Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/201

This is edition 2026/201 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: Electoral rules shouldn’t depend on who’s in power

Bryce Edwards - Democracy Project

• 🗳️ Labour and the Greens call the 13-day enrolment cut-off voter suppression. Trevor Mallard compared it to "the voter suppression you expect from Trump or Hungary".
• ⚖️ Edwards says neither side's account holds up. He thinks the cut-off is a serious mistake that will cost tens of thousands of eligible people their vote, many of them young.
• 🇭🇺 But the Hungary line is overblown, and Labour's hands aren't clean.
• 📜 Labour brought in election-day enrolment in 2020 with NZ First and Green support. It passed 63 votes to 57, over National's opposition.
• 🔫 A 2019 Ministry of Justice paper shows officials were told to look only at election-day enrolment. The Electoral Commission wanted to wait until 2023. Labour went ahead anyway.
• 🔁 Goldsmith later used that precedent to defend the coalition's change, which passed 68 votes to 54, with the second reading pushed through under urgency in December.
• 🧾 The counting problem was real. The Auditor-General found enrolment processing in 2023 took eleven days instead of five, and errors went undetected.
• ❓ Edwards asks why the fix was to restrict enrolment rather than invest in running elections properly.
• 🔪 My take? Both big parties rewrite the rules when they hold the pen. Hipkins promises to restore late enrolment. Ask him whether he'd consult National first, because that's the test he set himself in July.

2. RICHARD PREBBLE: The importance of being a smart voter

Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell

• 🙋 An Epsom National supporter asked Prebble whether he should vote for Paul Goldsmith. "Why would he?"
• 🧮 National's problem is not winning too few electorates. It's that it will win too many. Under MMP another National electorate MP just means one fewer National list MP.
• 🎓 Epsom once sent Sir Ronald Algie to Parliament for 23 years. He quit his law professorship to lead the Freedom Association, which opposed growing state control.
• 🚔 Prebble asks what Algie would make of Goldsmith's plan to remove the right to silence in some criminal cases, with up to ten years' jail for refusing to give police information.
• 🏛️ That compromise on principle is why James Christmas is standing for ACT in Tamaki. He advised both John Key and Bill English and was once seen as National's future Attorney-General.
• 👔 National instead picked a former "Head of People Operations".
• ✅ His answer to the Epsom voter: vote David Seymour. In Tamaki, vote James Christmas.
• 🔪 My take? The smartest party doesn't always win. The smartest voters often decide it. Short piece, sharp point.

3. No Free Speech Crisis? Tell That to the Doctor Forced to Leave New Zealand

Dane Giraud - The Many Ways I Let You Down

• 📕 Nicky Hager's Dirty Work dismissed the idea of a free speech crisis and painted Free Speech Union supporters as an angry crowd.
• 🩺 Giraud answers with Dr David Smylie, a GP with nearly 40 years' experience, interviewed this week on the Free To Speak podcast.
• 📧 In 2022 Smylie sent an ill-judged reply to a pharmaceutical rep about her blend of Maori and English. The Medical Council investigated.
• 💸 The result was twelve months of supervised education at his own expense, including his supervisor's mileage, and a demand for two essays on bias, colonialism and institutional racism.
• 🙏 He regretted the email at once and offered to apologise in person. The apology was never passed on.
• 🛑 A transcript shows the rep was open to meeting him, and someone on the board talked her out of it. "So much for restorative justice."
• ✊ Giraud asks where the Left and the unions were, for Smylie and for nurse Cath Simpson, dismissed over personal social media posts.
• 🔪 My take? The Free Speech Union turned up when the unions didn't. Hager should have picked up the phone before writing the book.

4. October polling and forecasts

rustie - The Overhang

• 📊 Polling consensus: National 29%, Labour 28%, Greens 15%, NZ First and ACT 10% each, Opportunity 6.2%. The government is 5 points ahead.
• 📉 National is down 0.6 points this month, its third straight monthly drop. Labour has slid since May.
• 📈 ACT is up 2.5 points from a July low. The Greens have gained 5 points since April to a record 15%.
• 🏛️ With National averaging 8 overhang seats and TPM 3, the model has a 131-seat House needing 67 for a majority.
• 🔢 Median forecast: National 40, NZ First 14, ACT 13. A bare one-seat majority of 67 without Opportunity.
• 🎲 The coalition has a 67% chance of governing without Opportunity. Labour's side has 4%. Opportunity picks the government 31% of the time.
• ⏳ Most of the remaining uncertainty is a late swing. About 20% is the risk of a polling miss.
• 🥭 There's a fun list of silly coalitions too. A National-Labour "Chris-Topher" grand coalition would have the numbers 99% of the time.
• 🔪 My take? The overhang is doing the heavy lifting for the right. Labour needs about three of five things to go its way, and the runway is nearly gone.

5. The Greens are consistent

David Farrar - Kiwiblog

• 🏍️ Farrar says the only surprise about the Greens defending their Mongrel Mob hui visit is that anyone was surprised. Marama Davidson: "This is not new. It’s not new for the Green Party".
• ⚖️ Their justice policy would abolish life sentences, so every murderer, Brenton Tarrant included, would get a finite term.
• 🔓 They would ban preventive detention, which fewer than 300 people serve, mostly recidivist sexual and violent offenders.
• 🏠 Home detention would be open to murderers too.
• 🔁 Breaching home detention, parole or bail would bring a "community based response" instead of prison.
• 👶 The Greens, and more implicitly Opportunity, would lift the youth justice age from 18 to 25.
• ⛪ Davidson says the one group beyond the pale is Destiny Church, over violent and racist rhetoric. Farrar notes Mob members often display the swastika and chant sieg heils.
• 🔐 Hipkins has ruled Greens out of Police and Corrections, not Justice or Attorney-General. They could be a quarter to a third of his Cabinet.
• 🔪 My take? Violent rhetoric is beyond the pale for the Greens. Actual violence isn't. At least they're consistent.

6. Where Does Benjamin Netanyahu Go from Here?

Haviv Rettig Gur - The Free Press

• 🇮🇱 Netanyahu's coalition won 53 of 120 Knesset seats, Gadi Eisenkot's bloc 48 and the two Arab parties 19. Nobody reached 61.
• 📉 His right-religious bloc fell from 68 seats to 53. Eisenkot called it "a two-decade low".
• 🏆 But Likud beat the polls to be the largest party on 26, five ahead of Eisenkot's Yashar. That kills any rotation deal with Eisenkot going first.
• 🔁 Any failure to form a coalition triggers another election, so Liberman and Bennett can't break their promises without facing angry voters soon.
• 🗳️ The Arab parties got unprecedented turnout and don't want a rerun. But Ra'am's Mansour Abbas again refused to call Hamas a terrorist group.
• 🚨 Netanyahu claimed on X that Arab parties had "stolen" the election through fraud. Election officials say there's no evidence yet of widespread fraud.
• 🎯 Gur thinks Netanyahu may want a second election. A caretaker PM can still launch military operations, as Begin did against Osirak in 1981.
• 🗓️ The coalition timetable could run over 200 days, time Gur says will be spent trying to finish the Iran war.
• 🔪 My take? Netanyahu lost the count but may have bought what he wanted most: time, with Trump's two years left, to finish off Tehran.

7. The Teacher Trapped by Her Cancellation

Frannie Block - The Free Press

• 📱 In June 2020 Vermont principal Tiffany Riley wrote on her private Facebook: "I firmly believe Black Lives Matter" but "I DO NOT agree with coercive measures taken to get this point across."
• ⏱️ Within 48 hours she was on leave "while we negotiate an exit strategy". The board emailed every parent condemning her post.
• 🔥 She was fired that October, even though the board found "there is no evidence that Employee personally holds racist beliefs."
• ⚖️ In March 2021 a court ruled the school had retaliated against her political views, breached her contract and denied her due process. She settled for $650,000.
• 📨 She has applied for over 70 jobs since and hasn't had a single interview. The job portal makes her tick a box saying she was fired.
• 🚐 She and her husband sold their Victorian home, bought an RV and moved to Maine. She now sells flooring, bartends and teaches yoga.
• 💰 An analysis for her lawyers put her lost income and benefits at $2.1 to $3.4 million.
• 🤷 AOC now laughs that "Woke 1 was crazy". Riley: "I feel like the world is trying to forget about 2020".
• 🔪 My take? The mob moved on. Its victims are still stuck with the damage, and nobody who piled on has paid a price.

8. The ‘Israeli apartheid’ libel has completely fallen apart

Brendan O'Neill - spiked

• 📰 The Guardian now says Palestinian parties will "redraw" Israeli politics. Not long ago it ran headlines saying Israel perpetrates apartheid.
• 🗳️ O'Neill's point: Arabs in Israel can vote, stand for office, and have now won what headlines call kingmaker status. "You know who never had kingmaker status over anything? Blacks in South Africa."
• 📈 Turnout spiked in Arab-majority areas. The Joint List and Ra'am were projected to double their Knesset seats.
• 🤝 Both the Netanyahu and Eisenkot blocs have ruled out alliances with the Arab parties.
• 👥 There are 2.1 million Arabs in Israel, with the same rights as Jews to healthcare, welfare and labour representation. They serve as High Court judges, senior diplomats and army commanders.
• ⚽ The pile-on against footballer Saied Abu Farchi for a supposed gun celebration fizzled. He was mimicking a snooker cue, and the Guardian published a retraction.
• 🇿🇦 South African blacks were barred from voting in national elections and stripped of citizenship. O'Neill calls the comparison a crime against the historical record.
• 🔪 My take? You can't be an apartheid state and have Arab parties deciding who governs. Pick one. Written mid-count, so check the final numbers in item 6.

9. TRUST NOT THE COURTS

John McLean - John's Substack

• ⚖️ On 21 October Justice Dale La Hood overturned the Government's 2025 regulations banning new puberty blocker prescriptions for gender dysphoric young people.
• 🗣️ Ground one: the Government failed to consult affected young people and their families properly.
• 🤔 McLean notes the ban covered only new prescriptions, so the Minister would have had to find and consult youths not yet on blockers.
• 📜 Ground two: the rules breached the Bill of Rights Act protection from disability discrimination.
• 🚫 McLean says section 4 of that Act bars any court from striking down an enactment just because it's inconsistent with the Bill of Rights.
• 📖 The Interpretation Act 1999 defines "enactment" to include regulations. So, he argues, the judgment conflicts with the Act it relies on.
• 🏳️‍⚧️ The Human Rights Commission joined as an interested party and backed PATHA's challenge.
• 🗓️ Winston Peters wants it appealed. McLean doubts an appeal would succeed and says the timing, a fortnight before the election, is "curious".
• 🔪 My take? If the coalition still wants the ban, it should do what McLean suggests and pass a Puberty Blockers Prohibition Act. A statute is much harder for a judge to set aside.

10. Paper straws are more harmful than plastic straws, South Korean study finds; check what research reveals

ET Online - The Economic Times

• 🥤 A study commissioned by South Korea's Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment found paper straws may do more environmental harm than plastic ones.
• 🧪 Paper straws had 6.33 times the carcinogenic impact of conventional plastic straws across their life cycle.
• ℹ️ That measures emissions from production to disposal, not the direct health risk of using a straw.
• 🌧️ Paper straws also had 2.04 times the acidification impact.
• ♻️ Biodegradable plastic straws scored 3.34 times the carcinogenic impact and 1.98 times the acidification impact of plastic.
• 📋 Four straw types were tested across 16 impact categories. Plain plastic came out lowest in 10 of them, including climate change.
• 🏛️ Opposition lawmaker Kim Wi-sang made the study public.
• 🔪 My take? We banned the straw that works for one that goes soggy and scores worse on the ministry's own numbers. Feel-good policy rarely survives a life-cycle test.

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