Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/202

This is edition 2026/202 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: Who is paying to engineer the election overhang?

Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project

• 📰 The Herald ran a full-page ad written by Don Brash and placed by RCR Media, the company behind Reality Check Radio. It told readers not to party vote National.
• ✍️ Electoral Commission rules need written sign-off from each party an ad promotes. So Edwards says Act and NZ First have almost certainly authorised it.
• 🧾 If they did, the ad's cost counts against their own spending limits and has to show up in their expense returns, even though RCR paid for it.
• 🎙️ Harry Mowbray told Sean Plunket on The Platform he'd put "a little bit of money" into RCR's campaign. He wouldn't say how much.
• 📱 He also confirmed money went to social media commentators Chantelle Baker and Penny Marie to boost posts on strategic voting.
• 🌐 Mowbray says his Split Your Vote website came down after the Electoral Commission told him the $35 domain made it an election ad.
• 🏢 RCR registered as a promoter on 9 October and can spend up to $424,000. Its directors are Claire Deeks and Alia Bland.
• 🙈 Promoters don't have to name donors, and big spenders' returns aren't due until 9 March 2027. Voters may never know who paid.
• 🔪 My take? Vote splitting is legal and the left did it first. But advance voting is already open. If you're telling people how to vote, tell them who's paying for it.

2. NICK MOWBRAY: Split your vote

Nick Mowbray - Brash and Mitchell

• 💰 Mowbray opens with it: "I am National's largest donor." But he doesn't agree with them on how you should vote.
• 🎯 His priority is a centre-right government. National, like every party, has its own interests.
• 🗳️ His advice is blunt. Electorate vote: National. Party vote: NZ First or ACT.
• 🧮 He says he wants National's list MPs in too, but voters have to confront the electoral maths.
• ⬅️ He points out the left ran this strategy first, and it's a tight election.
• 🧸 Zuru earns less than 1% of its revenue in New Zealand, he says. His interest is a prosperous country to raise his kids in.
• 🔨 "A country of makers not takers."
• 🔪 My take? Short and sharp. It's a post from his X account, republished. Hard to argue National's biggest donor is a stooge for the other side.

3. A Promise At Eberswalde.

Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter (Substack)

• 🏟️ Trotter opens at Eberswalde stadium in July 1932, where Hitler told 40,000 people Germany's 30 parties would disappear.
• 📜 A year later the Law Against the Formation of Parties made the Nazis the only legal party. Promise kept.
• ⚠️ His warning: when enough voters see democracy as the cause of their woes, not the fix, democratic norms are in trouble.
• 📊 He cites a Helen Clark Foundation study. Only 32% are satisfied with their finances, and food insecurity sits at 25%.
• 🦸 And 32% of New Zealanders, 48% of men under 44, liked the idea of a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with parliament or elections.
• 🧩 He blames the economy, a culture of rampant individualism, race and gender politics and a tech revolution. And he says MMP has made it worse.
• 🇩🇪 The allies imposed MMP on West Germany to force compromise. Trotter says in a crisis, too many choices confuse a frightened people.
• ⚖️ His answer is a simple binary, Left or Right, with losers willing to wear defeat rather than rig permanent victory.
• 🔪 My take? Grim reading a week out from polling day. One in three wanting a strongman should worry every party, not just the losers.

4. The Election Story Everyone Is Missing

Simon O'Connor - On Point

• 🔍 O'Connor says commentators hunting for an election-changing moment may have missed one that has already happened.
• 🏚️ It's Te Pati Maori MP Oriini Kaipara's appearance at a gang pad, and what she said afterwards.
• 📉 He argues it shows a deeper problem for the centre-left than the polls suggest.
• 🔪 My take? Paywalled, so that's all I can see. Worth a read if you subscribe.

5. Who gets to run your life?

Ani O'Brien - Thought Crimes

• 🧭 Ani O'Brien says the real choice on 7 November is how much of your life gets decided in Wellington.
• ⚖️ Her rough line: the left wants government further into our lives, the right wants to push it back out.
• 📚 She runs the parties past the philosophers. Rawls asks whether a policy actually helps the least advantaged. Hayek says no central planner knows enough.
• 🏠 Exhibit A is Labour's rent-to-buy policy: $100 a week towards a deposit for eligible working tenants in Kainga Ora and community housing.
• 🏘️ Two similar families in the same suburb. One rents privately and gets nothing. The other could get $5,200 a year, partly paid for by the first.
• 🧓 She reminds Labour that Savage's Social Security Act 1938 required benefit applicants to be willing to work.
• 💸 Budget 2026 forecasts $27 billion on welfare in 2026/27 plus $26.5 billion on Super. "So $53.5 billion for one year of social spending."
• 📈 Marama Davidson guessed we pay 1 to 2% on government debt. O'Brien says the 10 year bond yield is around 4.9%.
• 🔪 My take? "Every new intervention and its inclusions creates a new set of exclusions." Long read, but the clearest left versus right piece of the campaign.

6. RODNEY HIDE: The Future

Rodney Hide - Brash and Mitchell

• 🚗 Hide starts with a car park business case built on careful traffic data. In fifteen years, he says, it'll be empty.
• 🤖 Driverless Teslas are already carrying paying passengers in six American cities. "We are pouring concrete for a world that is leaving."
• 🧠 The bigger story is superintelligence, and robots that make robots. Then labour, resources and power all get cheap.
• 🔑 What's left scarce? Land, time, trust, and the rules we make ourselves. "In an age of abundance, the scarcest thing left will be permission."
• 📋 His briefing to incoming ministers: new tech is lawful here unless there's proven harm. If a trusted overseas regulator approves it, we do too.
• ⏱️ A regulator who wants to block something gets 60 days to show real harm. Miss the deadline and the answer is yes.
• 🏫 An SI tutor for every child. Data centres and power stations consented in months, not years.
• 💵 Fast-lane tech firms pay a power levy into a Citizen's Fund that pays every citizen a dividend, like Alaska has done with oil since 1982.
• 🔪 My take? Hide admits he won't have it all right. But he's asking the question nobody on the campaign trail is: what's government for when the machines do the work?

7. DON BRASH: Want to keep the Left out of government?

Don Brash - Brash and Mitchell

• 📰 This is the full text of Brash's advertorial that ran in the Herald on 29 October. "It sounds backwards - but hear me out."
• 🙅 National wants "two ticks blue" and Sir John Key says splitting is "the opposite of clever". Brash says this isn't an ordinary election.
• 🧮 National's electorate strength is well above its party vote. If it wins more electorates than its party vote earns, extra National party votes add no MPs.
• 📐 His example: National wins 40 electorates against an entitlement of 34. Parliament grows to 126 with a six-seat overhang.
• ⬅️ Te Pati Maori is already urging supporters to party vote Green or Labour to engineer a left overhang, he says.
• 🧑‍🏫 He cites former National minister Maurice Williamson: even if National's party vote rose from 28% to 33%, it may not add one list MP.
• 🗳️ Brash reckons about 25,000 party votes buys each extra NZ First or ACT list MP.
• 🏉 Williamson's line: "It's like a rugby game. It does not matter if the winger, the lock or the kicker scores, so long as the team wins".
• 🔪 My take? Read this with item 1. Edwards wants to know who paid for it. Brash wants you to read it.

8. The Overhang 2.11 - Lower case “o”

rustie - The Overhang

• 📊 The Overhang's forecaster is sticking with a 40-seat, eight-seat overhang call for National. The Herald/Motu, Stuff and NZElectionPredictor show overhangs too.
• 🗺️ The structural reason: Labour's vote is packed into the Maori seats and South Auckland. National's is spread across suburban and small-town seats.
• 🤝 Labour voters are historically more willing to back a National candidate than the reverse. That's worth about 3% to National.
• ✂️ There are six fewer list seats than when MMP started, because electorates keep growing inside a fixed 120.
• 🎖️ National is fielding 17 established candidates plus 21 one-term incumbents. Labour has just 14.
• 🚫 ACT is missing from 10 competitive seats this year, including Hutt South, which helps National candidates there.
• 🗑️ The wasted vote is usually about 6%. Parties outside Parliament are polling under 0.4%, so there are fewer spare list seats.
• 🎲 The headline: the overhang roughly doubles the coalition's chances, from 32% to 65%.
• 🔪 My take? The model is the author's, not a poll, and they say so. But the maths explains why everyone is suddenly talking about this.

9. National still refusing to accept the obvious

Peter Allan Williams - Peter’s Substack

• 🗳️ Williams says National is as staunch as ever against tactical vote splitting, the one tactic he says keeps Luxon as PM.
• 📰 The Herald reports Luxon called it "disappointing", and National says the RCR ads "trying to confuse" voters.
• 🙄 He calls that patronising. Te Pati Maori voters worked it out ages ago.
• ✂️ He's split his own vote at least twice, including in 2023. Most people do, he reckons.
• 📉 National polls in the high 20s, with RNZ-Reid Research at 24.8. Act and NZ First together sit around 20%.
• 🏛️ He expects the largest Parliament in our history, possibly up to 130 seats.
• 🤔 He takes on a Substack by Zoran Rakovic suggesting National might prefer to lose office and rebuild.
• 🧭 His reply: National is flailing because it forgot its own principles, and a Labour-Greens-Opportunity-Te Pati Maori government means asset taxes.
• 🔪 My take? "Voters are not stupid." National's leaders know two ticks blue won't work. They just can't say so.

10. RICHARD PREBBLE - Interesting election races: Chris Bishop

Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell

• 🏛️ Prebble says some electorate races matter because electing a good candidate makes a better Parliament.
• 🗑️ "Frankly, many MPs are third raters whom you would not employ to take out the rubbish."
• 🤝 "It is not often I agree with Winston Peters, but Chris Bishop is a remarkable MP."
• 🏗️ He credits Bishop as the driving force behind cross-party agreement on a long-term infrastructure plan.
• 📜 Parliament has known the RMA was flawed for 30 years. Successive governments failed to replace it. "Bishop succeeded."
• 🔁 Labour opposed parts of the new law but isn't campaigning to repeal it.
• 📋 His opponent Ginny Andersen is 12th on Labour's list, so she'll be back in Parliament regardless.
• ✅ He asks Labour voters in Hutt South to back Bishop and keep their party vote for Labour.
• 🔪 My take? A former ACT leader and Peters both backing a National MP in one week. Bishop must be doing something right.

11. Your election desk is already paid for.

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