Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/199

This is edition 2026/199 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: Scandal fatigue over politicians and gangs

Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project

• 🪧 Sensible Sentencing Trust billboards put Swarbrick, Davidson and Hipkins under "BACKING THE GANGS", above the Greens' slogan "for all of us". RNZ says the Campaign Company, owned by Taxpayers' Union boss Jordan Williams, made them.
• ⏸️ The Greens have complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. JCDecaux has paused the ads while it reviews. Luxon's office referred RNZ to the organisation responsible.
• 🐕 The row began with Green and Te Pāti Māori MPs at a Mongrel Mob pad hui, then Labour's Kerrin Leoni after footage of her at a Papakura fundraiser with Mob members.
• 🔄 Leoni resigned on Friday saying she did not want a National government. By Monday she told Te Ao Māori News she will keep campaigning and, if elected, sit as an independent.
• 📸 Labour Weekend turned into a photo war: Potaka with patched Mob members in 2024, then Tam posting Hipkins and Luxon with gang figures. Edwards says almost none of the later shots show anything improper.
• 🗣️ Luxon went from "No, no, no, no, no, absolutely no" on engaging with gangs to Mark Mitchell saying politicians are photographed with thousands of people and "We don't know their background."
• 📊 The Post/Freshwater Strategy study found only 3% of New Zealanders rate law and order as their top concern. The ODT: "it's the cost of living, stupid".
• 🧮 A Leoni win would most likely still count as a Labour seat under the Electoral Act, giving Labour one fewer list MP while she sat outside caucus.
• 🔪 My take? Hipkins drew a hard line on gang pads, then spent a week watching his own candidate rewrite it. Scandal fatigue is Luxon's friend until the power bill arrives.

2. Mob Rule.

Chris Trotter - Bowalley Road

• 🐕 Trotter says Harry Tam has again dragged the Mongrel Mob into the heart of the campaign, and that Te Pāti Māori, Green and Labour candidates let themselves be recorded seeking Mob votes.
• 🗳️ A fortnight ago the momentum was with Labour and its allies. Now, with early voting open, he says only the most indefatigably optimistic would deny that "Chippy has lost it."
• 🎯 Prima facie it is Kerrin Leoni's disaster, "Co-parented" by the Te Pāti Māori and Greens attendees. Deeper down, Trotter blames a party culture that no longer picks candidates with an instinct for where most New Zealanders stand.
• 📜 Under first-past-the-post, he says, nobody who heard Norman Kirk promise to "take the bikes off the bikies" needed a memo to avoid the Mob.
• 📋 MMP Party Lists, he argues, pull candidates inward toward faction and ideology, not out toward ordinary voters.
• 🧠 To the ordinary voter, gangs mean violent criminals. To the radical ideologue, they are victims of colonisation the "Settler State" should heal.
• 🚪 Under MMP, accepting Harry Tam's invitation can look like "common sense" inside a progressive faction, even when it is electoral poison outside.
• 📱 Politicians who had to win an electorate under the old rules would not have walked into a Mob pad with every patched member holding a cellphone set to record.
• 🔪 My take? When Trotter says Chippy has lost it, the left should stop arguing about nuance and start counting the early votes already cast against them.

3. Election Fortnight begins

Peter Allan Williams

• 🗳️ Williams says we no longer have Election Day. We have Election Fortnight. You can vote from 26 October through 6 November, then candidates must rest on the 7th.
• 📢 Campaign messages can hit you right up to the booth door for twelve days, then vanish on the official day. He calls that "utterly inconsistent and illogical".
• 🇬🇧 In the UK, early votes are postal or proxy and arranged well in advance. Australia lets you vote early in person only with a declared reason. We throw the doors open.
• 📊 In 2023, 61.4% of all votes were already in before the official day.
• 📝 The Ardern government added Election Day enrolment in 2020. About 80,000 enrolled on the day in 2020, and 110,000 in 2023, with a late surge that delayed the final result by three weeks.
• 🔒 This year the roll closed 12 days before Election Day, the strictest cut-off in his lifetime. Miss it and, even if you turn 18 before the final count, you wait until 2029.
• 🌍 Permanent residents got the vote in 1975. NZ is now one of only four countries that lets non-citizens vote, and we require just twelve months' residence.
• ✈️ His daughter has lived in London 22 years, votes there, and because of short NZ visits she can vote here too. He says that is not fair, with a diaspora estimated at over 900,000.
• 🔪 My take? Peters backed citizens-only voting years ago. Closing the roll early without fixing Election Fortnight is half a job.

4. The case for saving Chris Bishop

Ani O'Brien

• ⚠️ Because of National's likely overhang, list MPs like Willis, Bishop, Goldsmith and Brownlee are at risk unless they win electorates. O'Brien is writing to save Bishop in Hutt South.
• 🔴 Hutt South is usually a red seat. Ginny Andersen held it before Bishop flipped it. Boundary changes have made it redder still.
• 📊 A Victor Consulting RoboPoll (n=533, firm founded by former Labour staffer Clint Smith) had Andersen on 42% and Bishop on 30%. O'Brien flags it as cheap and unreliable, but not surprising.
• 🏛️ She rates Bishop as one of the rare MPs who actually run Parliament: Leader of the House, then Attorney-General, with deep knowledge of the rules.
• 🏗️ On housing, infrastructure and RMA reform she says he worked across the aisle, including with Labour's Kieran McAnulty. Officials estimate the RMA rewrite could cut about 45% of consent applications.
• 🎸 He is a genuine NZ music fan. At last year's music awards he was caught looking irritated during Stan Walker's politicised performance, later said he should have kept quiet, and still praised Don McGlashan.
• 📻 Andersen, she says, is often not across the detail. On Newstalk ZB she insisted the National Land Transport Fund did not pay for road maintenance, then admitted after the break she was wrong.
• 💥 In February 2024 Andersen accused Mark Mitchell of being paid to kill people in Iraq and asked if he kept a tally. Hipkins said she had gone too far; she apologised.
• 🗳️ Andersen is high enough on Labour's list to return even if she loses. NZ First's Alistair Boyce is telling voters to give Bishop the electorate vote and NZ First the party vote.
• 🔪 My take? Split the ticket in Hutt South: Bishop for the seat, party vote where it adds a seat. Losing him to the overhang would be a self-own.

5. RODNEY HIDE - Election outcome: the real losers won't be on the ballot

Rodney Hide - Brash and Mitchell

• 🔮 Hide's election-night call: centre-right government, National overhang, ACT and NZ First come out on top, Opportunity out. The big losers: the New Zealand media.
• 📺 He says the press ran one story all year: it was close, the government was in trouble, Opportunity was the kingmaker. Voters, he reckons, have stopped listening.
• 📊 He leans on The Overhang's "Side splitting" numbers: National wins about 40 electorates against a list entitlement of about 32, an overhang of around eight (range four to ten, never zero).
• 🧡 The Māori Party is expected to pick up about two overhang seats on that model.
• 🤝 Loyalty gap: a National incumbent gets 91% of National party voters; a Labour incumbent 87% of Labour's. The centre-right holds; the left leaks.
• 🧮 Once National is in overhang, an extra National party vote shrinks the overhang instead of adding a seat. Smart centre-right voters, he says, will park the party vote with ACT or NZ First.
• 🏛️ That pushes National toward marginal-seat campaigns and local candidates who can win electorates, not list placements handed out by head office.
• 🟠 Opportunity has polled over 6% in places, but soft support fades. Hide does not see Qiulae Wong winning Mt Albert, and without an electorate they miss 5%.
• 🔪 My take? Hide is singing the NZ First and ACT hymn sheet, and the media's Opportunity-kingmaker yarn is already looking like last month's weather forecast.

6. GRAHAM ADAMS: Why does the left soft-soap Māori gangs?

Graham Adams - Brash and Mitchell

• 🎥 Adams says Oriini Kaipara has been called a "sleeper-agent for the centre-right" after posting video from a Mongrel Mob hui with Maipi-Clarke, Green MP Hūhana Lyndon and Green candidate Michel Mulipola.
• 📰 Chris Bishop told supporters the two-week rolling controversy has "definitely distracted attention" from the economy, but "probably focused attention on just how crazy a Labour/Green/ Māori Party government would be."
• 📈 His figures: gang members are about 0.25% of adults but linked to 18% of serious violent crime, 19% of homicides, 23% of firearms offences and 25% of kidnapping and abductions.
• 👩 Feminist Sandra Coney defended Leoni campaigning at a Mob gathering: "Whether we like it or not, [gangs] are part of us."
• 🧥 Leoni, in a Labour jacket, urged gangsters to oust the government and later said: "I cannot change who my whānau are or who I grew up with, nor would I ever turn my back on them."
• 🗣️ Kaipara told the pad: "You are tangata whenua. You are of this land." Adams reads that as implying ancestry should confer special rights, including state housing, to restore "mana".
• 🩸 He calls that a muddled variant of "blood and soil" ideology, citing Dame Elizabeth Rata on ethno-nationalism and first-arriver political entitlements.
• 🟢 Green MP Tamatha Paul, on the gangs bill, said of gang leaders: "They're just normal people. Go and have a chat with them. I think you'll find they're quite nice."
• 🔪 My take? When Greens call patched Mob leaders "quite nice", they are not soft-soaping. They are auditioning for Opposition.

7. Ideology, Intolerance, and Emotional Reactivity Behind Unsupported Claims That Online Words and Images Cause Violence

Michael Shellenberger - Public

• 🇦🇺 After an alleged car attack on Australian MP Helen Haines, politicians blamed social media. Within hours the suspect looked intoxicated and mentally ill; he and his family had been friends with her for years.
• 🔬 Shellenberger reviews about 140 years of research and finds no proven causal link from online words and images to real-world violence.
• ⚖️ Correlation is not causation. Killers may consume violent media, but so does everyone else, and their own accounts are a poor guide when many are mentally ill.
• 📉 Studies often cited for a link, including German anti-refugee and Russian VK papers, stop short of saying social media creates crimes "out of thin air". Effects show up where hostility already exists.
• 🧪 A 2023 Nature experiment by Brendan Nyhan and colleagues found cutting like-minded Facebook exposure had no measurable effect on eight preregistered attitude measures.
• 🎬 Some evidence runs the other way: a 2009 study found violent crime fell on days with larger audiences for violent movies, deterring almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend.
• 👨‍⚖️ In 2011 the US Supreme Court struck down California's video-game law 7-2. Scalia: the studies "do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively."
• 🧱 He argues elites use violence as a pretext for censorship they already wanted, from Germany's NetzDG after 2016 to Australia's misinformation push.
• 🔪 My take? If the science does not show online words cause killings, the censors are not protecting you. They are protecting themselves from being argued with.

8. RICHARD PREBBLE: Grievance Politics

Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell

• ⚡ Prebble says Te Pāti Māori and New Zealand First will hate the comparison, but both are "grievance parties" led by politicians who specialise in outrage.
• 🎯 NZ First, he says, targets migrants, particularly Indians. Te Pāti Māori blames non-Māori.
• 💸 Both make extravagant promises with no fiscal plan: NZ First's list includes buying back the BNZ and a $100 billion infrastructure fund; Te Pāti Māori's includes a $3.1 billion food programme and $100 million for Māori-owned supermarkets.
• 🔄 Both attack the establishment while seeking the power to join it. Peters made Ardern Prime Minister, backed vaccine mandates, then courted the anti-vaccine vote; Waititi was Labour's Waiariki candidate in 2014.
• 🧲 What attracts their supporters, he argues, is not a coherent programme but the conviction that someone else is responsible for their misfortunes.
• 📉 His sting in the tail: both parties do more electoral damage to their coalition partners than to themselves.
• 🗣️ Winston Peters' attack on a Chinese-born MP, Prebble writes, "appears to have cost him little support" but damaged Luxon.
• 🐕 Te Pāti Māori courting the gangs "may not have cost the party votes. It may have cost Chris Hipkins any chance of becoming Prime Minister."
• 🔪 My take? Prebble's NZ First dig is stale gallery copy. The half he gets right is simpler: TPM's gang courtship is the millstone around Hipkins' neck.

9. Ross Douthat: Why Evangelicalism Is Winning

Ross Douthat - The Free Press

• ⛪ Tocqueville once tipped Catholicism to win in democratic America. The last few years have revived talk of a "Catholic century".
• 📊 Douthat, himself Catholic, says look past the intelligentsia: the form of Christianity most adapted to late-modern America is evangelical Protestantism.
• 📈 Ryan Burge's data: evangelicals have held a roughly steady share of the US population since the 1970s, while Catholicism and the mainline denominations have declined.
• 🗓️ In the 2020s, evangelicals are more than twice as likely as Catholics to attend church weekly, and twice as likely to call faith "very important" in their lives.
• 🔁 Evangelicalism does not just win more converts than Catholicism; on current evidence it also keeps more of its young people.
• 🧠 He grants the usual critiques: anti-intellectual current, thin aesthetics, partisan blur, the old "scandal of the evangelical mind".
• 🌍 He rejects the claim that evangelicalism is just white male chauvinism, noting shared distinctives with the black church and growth across Africa, Latin America and Asia.
• 🛠️ The entrepreneurial pastor, adaptable structures and seeker-friendly model, he says, clearly work under 21st-century conditions.
• 🔪 My take? Rome gets the prestige essays. The evangelicals get the bums on seats. Douthat is honest enough to admit which one is actually winning.

10. Where’s the party?

Jenny Ruth - Just the Business

• 📈 The Reserve Bank looks set to raise the OCR on Wednesday. Ruth thinks that would be a mistake, as she did the two hikes already made this year.
• 🏦 Markets and all four major-bank economists are pricing a hike. The OCR is 2.75%; the Bank has said it wants 3%.
• 📉 Headline CPI is 3.7%, below Kiwibank's 4% and the RBNZ's 3.9%. Excluding transport, Kiwibank has core at 2.7%, inside the 1% to 3% band.
• 💬 Kiwibank: "We don't think a hike is needed at all, to be clear." Rip the band-aid only if fear of oil-shock spillovers is driving the call.
• 👷 Unemployment has been rising since mid to late 2022 and hit 5.6% in the June quarter. Shamubeel Eaqub says current inflation is a cost shock that makes New Zealanders poorer, not a wages-prices spiral.
• 🇦🇺 The RBA may hike again on 3 November (cash rate already 4.6%). A still Kiwi dollar risks importing more oil-price inflation.
• ⏪ She compares 2014, when Graeme Wheeler hiked from 2.5% to 3.5% and later admitted "We did get it wrong," after feared inflation never arrived.
• 🏠 House prices are still sliding: REINZ's index was down 1.5% in the year to September and 17% from the November 2021 peak. Annual GDP to June was just 1.7%.
• 🔪 My take? Taking away the punch bowl only works if someone is actually at the party. Right now the room looks half empty.

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