if he has put up hoardings over several campaigns, his Labour support predates the government he was criticising.
- 📝 And “as of the time of writing, the original article still carries no note disclosing any of this.”
- 💡 Takeaway: Hehir asks whether we would accept that sort of follow-up from a politician. The answer is obvious, and The Press should apply it to itself.
8. RODNEY HIDE: Henry Cooke wants a do-over if you vote wrong
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🔁 Hide says The Post’s political editor Henry Cooke has a plan if Opportunity falls short: “if you vote the wrong way, you vote again.”
- 📝 Cooke wants Luxon and Hipkins to promise that “if an overhang is the only path to government, then we’ll ask the Governor-General to call another election instead.”
- 🗳️ Hide says split voting that produces an overhang is “MMP working exactly as Parliament wrote the law”, and with National already polling in overhang, its party votes would do more good with ACT or NZ First.
- 🤝 Cooke’s fallback is a grand coalition to rewrite the electoral law with no supermajority and no referendum, and then another election.
- 🎯 Cooke worries about “well-organised minorities” governing. Hide’s reply: “Henry, that’s called campaigning.”
- 📰 He says a journalist’s job is to hold power to account, “not to act as a broker for Labour and National”.
- 💡 Takeaway: voters “don’t need a second go because the political editor of The Post didn’t like the first one.”
9. Who might be a National MP?
David Farrar - Polling & Politics (Patreon)
- 📊 Farrar’s weighted average of recent public polls has National on 28.1%, which is 34 seats, with a range of 31 to 38 seats within the margin of error.
- 🕰️ He notes those polls predate the Greens campaigning with the Mongrel Mob.
- 🗺️ “Only 28 seats I classify as safe for National. A further five I classify as likely and a further six as leaning National’s way.” That is 39 he thinks National is more likely than not to win.
- 🎯 The ratings come from public data, not private polling, and he expects “to be wrong over 25% of the time on lean seats and wrong over 10% of the time on likely seats.”
- 1️⃣ If National wins only its 28 safe seats, it gets about six list MPs. Nancy Lu gets in, with Mike Butterick, Dale Stephens and Mahesh Muralidhar on the cusp.
- 2️⃣ Win the 33 safe and likely seats and it is down to one list MP, Nicola Willis, with Chris Bishop, Paul Goldsmith and Gerry Brownlee only coming in within the margin of error.
- 3️⃣ Win all 39 and National has an overhang of five seats on the polling average, or as few as two within the margin of error.
- 📉 If Opportunity falls below 5%, National picks up about 2% of the effective vote and a couple more MPs.
- 💡 Takeaway: “it is definitely possible National could have an overhang, but it is also possible National will have List MPs.” On these numbers the overhang the gallery is fretting about only turns up if National wins every leaning seat.
10. You Need A Lot Of Censorship To Get People To Destroy Their Civilization
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- 🎙️ Heading home from CPAC in Australia and two days of meetings in Canberra, Shellenberger sat down with Sam Bamford on his podcast “Two Worlds Collide”.
- 📜 The subject is Australia’s Digital Duty of Care Bill, which Bamford calls the “Mass Censorship Bill”.
- 🏛️ Shellenberger says Labor staffers he met in Canberra didn’t know what was in the bill, and got angry when he asked whether a future government might use it against them.
- 🪞 His wider point: “The people who really want to censor their fellow citizens never think they would be the ones censored.”
- 👧 The pair accuse Minister Anika Wells of using child safety, including girls with eating disorders, to sell the bill.
- ❔ Bamford also makes claims about One Nation’s polling and government money for journalists that we haven’t been able to verify.
- 💡 Takeaway: Shellenberger calls the censors’ picture of themselves “a profoundly childlike view of themselves and of morality”, and it travels well across the Tasman.
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