This is edition 2026/195 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: Politicians must act on the overhang campaign
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 🗳️ Edwards says the campaign by politicians on left and right to game MMP is escalating, and Luxon and Hipkins need to say what they’d do about it before overseas voting starts on 21 October.
- 🏏 The Post’s editorial said Te Pāti Māori’s version was “within the rules” but “best described as cheating”. Matthew Hooton says the right’s version at full stretch would be “a bit like bowling the whole innings underarm, not just the last ball.”
- 🧮 On Nine to Noon, Liam Hehir predicted “a record overhang”, including a National overhang of about four or five seats.
- 🎭 John Tamihere told Waatea News: “But we want to make it very clear if you get our candidates in it can create the overhang.” Te Pāti Māori’s party list has one name on it, Lance Norman.
- 📺 ACT’s new ad has Paul Henry telling viewers how to “keep these guys out”, with the electorate vote shown in blue. ACT says it isn’t trying to create an overhang and blue is one of its own colours.
- 🔥 NZ First’s Michael Laws told Platform listeners they “may as well burn” a party vote for National, and Peters said Luxon was “making statements which are just suicidal for the National Party vote”.
- 🎲 Edwards’ catch: the advice assumes National wins no list seats, and nobody can know that in advance. “Advice presented as an obvious mathematical truth is a gamble on both.”
- 📋 His three asks: condemn engineered overhangs even when they help your own side, say before polling day whether you’d govern on one, and commit to closing the loophole the Electoral Commission flagged in 2012.
- 💡 Takeaway: Andrew Geddis says the 2023 review panel thought “we should try to get rid of them, but no one did anything.” Edwards concedes none of this is illegal. The rule only seems to become an emergency once the right learns to use it too.
2. Dying To Be Born.
Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter’s Substack
- 🗳️ Trotter starts with 1938, when Labour’s social security and compulsory unionism went to the voters. Sid Holland called it “Applied lunacy!” Savage answered: “Applied Christianity”. Labour won 55.8% and the changes stuck for decades.
- ❓ So why can’t anyone build a majority that changes the country that thoroughly now? His answer: today’s parties can’t roll back the changes of the 1980s and 90s, any more than National could reverse the First Labour Government’s.
- 🍽️ He doesn’t blame MMP. ACT and the Greens both want sweeping reform, but National and Labour only let their partners “order an entrée”.
- 💥 Breaking a consensus like that takes a catastrophe, plus an establishment that has run out of answers.
- 🕯️ He reaches for Gramsci: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Trotter’s morbid symptom is that nearly every viable party has to lie to voters.
- 🧭 Since the global financial crisis, he says, neoliberalism no longer guides policy, but nothing has replaced it. Copying MAGA loses votes, and Hipkins is too worried about business and media scorn to ditch the orthodoxy.
- 🌿 The Greens and Opportunity are hamstrung because voters doubt they really believe their own radical policies. “As the 1News-Verian poll released earlier this week (13/10/26) confirmed, New Zealand politics is stuck.”
- 🪶 He thinks Te Pāti Māori may have more room to move, because its policies come from communities outside the free market.
- 💡 Takeaway: if the old order is dying, let it go. “Perhaps it is time for the future to be born.” The left’s best historian hopes Te Pāti Māori brings it. That should worry anyone who has read their policies.
3. Paul Henry, private worlds, and the social good of creating offense.
Dane Giraud - The Many Ways I Let You Down
- 🎙️ Dane Giraud sits down with Paul Henry on Free to Speak. He says they share a weakness, “or strength”, for saying the thing that might spoil a respectable gathering.
- 🏠 After his parents split, Henry swapped a comfortable Howick childhood for industrial Bristol, where his mother worked treble shifts in a plastic bag factory.
- 😈 Giraud reckons a bit of offence now and then, tearing a hole in reality, is “A social good if ever there was one.”
- 🎥 They talk interviewing, the curiosity journalism needs, and their mate Shubz, a Māori podcaster whose studio runs “on the smell of an oily rag”.
- 🤝 Since Giraud helped set up a regular Free Speech Union slot on Shubz’s show, he says hostility has softened, especially towards ACT, with some mostly Māori viewers saying they might vote for old enemies. “Comments aren’t votes, but something is happening.”
- 📡 Then the BSA. Giraud says a regulator with a mandate to attack new media would “disproportionately attack Māori and other minority influencers online.”
- 💡 Takeaway: is Henry ready to let regulation go? Giraud leaves that for the video. Worth a watch alongside Labour’s promise to keep and modernise the BSA.
4. RICHARD PREBBLE: Does Luxon know something we don’t?
Richard Prebble - Brash & Mitchell
- 🤔 Commentators can’t work out why Luxon keeps ruling out a deal with TOP. Prebble: “Perhaps Luxon knows something they don’t.”
- 📊 Parties buy far better polling than the public sees. When he led ACT the local firms were all taken, so ACT hired an American company, “far better than any New Zealand pollster.”
- 🇬🇧 National uses Britain’s Sancrox Political Advisory, and Luxon says he only looks at internal polls analysed overseas.
- 🔢 A July Talbot Mills poll found 23% of TOP supporters voted National in 2023 and 18% Labour. Roy Morgan has TOP strongest among younger men, who are “hard to enrol and even harder to get to vote.”
- 🧪 His theory: the focus groups ask “Would you still vote TOP if Luxon ruled out a deal?” If former National voters say no and former Labour voters say yes, ruling TOP out wins National its voters back.
- 🗑️ And if TOP misses 5% and wins no seat, every one of its party votes is wasted.
- 💡 Takeaway: Luxon’s “inexplicable political blunder could be a calculated election-winning strategy.” Then the Prebble sting: “perhaps Luxon just doesn’t understand MMP.”
5. Decades Of The Left Demonizing Police Behind Macron’s Failure To Prevent The Riots
Michael Shellenberger - Public
- 🔥 Shellenberger opens with the video of a young French shopkeeper who begged rioters to spare her store, was pushed aside, and watched them loot it.
- 🛡️ Macron’s defenders say nobody saw the numbers coming. Macron promised “those who destroyed must pay” and turned down Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez’s offer to resign.
- 📅 But the government had known for weeks that the CGT union confederation and the student unions had planned a massive protest for 17 October.
- 📊 The Interior Ministry expected 40,000 to 60,000 in Paris and about 100,000 in the rest of the country. Roughly 550,000 turned out, 110,000 of them in Paris.
- 👮 Just 60,000 police and security forces were deployed, with few armoured vehicles or tactical units in place beforehand.
- 🕵️ French intelligence told a crisis meeting on 1 October that the school movement was “an operation organised by LFI (France Unbowed) and its proxies on the far left.”
- 💡 Takeaway: the rest, behind the paywall, pins it on decades of the left demonising police, the same story he told about BLM. A government that won’t back its cops gets the riot it was warned about.
6. Voter Suppression?
Grant Duncan - Politics Happens
- 🗳️ Labour and Green leaders are ringing alarm bells over low enrolment among 18 to 24 year olds, and talking about voter suppression.
- 📊 The Electoral Commission says 65.5% of 18 to 24s were enrolled at 15 October. The deadline is 25 October, and this time you can’t enrol and vote on the same day.
- 🕰️ Duncan argued back in August 2025 that moving the deadline from polling day “could amount to intentional voter suppression.”
- 📉 He accepts the figure is low against recent elections, and “it doesn’t look good for enrolment rates of young people.”
- ⚖️ But he says nobody can draw definitive conclusions until the final turnout and enrolment figures by age group are in.
- 💡 Takeaway: even a critic of the change says the numbers can’t prove suppression yet. That hasn’t stopped Labour and the Greens crying it three weeks out.
7. Not A Right to Silence Issue
David Harvey - A Halfling’s View
- 🤐 National wants adults who know how a child under 12 died to be made to tell the police, with a penalty if they don’t.
- ⚖️ Harvey says the label is wrong. The right not to give evidence at trial, and the section 23(4) Bill of Rights right on arrest, belong to suspects and the accused. This is a new duty to give police information.
- ✅ He’s fine with the idea: “As a concept that is unobjectionable.”
- 🚩 Problem one: one of the adults at the scene may be the killer, who could then lose the right to silence as a suspect. That would be “a significant erosion of the rights of an accused.”
- ❓ Problem two: how do police prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone who stays silent actually knew anything? “potentially an unenforceable law.”
- 👥 Problem three: six adults, five who genuinely know nothing, and the killer points the finger at someone else. “It has happened.”
- 💡 Takeaway: Harvey says “Conceptually the objective is laudable” but calls it a “dog-whistle” election policy. Fair points on drafting, but the families who close ranks around a dead child know exactly what they’re doing.
8. I asked AI to find Debbie Ngarewa-Packer's worldview
Rodney Hide - Brash & Mitchell
- 🤖 After Rawiri Waititi, Hide turns his AI assistant on Te Pāti Māori’s other co-leader, with the usual rules: exact quotes, checked, and kept apart from what it thinks she meant.
- 🏭 She grew up in Pātea in a “freezing-worker family”, shaped by the 1869 Pakakohi prisoners shipped to Dunedin and the 1982 closure of the freezing works.
- 🗝️ Her creed, in her own words, is for government to “get out of the way and resource them.”
- 🧾 In her maiden speech she called Fox, Grey and Bryce “those monsters on these walls.” The Crown’s 2003 settlement apologised, with redress worth $41 million.
- 🌊 Her 2022 bill to ban seabed mining said, three times, “No compensation is payable by the Crown for any loss or damage.” It went down 106 to 13.
- 🔥 Walkouts, haka, boycotts and a bill burnt on the forecourt. In her own words: “Nothing that we ever do as Te Pāti Māori is accidental.”
- 🏠 She told the House a capital gains tax would raise $200 billion, which Nicola Willis called “the height of innumeracy”. The Herald later reported she owned three properties but had declared one since 2020, though it found four other MPs with similar gaps.
- ⚖️ The sharpest tension: her people lost land to a Wellington law without compensation, and her bill would have revoked lawful property rights “and denied compensation by name.”
- 💡 Takeaway: Hide’s verdict: “Her solution is tribalism.” And for tribes “to be paid for by everyone else.” That’s Te Pāti Māori in two lines: hands off, wallet open.
9. ZORAN RAKOVIC: Voluntary, or Else
Zoran Rakovic - Brash & Mitchell
- 🏛️ Local Government Minister Simon Watts invited councils into his Head Start reform programme. They had three months to prepare proposals, and any council that declined could have an arrangement prepared for it by the Government.
- 🔐 Rakovic: “It's rather like a burglar inviting you to open your safe voluntarily, explaining that otherwise he'll open it himself.”
- 💸 Councils spent an estimated $9 million on consultants, meetings and reports, and five major Canterbury councils alone spent $428,000.
- ⏸️ Then the Government paused the programme, and when mayors asked about the bill, Watts said taking part had been voluntary. One delegate reportedly shot back: “You made us do it.”
- 📖 In Wellington, Rakovic says, “voluntary means compulsory, provided the compulsion is sufficiently politely expressed.”
- 💡 Takeaway: “Nine million dollars spent, nothing delivered, nobody responsible.” This one is on a coalition minister, and ratepayers are still left holding the bill.
10. Douglas Murray: France Stares Down the Abyss of History
Douglas Murray - The Free Press
- 🔥 Whenever France burns, Murray says, people reach for precedents: 1968, 2005, 1848 or 1789.
- 🏫 He calls the line that these riots are “school protests” an “asinine claim”.
- 💶 French government spending hit 57 percent of GDP last year, education spending is above the OECD average, and debt is 115 percent of GDP.
- 🎓 “France is, if anything, spending too much on the education of its youth.”
- 👀 Working out what is fuelling the riots, he says, “requires nothing more than having eyes.”
- 💡 Takeaway: the rest is behind the paywall, but the subtitle warns there’s no guarantee French culture survives its discontents. Coming from the author of The Strange Death of Europe, expect no happy ending.
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