Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/203

This is edition 2026/203 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. "Doing the Math" - Against Democracy.

Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter (Substack)

• 🗳️ Trotter asks whether the left will wake up on Sunday 8 November and decide to fight the result in the streets, the way the French do.
• 📉 He points to the 1News-Verian and RNZ-Reid Research polls. National is falling and its coalition partners are rising.
• 🧮 RNZ-Reid Research has National on 24.8 percent of the party vote. In a normal MMP election that's about 30 seats.
• 🏠 But he says there's "Not. A. Chance." Labour takes 18 electorates off National. So National could pick up an overhang of 10 to 15 seats.
• 📐 With Parliament ballooning to 130 to 135 seats, the left needs at least 66. In his scenario it wins 64 and loses, even with more than half the party vote.
• 🤝 He doesn't call vote splitting illegal. His beef is that it's organised, quoting union veteran Pat Kelly: "This vote wasn't stitched-up, comrade, it was organised."
• 🎯 He says the strategy is about saving the right, not National, even if Nicola Willis and Gerry Brownlee lose their seats in Parliament.
• 🔥 His warning: shut the left out of power and the radicals may go looking for it "by other means", several notches up from the Treaty Principles Bill protests.
• 🔪 My take? Every rule Trotter describes was there when the left was using it. Now that the right has done the maths, it's suddenly a threat to democracy.

2. Strategic Voting is Right and Fair

Flag n Fix (Substack)

• 🗳️ Flag n Fix says splitting your vote is nothing new. It's part of MMP, and 35% of voters split their vote at the last election.
• 🙏 The writer reckons the country owes Reality Check Radio "a great deal of gratitude" for explaining how the two votes work.
• ❓ National's two-tick line gets short shrift. Luxon warned the split vote could confuse voters and risk a Labour-led government.
• 🚗 The reply: if people can drive cars and use computers, they can handle two ticks.
• 💬 Don Brash told RCR: "It is a great sadness to me that the party I once led is now putting party over country and denigrating the intelligence of right-side voters."
• 📺 The post leans on David Farrar's count of state broadcaster coverage. Opportunity and the Greens got five to seven times more favourable coverage than ACT and NZ First.
• 🏛️ It quotes Winston Peters at Whanganui, saying a packed meeting in Palmerston North got "not a word, not a syllable" from the mainstream media.
• 🧾 It also flags Troy Bowker's warning that Opportunity's land value tax would hit homeowners and farmers every year, whatever their income.
• 🔪 My take? The two ticks are yours. National can ask for both, but it can't stop you doing the maths.

3. To change, or not to change, a government.

Grant Duncan - Politics Happens

• 🗓️ Election night is 7 November, final results land on 27 November, and Duncan says coalition talks could take weeks.
• 💸 Polls put the cost of living as the top issue. He blames poor productivity growth and unfair ways of sharing out income and wealth.
• 🤖 He says AI is already picking and rejecting job applicants, yet it has hardly featured in the campaign.
• 🙈 "Political heads are buried deep in the sand on this."
• 📺 He's scathing about the two Chrises, calling them "unimpressive and mendacious" and the same pair who debated three years ago.
• 📊 Hooton reckoned Hipkins won the Stuff debate by asking if you're better off. Duncan notes unemployment hit 5.6% and inflation went over 4%, though September's figure was 3.7%.
• 🔙 Luxon's reply is that inflation topped 7% under Labour in 2022. Duncan says that line gets weaker as time passes.
• 🔮 His real question: will you be better off in three years, and under whose leadership?
• 🔪 My take? Fair point on AI. But a man who calls both leaders liars still has to pick one of them on Saturday.

4. Remoras, wasps and coalition government

Liam Hehir - The Blue Review w/ Liam Hehir

• 🦈 Hehir starts with the remora and the shark. Natural rivals, but both do better working together. That's how a coalition is meant to work.
• 🐝 Then there's the tropical wasp that lays its egg inside a host, which gets eaten from the inside out.
• ⚖️ He says this coalition was never one of equals. ACT and NZ First can claim the popular wins and distance themselves from the rest. National can't.
• 📉 That's one reason he gives for National missing the usual first-term bounce.
• 🔁 A vote moved from National to ACT or NZ First isn't lost to the right, he says. But it isn't a vote gained either.
• 🧮 On the overhang strategy, he says both smaller parties seem to have given their blessing to split-vote ads, with ACT's consent tied to a message backing its own electorate seats.
• 🏛️ National has resisted. Hehir says the minute it starts "licensing defection" it stops being the natural home of centre-right voters.
• ⏳ His warning is a long stretch out of power, like the right's fourteen years from 1935 to 1949.
• 🔪 My take? A tidy case for National's two ticks. The catch is that voters, not parties, decide where their votes go.

5. From Portland To Paris To Pretoria, The Left Creates The Problems It Blames On Civilization

Michael Shellenberger - Public

• 🏨 A downtown Portland hotel sold for $101 million less than it was bought for in 2016. The media blamed the pandemic and slow tourism.
• 🏙️ Shellenberger blames soft-on-crime policy. Portland's commercial vacancy rate is 24%, against Nashville's 16%.
• 🇫🇷 French students protesting teacher shortages? He says spending per pupil is up 1.6% a year in constant euros since 1980.
• 🇿🇦 South Africa's water and sewage systems are collapsing. He notes apartheid ended in 1994 and the left has run the place ever since.
• 🗳️ Nearly 80% of Portland voters backed Kamala Harris, and Oregon hasn't had a Republican governor since the early 1980s.
• 📰 A 2022 survey of 1,600 journalists found just 3% identified as Republicans. In 1971 it was over 25%.
• 🎓 Universities went the same way, he says, and the media stopped filtering and just repeated the left's framings.
• 🔄 His argument: the left causes the mess, then blames "the system", meaning civilisation itself.
• 📚 It's a taster for The Left's War on Reality, his book with Alex Gutentag, out from HarperCollins in January.
• 🔪 My take? Swap Portland for Wellington's CBD and see if it sounds familiar.

6. Anthropic asks investors to trust it won't do evil

Paul McBeth - Jenny Ruth's Just the Business

• 📈 Anthropic's S-1 shows revenue of US$16.29 billion in the six months to 30 June, up from US$1.16 billion a year earlier.
• 📉 Its operating loss narrowed to US$693 million from US$2.14 billion, and it had US$131.7 billion in cash and short-term investments.
• 💰 Talk is of a raise of up to US$100 billion at a valuation of US$1.5 trillion to US$2 trillion.
• 🛡️ The pitch is safety. A Long-Term Benefit Trust with no financial interest can appoint most of the board.
• 🙏 McBeth says there's an element of "trust us, we know what we're doing", like Google's "Don't be evil" in 2004.
• 🎁 Anthropic is putting 5% of its equity into a public good fund, and the co-founders have pledged 80% of their equity to charity.
• 🖥️ The catch is compute. Anthropic is on the hook for almost US$660 billion in leases over the next decade, whether it uses the capacity or not.
• 🇳🇿 He says New Zealand could shine here, with new generation coming and the renewable power and water data centres need.
• ⚡ Done right, we could export our electrons through AI infrastructure the way we do with aluminium from Tiwai Point.
• 🔪 My take? Never mind the halo. If they want cheap clean power, we've got it. Get the consents moving.

7. Douglas Murray: Bibi Derangement Syndrome Is Spreading

Douglas Murray - The Free Press

• 🧠 Murray says Bibi Derangement Syndrome was around long before Trump Derangement Syndrome, and was even more virulent.
• 🗳️ He says Tuesday's election in Israel shows it's "a vision-impairing condition".
• 🍷 Spend time in Tel Aviv and you'll wonder how Netanyahu ever got elected. Nobody you meet admits to voting for him.
• 📊 He says the polls consistently, almost systematically, underestimate Netanyahu, and he surprises every time.
• ⏳ Netanyahu has been prime minister for 19 of the last 30 years, the longest-serving in Israel's history.
• 🌍 When he first took office, Clinton was president, John Major was prime minister and Hafez al-Assad ruled Syria.
• 🎯 Murray's point: however the next government shapes up, anti-Zionists, antisemites and peaceniks around the world "will feel no less hostile".
• 🔪 My take? Murray's right about the polls. They've written Bibi off before and he keeps turning up.

8. How to vote New Zealand election 2026: Electorate guide

Liberty Scott - Liberty Scott

• 🗺️ Liberty Scott has gone through every electorate and picked who he'd back for more freedom, smaller government and less tax.
• 🚫 He says it isn't strategic or about creating an overhang. He does urge votes against the Greens and Te Pati Maori.
• 📶 Each pick is rated high, medium or low priority, so you can tell where your electorate vote actually counts.
• 🏙️ Auckland Central: Candace Kinser, National, high priority, to beat Chloe Swarbrick.
• 🥊 Botany: Ali Dahche of ACT, high priority, if you want to give Luxon "a bloody nose".
• 🚇 Hutt South: he backs Chris Bishop as one of the few National ministers with some passion for reform, citing congestion pricing and road user charges.
• 🪙 Epsom: Seymour or Goldsmith. Goldsmith has been good on hate speech and the BSA, so he says flip a coin.
• 🗳️ In the Maori seats he often backs Labour to knock out TPM, like Toni Boynton against Rawiri Waititi in Waiariki.
• 🔪 My take? A cracking read for anyone still undecided on the electorate vote. Find your seat before Saturday.

9. Is it 'Islamophobic' to mention Islam's history of conquest?

Steven Greer - spiked

• ⚖️ Collin May was sacked as head of the Alberta Human Rights Commission in September 2022 after an "Islamophobia" accusation.
• 📖 The trigger was a 2009 review he wrote of Islamic Imperialism: A History by Efraim Karsh, published by Yale University Press.
• 🎓 May has degrees in law, political philosophy and Islamic studies, and has worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
• ✂️ An NDP-affiliated blogger attributed Karsh's view to May, ignoring his next sentence: "But we need to be careful here…"
• 📢 The National Council of Canadian Muslims demanded he go. He refused to apologise.
• 🏛️ He's now suing the Alberta government for unfair dismissal, and the NCCM and the blogger for defamation.
• 🔒 May's new book argues cancel culture is morphing into a state strategy he calls "incarceration culture".
• 🤔 Greer, himself research director at a progressive Muslim think-tank, says May's book makes "a splendid contribution".
• 🔪 My take? Reviewing a Yale history book cost a man his job. That's where hate speech rules lead.

10. Lewis Hamilton's Grand Prix of hypocrisy

James Price - spiked

• 🏎️ After years of lobbying for an African race, Hamilton got his wish. Rwanda will host a Grand Prix from the early 2030s.
• 🚨 The US sanctioned Rwanda's army in March for backing the M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
• ⚖️ Amnesty International says M23's abuses may amount to war crimes. The DRC's foreign minister called the race "morally indefensible".
• 🤐 Hamilton's response: "I don't get to choose where we go", plus a call for "humility" when judging African countries.
• 🌍 He blamed Rwanda's problems on "colonialism and the West intervening".
• 🌈 Price contrasts that with the rainbow helmet in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and calling Saudi anti-gay laws "pretty terrifying".
• 🤔 He suggests the silence may be because an African Grand Prix was Hamilton's own idea.
• 🏛️ Price, a former chief of staff to the UK chancellor, wants someone on the podium whispering "Free Congo", like the slave in a Roman Triumph.
• 🔪 My take? Activism is easy when it's someone else's race. Not so much when it's your own.

11. Your election desk is already paid for.

Your VIP membership includes Good Oil AI: the poll of polls with seat ranges, a dossier on every MP, and Ask, which answers questions from Hansard, the votes, the donations and the registers with sources. Sign in with this email address: app.goodoil.ai/login. Got a mate who should see it? Non-members can get the full desk free until 15 November with the Election Pass (card needed to start, nothing charged until 15 November, cancel any time in the app): app.goodoil.ai/insight

What our members are saying about Ten@10

Elizabeth
These articles are compulsory reading for me and the perfect addition to the usual list of Goodoil items!

Lynne
Absolutely brilliant to receive these current and thought provoking articles.

Jonathan
Just wanted to let you know that I’m loving this new 10@10. Much appreciated from someone who chooses to read/watch almost NO mainstream media.

Murray
Cam, relish your output as the newspaper in Christchurch is so intent on non news. Thankyou

Fred
Thanks for Ten @ Ten, really enjoy reading it.Keep it up. All the best, keep healthy.

Jocko
Wonderful info not otherwise available in NZ. More power to your elbow! Thanks.