This is edition 2026/196 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: Te Pāti Māori’s dysfunction is a gift to the right
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 🗳️ Edwards says Te Pāti Māori’s chaotic campaign keeps handing National free ammunition against a Labour-led government.
- 📊 National is up four to 32 in the 1News-Verian poll. Te Pāti Māori is under 1% there.
- 🐕 It started with Oriini Kaipara’s line: “you see Mongrel Mob, I see whānau.” Luxon has made the most of it.
- 😂 Kiri Tamihere-Waititi mocked Hipkins: “It puts old Chippy under pressure and he’s fallen for it”. Hipkins then had to rule the Greens and Te Pāti Māori out of police and corrections.
- 📜 Their Tiriti Commission bottom line would let it stop Cabinet decisions. Audrey Young: “That’s not only a coalition killer, it will make it less likely the parties of the left are elected.”
- 🌿 A Whakaata Māori-Curia poll has the Greens’ Hūhana Lyndon leading in Te Tai Tokerau. The candidate-vote-only plan may be backfiring.
- 💸 Māori voters rank cost of living way ahead of Te Tiriti. The party is campaigning on the wrong thing.
- 🔚 Edwards: “Te Pāti Māori’s problems become problems for the whole left.” If the right scrapes back on 7 November, this will be part of why.
2. Chippy Don’t Lose That Number.
Chris Trotter - Bowalley Road
- 🧩 Trotter asks why nobody can call this election. His answer: National and Labour are both defending a status quo that doesn’t work for most people.
- 🙄 “Better starts now.” is Labour’s slogan. Trotter says it would have been a good one fifty years ago.
- 🍯 He says Labour’s habit of lowering expectations is “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today”.
- 🧮 The left’s maths: “17% + 28% = 45% which is not enough to claim victory.”
- 🟢 So the left needs Opportunity, on 8% in the latest 1News-Verian poll. Trotter says that’s no natural fit.
- 🔧 His read on Qiulae Wong’s lot: “Opportunity does not want to demolish the status quo, Opportunity wants to renovate it.”
- 📋 And Wong wasn’t elected by members. “She answered an ad and sailed through the job interview.”
- 📞 Trotter reckons Hipkins has her number and Bishop probably gave her his. Luxon hasn’t rung. That may cost him.
3. RODNEY HIDE: Two votes, one brain
Rodney Hide - Brash and Mitchell
- 🗳️ Hide’s pitch is simple: “You have two votes. Make them count.”
- 🏆 He knows. In 2005 Epsom voters gave him the seat and kept Richard Worth on National’s list. ACT survived.
- 📉 On his own poll average, National wins about 35 electorates but earns only 34 seats. No list MPs at all.
- 🙈 Roughly 800,000 National party votes would add not one National MP.
- 🤝 So he wants ACT to tell Epsom to back Paul Goldsmith and Tamaki to back Mahesh Muralidhar. ACT loses nothing. National gains two.
- ➕ He says if two voters in every hundred shift their party vote from National to ACT and NZ First, the centre right gets 64 seats in a Parliament of 127.
- 🧠 His line: “That is strategic voting. It is not a trick. It is reading the rules.”
- 🎯 The bottom line: “Electorate vote National. In every electorate. And Party Vote ACT or New Zealand First depending on your preference.”
4. RICHARD PREBBLE: What can we read into the TVNZ poll?
Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell
- 📊 Prebble says the TVNZ-Verian poll has a good record, with one catch. It keeps misjudging the minor parties.
- 🎲 His pick to miss the 5% line is TOP. Its base is young men, “notoriously unreliable voters.”
- 💀 On Labour: “Labour’s 27% is disastrous.” Hipkins’ own numbers are no better.
- 🔗 He thinks Labour is collateral damage from the Greens’ association with gangs.
- 🔄 National up four to 32 matters. Voters switching from Labour to National matters more.
- 🤯 ACT on 11 and NZ First on 8 are both above their 2023 results. For junior coalition partners under MMP, he calls that “extraordinary.”
- 📈 In April, 52% expected the economy to worsen. Now 43% expect it to improve.
- ⏱️ He finishes: “Has National timed its run just right?”
5. Labour’s Online Policy
David Harvey - A Halfling’s View
- 📢 Retired judge David Harvey predicted Labour would come up with an interventionist online policy. Now it has.
- 🐴 Media spokesman Reuben Davidson’s plan wraps it all in child safety. Harvey calls it a Trojan Horse.
- 👮 Labour would set up an independent digital regulator with powers to enforce safety standards and act against platforms that break the rules.
- ⚖️ Harvey points out the Harmful Digital Communications Act already deals with harm, after it happens.
- 🚫 Labour’s own words: “The aim is to prevent harm in the first place, rather than leaving people to deal with the consequences.” Harvey says that’s prior restraint.
- 📺 Labour would keep the Broadcasting Standards Authority and possibly stretch it over online content. That puts The Platform and Reality Check Radio in the gun.
- 💰 It would also revive the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. Harvey bets Stuff bends the knee first.
- 🏰 He says control of the internet is the Holy Grail for governments. Labour is knocking at the castle gate.
6. Voter suppression? Give me a break.
Liam Hehir - The Blue Review
- 🇺🇸 Hehir says our media love importing American rows, whether they fit here or not.
- 🗓️ The latest is calling the 13-day enrolment deadline, 25 October this election, “voter suppression”.
- 🧾 Election-day enrolment only arrived in 2020, on a 63 to 57 party-line vote.
- 🐢 In 2023 the Auditor-General found 454,000 people enrolled in the final fortnight, and the count nearly buckled.
- ⏳ The review said “A final quality assurance check that would usually be completed over two days had to be completed within hours.”
- 🇬🇧 The UK closes registration twelve working days out. Nobody calls that a rigged election.
- 🎯 Hehir: “If an enrolment deadline applying uniformly across the whole country is voter suppression, then there are very few free elections going on in the world.”
- 🔥 He calls the label “irresponsible and corrosive”. Fair call.
7. RODNEY HIDE: I asked AI to find Rawiri Waititi's worldview
Rodney Hide - Brash and Mitchell
- 🤖 Hide set his AI research assistant on Rawiri Waititi’s speeches, bills and votes, with every quote sourced.
- 🪢 The maiden speech set the frame. He pulled off his tie to “remove the colonial noose around my neck so that I may sing my song.”
- 🏛️ The report finds colonisation is his answer to almost everything. Even Māori who disagree: “colonisation has done its job on our people, a bloody damn good job.”
- 👢 Thrown out for no tie, for hakas, suspended for 21 days in June 2025. He called the Privileges Committee a “kangaroo court”.
- 🍒 At a party conference he joked about slipping karaka berries into Seymour’s water: “re-indigenise yourself with some native seeds.”
- 💰 On money he’s a redistributor. His bill to take GST off food got only his own party’s votes.
- ⛪ He is a Ringatū minister. That faith was founded by Te Kooti, whose men killed dozens of civilians, Māori and Pākehā, at Matawhero in 1868.
- 😳 Hide used to see Waititi as performative theatre. “That is no longer the case for me.”
8. Innovators and Fakers
Jeffrey A. Tucker - The Epoch Times
- 🚀 Tucker watched Tesla’s new Roadster lift off and land at its Waco launch. He calls it “utterly astounding”.
- 🎬 The next day he saw “You Can See Everything,” the new documentary on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
- 🩸 Holmes promised hundreds of tests from one drop of blood. There was no peer review behind any of it.
- 💵 Theranos hit a $9 billion valuation on vibes and PR. Tucker says “It all happened based on vibes, public relations, and nothing more.”
- 🤷 He has little sympathy for the investors: “Their losses are their losses.”
- 💉 Then the knife. He argues the drug giants behind the mRNA shots face no consequences while Holmes sits in prison.
- ⚖️ His line: “The wrong people are going to prison for medical fraud.”
9. You can now be treated as a terrorist just for visiting Israel
Jake Wallis Simons - spiked
- 🚪 Holly Passmore, a County Durham mum of two, opened the door to two plain-clothes police.
- ✈️ They wanted to know why she had been to Israel. She’d been referred to Prevent, Britain’s counter-extremism scheme.
- 📝 The anonymous referral said she was “supportive of Israel to the point that she has travelled to Israel”.
- 🕍 Police asked whether she’d ever been to Auschwitz. She’s not Jewish. She’s studying the Holocaust.
- 🏥 Her NHS records quietly tagged her a “vulnerable adult” for almost a year. She cares alone for her severely autistic son.
- 🔪 Same Prevent that closed Axel Rudakubana’s case three times before he murdered three little girls in Southport.
- 🎯 Passmore: “Nobody would describe me as vulnerable”. Wallis Simons says the people to worry about are the ones who knocked on her door.
10. No wonder JK Rowling wants nothing to do with the BBC
Malcolm Clark - spiked
- 📺 The BBC is making a two-part documentary on JK Rowling. Trans activists lost their minds anyway.
- 🏷️ The press release calls her “one of Britain’s most polarising public figures”.
- 📚 She’s sold more than 600 million Harry Potter books. Polarising, apparently.
- 🙅 Missing from the release: any sign Rowling is taking part.
- 🌟 Clark says celebrity access is everything now. Netflix’s Beckham, made with Posh and Becks, was its biggest UK show in 2023.
- 🎙️ Rowling did talk to the Free Press for The Witch Trials of JK Rowling. A start-up got her. The BBC couldn’t.
- 🪦 Clark’s verdict: the day the BBC lost Britain’s most successful living writer should loom large in the story of its “long, slow death”.
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