Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/198

This is edition 2026/198 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: What business thinks of the politicians and parties

Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project

• 📋 The Herald’s Mood of the Boardroom survey asked 150 business leaders to rate the politicians out of 5. Hardly anyone impressed them.
• 🏅 Only 11 of 27 ministers scored 3 or better. Erica Stanford tops it again on 4.38, with Todd McClay on 4.12 for the India trade deal.
• ✈️ Luxon, the former Air New Zealand boss, ranks 13th on 2.93. Willis, ex-Fonterra, is ninth on 3.17. Her placings over the last two years are the lowest for a Finance Minister in the survey’s records.
• 🛒 One chair on Willis: “Beating up on the banks, gentailers, Foodstuffs and other successful New Zealand businesses is cheap politics and not in the country’s interests.”
• 🙅 Hipkins is worse. Just 3% pick him to drive growth against 65% for Luxon, and his 1.86 on economic management is the lowest for a main party leader back to 2005.
• 💼 Labour’s Barbara Edmonds tops their frontbench on 3.39. Some 55% see her as a credible Finance Minister, partly as a brake on the left.
• 🍃 The Greens slump. Only 26% think Swarbrick and Davidson have made them a credible partner, down from 47% in 2023.
• 🟠 Opportunity does better than you might expect. 46% think Luxon was wrong to rule it out.
• 📉 National’s share saying it has the best policy mix has fallen from 70% in 2023 to 53%.
• 🔪 My take? The boardroom can’t stand Hipkins, but it isn’t in love with Luxon either.

2. Democracy Briefing: Labour’s gang problem

Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project

• 🐕 After the Greens and Te Pāti Māori were photographed at a Mongrel Mob hui, Hipkins called it a “huge error of judgement” and ruled them out of police and corrections.
• 🎤 In a Whakaata Māori debate, Oriini Kaipara said Labour’s Kerrin Leoni had been to the same place. Leoni: “No, I did not go to the gang pad the week before, no.”
• 📢 Hipkins accepted her account and Labour declared that “Oriini Kaipara was wrong.”
• 🎥 That evening Whakaata Māori aired footage of Leoni at a 3 October event attended by Mongrel Mob members. She resigned the next morning.
• 🧥 RNZ says she was in her Labour jacket, handing out flyers with a sign showing her and Hipkins.
• 📊 Law and order had fallen to eighth in the Ipsos Issues Monitor. Search Labour’s policy page for it and the reply was “No policies match your search.”
• 🗣️ Hipkins then said there was an element of “racism” in the reaction, and that Māori MPs are held to a very different standard.
• 🗳️ Edwards says it’s too early to say the left has lost, but it has lost control of the final fortnight. Labour starts advance voting answering questions about gangs.
• 🔪 My take? Hipkins drew the line himself. Then his own candidate walked straight over it.

3. Ruling out Opportunity only harms Luxon’s election chances, right? It’s not that simple

Grant Duncan - The Conversation

• 👑 Opportunity isn’t even in Parliament yet and it’s already being called a “kingmaker”.
• 🚫 Luxon has repeatedly ruled it out, pointing to its land tax. He says he couldn’t be “any clearer”.
• 🧮 On the polls, Duncan says Luxon may not be able to form a government without Opportunity’s numbers.
• 📡 But ruling it out tells centre-right voters not to stray, which could push Opportunity below 5%.
• 🙅 Qiulae Wong isn’t keen anyway: “We are not here to prop up the current coalition government.”
• 🌿 Opportunity’s five bottom lines, including ending bottom-trawling and capping political donations, sit more easily with Labour and the Greens.
• 🐴 Duncan thinks Luxon sees Opportunity as more like Labour’s Trojan Horse than a genuinely centrist kingmaker.
• 🗳️ His conclusion: it’s not unreasonable to assume a vote for Opportunity is, in effect, a vote for a change of government.
• 🔪 My take? Even The Conversation has worked out which way Opportunity leans.

4. RODNEY HIDE: Hipkins sets the bar, then trips over it

Rodney Hide - Brash and Mitchell

• 🗣️ Hipkins complained that Māori MPs are held to a different standard: “There is an element of racism in this as well that is just ugly.”
• 📏 Hide asks whose standard. His. Hipkins set it when he called the Mongrel Mob pad visit a “huge error of judgement”.
• 🎥 Then footage turned up of Labour’s Kerrin Leoni campaigning in a Labour jacket at an event with Mongrel Mob members.
• ⏱️ On Thursday he defended her. By Friday she was gone, for breaching “the clear standards that we have set out for our Labour MPs and candidates”.
• 🔄 So he set the standard, enforced it, then called it racist. Hide: “You can’t have it both ways.”
• 📊 Tāmaki Makaurau was the one Māori seat Labour might have won. The Curia poll had Kaipara on 33 and Leoni on 31.
• 🧮 Now it goes to the Māori Party. Under MMP Labour just gets another list MP, but every extra Māori Party electorate is overhang.
• 📈 Hide’s model: Labour stays on 34, the Māori Party goes from four to five, and Parliament grows from 123 to 124.
• 🔪 My take? Lose a candidate, keep every MP, and gain a seat for your bloc. “That’s quite a day’s work.”

5. RICHARD PREBBLE: Opportunity to opportunistic

Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell

• 😞 Prebble says all parties disappoint. ACT now says the country can’t afford a tax cut.
• 🏃 But no party has abandoned its founding principles faster than Opportunity.
• 💰 Gareth Morgan spent $3 million of his own money promoting a guaranteed income and a land tax.
• 📜 On 29 September Qiulae Wong announced five non-negotiable policies. Neither land tax nor a citizens’ income was among them.
• ⏸️ On 9 October she said TOP could set aside tax reform for the next term.
• 🚗 Prebble calls TOP a party of learner drivers, willing to drive down any road, with any driver, on any side of the road.
• 🤔 What puzzles him is Luxon saying he rules TOP out over tax, when the whole country knows Wong would ditch that for a seat at the cabinet table.
• 🔪 My take? Prebble nails it: “An agreement with an opportunist lasts only until a better opportunity comes along.”

6. Anglo-American Civilisation

William McGimpsey - The Conservative Network

• 🏛️ McGimpsey says you can’t defend a civilisation if you won’t say what it is.
• 🇬🇧 His Anglo-American Civilisation runs from England out to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
• 🔺 He gives it three essential parts: the Anglo-Celtic peoples, Christianity and liberty.
• ⚖️ Take away any one, he argues, and you have a different civilisation.
• ⛪ He says we’ve swung too far from Christianity to secularism, and schools teach atheism by default.
• 🌏 He blames liberal universalism for multiculturalism, and says that brings pressure for hate speech laws and curbs on free association.
• 🤝 His proposals: a formal Anglosphere alliance on defence, trade and migration, and Christianity taught neutrally in schools, with an opt-out.
• 🛂 He also wants immigration and citizenship policy to preserve Anglo-Celtic majorities, and non-assimilated recent arrivals encouraged to leave.
• 🔪 My take? Plenty here will make the bien-pensant choke on their flat whites. Read it and decide for yourself.

7. Gangs and gang members

David Farrar - Patreon

• 😄 Farrar is amused that Labour is comparing MPs meeting gang members at a Kīngitanga hui or the state care apology with going to gang events and campaigning for votes there.
• 💒 He says he can speak with some authority. He was at a mate’s wedding in the Hawke’s Bay where a dozen or so Black Power members were guests.
• 🎰 He chatted to them about whether the Mob selfies with MPs would hurt at the election, while his kids played pinball. He found it “slightly surreal”.
• 🌊 At the Porirua pool he often sees parents with Mob tattoos on their backs, and the kids play together. He calls it “really nice seeing a diverse group of people, just being parents and kids.”
• 👪 His point: you can treat individuals differently from the organisations they belong to. “Kerrin Leoni is right when she says you love and support your whanau.”
• ⛪ His analogy, with apologies to the Mormons: he thinks the church is a scam, but individual Mormons are “some of the best people in humanity.”
• 🚔 He’s not saying gang members are all lovely. “Gang members are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime in NZ.”
• 🧥 The difference: Leoni “attended a gang organised event, went along in her Labour campaign outfit, and solicited for votes there.”
• 🔪 My take? Farrar nails it. “She was not there as whanau, but there as a candidate for office.”

8. The Overhang 2.10 - Side splitting

The Overhang

• 🗳️ The Overhang crunches decades of vote-splitting data to forecast every electorate.
• 🔵 Its headline: “National are almost certainly getting an overhang”.
• 📊 Average electorate wins: National 40, Labour 21, Greens 4, Te Pāti Māori 4, ACT 2.
• 🧮 That would mean a National overhang of 8 and a Te Pāti Māori overhang of 2, in a 130-seat Parliament.
• 🤝 National voters are more loyal. National incumbents get 91% of their own party voters, Labour incumbents 87%.
• 🔀 In the Māori seats, Labour voters are far more willing to back Te Pāti Māori candidates than the reverse.
• 📉 It notes rebel MPs like Hone Harawira and Meka Whaitiri did badly after their breaks. Bad news for Kapa-Kingi and Ferris.
• 🤷 On those seats it is honest: “not much better than three guesses wearing a trench coat”.
• 🔪 My take? The left spent a fortnight crying foul about overhangs. The numbers say National gets one anyway.

9. La France à Genoux.

Chris Trotter - Bowalley Road

• 🥖 People laugh at the French. Trotter says the French know revolution is no joke.
• 🔥 Most French citizens are watching the looting and burning town halls in horror and dismay.
• 🎓 The Paris professors who were student radicals in 1968 have “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”.
• 🗳️ In 1968 De Gaulle called fresh elections, and conservative France delivered its verdict on riots in the streets.
• 🇳🇿 New Zealand has been wary of that sort of politics, and our big ruptures, from the 1890 Maritime Strike to the 1981 Springbok Tour, were followed by reforms to defuse them.
• 💸 Revolutions come when a state can’t pay its bills and nobody will accept the cuts, tax rises or pension reform to fix it.
• 🎶 Macron and his wife were filmed swaying to Celine Dion as Paris erupted. He might as well have declared: “Let them eat cake”.
• 🐺 Trotter pictures Marine Le Pen as a she-wolf, watching and licking her chops.
• 🔪 My take? When Chris Trotter is warning about broke governments and riots, the left should be listening.

10. BRYCE WILKINSON: Cost of living crisis won’t be solved by subsidising prices

Bryce Wilkinson - Brash and Mitchell

• 📉 Real national disposable income per person fell 4.3% between the September quarters of 2022 and 2024. It is still 1.5% down.
• 🐌 The big cause is productivity. Output per hour grew 1.3% a year from 2000 to 2008, then 0.9%, then just 0.1% a year from 2020 to 2024.
• ⏳ At 1.3% a year real wages double in 54 years. At 0.1% it would take nearly 700 years.
• 🏷️ Wilkinson says some parties are relying on voters to confuse price with cost. One has a “Cost of living action plan” of subsidies and price caps.
• 💡 “Forcing a price down does not reduce the cost of supply.” You pay through rates, tax, lower wages or smaller KiwiSaver balances.
• 🥪 A worrying share of food for ‘free’ school lunches will likely be thrown away.
• 🚗 Subsidies help the well-off most, because they buy more. EV subsidies didn’t help those who couldn’t afford one.
• 💵 Cash beats price caps because it gives people choice.
• 🔪 My take? The slowdown, not greedy grocers, is the problem. Any party promising cheaper prices by decree is selling you a bill you pay later.

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