Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/204

This is edition 2026/204 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: The overhang that could decide the election

Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project

• ⚖️ Edwards says the kingmaker role has passed from Qiulae Wong and Opportunity to the MMP overhang in the campaign's final week.
• 🧮 National holds 44 electorates, but its party vote has fallen from 38% in 2023 to 29% in 1News-Verian and 24.8% in RNZ-Reid Research.
• 📈 The Overhang forecasting site projects an average of eight extra seats for National and three for Te Pāti Māori. That's a Parliament of 131 needing 66 for a majority.
• 🎲 On that forecast the coalition has "a 67% chance of governing without needing Opportunity".
• 📰 He calls it the strangest campaign of the MMP era: ACT and NZ First authorised Don Brash's daily ad telling voters not to party vote National, and National has complained to the Electoral Commission.
• 🍵 Sir John Key, of the 2011 Epsom cup of tea, now urges Epsom voters to back Paul Goldsmith.
• 🔁 He condemns Te Pāti Māori's electorate-vote strategy just as much as the right's, saying an engineered overhang distorts Parliament whichever bloc benefits.
• 🛠️ The Electoral Commission's 2012 review and the 2023 Independent Electoral Review both recommended abolishing overhang seats. Neither was acted on.
• 🔪 Takeaway: Splitting your vote is legal and it's how MMP works. If the left can do it in the Māori seats, the right can do it in the general seats.

2. The Left does not have a monopoly on empathy

Ani O'Brien - Thought Crimes

• 🪟 O'Brien starts with the man who put a crowbar through a window at Winston Peters' home while his partner and a friend were inside.
• 🎤 Days later Chloe Swarbrick introduced actress Acacia O'Connor at a Greens press conference. O'Connor had livestreamed from the protest outside Peters' home.
• 😢 Now Swarbrick claims National is "effectively cyberbullying her". RNZ counted 37 of National's 94 Instagram posts over six days featuring her or her party.
• 🎯 O'Brien says the ads respond to fears about Swarbrick as Finance Minister. They don't create them.
• 📚 She cites a study of 4,737 people in the UK and US: conservatives consistently expressed more empathy towards liberals than the reverse.
• 🤬 She points to Andrea Vance calling Nicola Willis and other female ministers "c***s" with no sanctions, and the abuse Judith Collins copped with no media interest.
• 🏞️ At Albert Park in 2023, she says, a grandmother was punched in the face. Swarbrick called the protest "peaceful".
• 🔪 Takeaway: Empathy that only flows to your own side isn't empathy. Swarbrick can dish it out, so she can take a few attack ads.

3. The Overhang 2.12 - Seated (Part 1)

rustie - The Overhang

• 🗺️ The Overhang starts a seat-by-seat guide to the electorate races, based on its modelling as of 26 October.
• 📊 Its nationwide assumption: Labour 28%, National 26%, Greens 15%, NZ First 12%, ACT 10%, Opportunity 6.4%, Te Pāti Māori 1.1%.
• 👀 Banks Peninsula and East Cape are the ones to watch to see whether Labour can make gains that stymie National's overhang.
• 🔴 In Banks Peninsula, Vanessa Weenink brings a 0.85pp majority to the rematch with Tracey McLellan. The model predicts Labour by 6pp.
• 🎲 Christchurch Central is called the hardest general seat in the country to predict, with National's Dale Stephens a real chance to come up the middle.
• 🟢 Dunedin is a near even call between Labour's Rachel Brooking and the Greens' Francisco Hernandez, who are both locks on the list anyway.
• 🧢 Botany: Christopher Luxon will be re-elected with only a slightly decreased margin.
• ✅ Auckland Central, Christchurch East and Coromandel are not in doubt. Swarbrick's position is called safe.
• 🔪 Takeaway: If you're watching the overhang on Saturday night, watch Banks Peninsula and East Cape.

4. RICHARD PREBBLE: Is the election already over?

Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell

• 🛒 Prebble hadn't meant to vote early, but his eleven-year-old grandson wanted to watch him vote at a huge polling station in the mall.
• 🗳️ By Friday nearly 600,000 votes had been cast, 32 per cent more than at the same stage in 2023.
• 📈 He wouldn't be surprised if the weekend figures take the total close to a million. That's about a third of the expected vote.
• 📜 When he was an MP, advance voting needed a special reason and a declaration. Since 2011 anyone can vote early.
• 🧑‍🎓 He reckons the easy enrolling and voting should help the left, especially parties attracting younger voters.
• 🤐 Early voting makes "a nonsense of the ban on election-day campaigning when we effectively have twelve election days."
• 📉 Minor parties often relied on the final week. TOP risks missing the threshold, but high enrolment and turnout must help it.
• 🔪 Takeaway: A third of the votes are already banked. Any party still saving its big pitch for the last week has left it too late.

5. Diversity redefined

Karl du Fresne - Karl du Fresne

• 🎧 Karl du Fresne looked into a Golden Bay music festival that cancelled an Israeli DJ named Dekel.
• 🇮🇱 It was reportedly because Dekel failed to publicly condemn his country's actions in Gaza.
• 🌐 So du Fresne went to the website of the festival organisers, Twisted Frequency.
• 📜 Under a long statement of high-minded values, he found a section headed Diversity.
• 🌈 It says gender and race diversity "are not just buzzwords" and are essential to music.
• 📣 The organisers say they "strive to amplify the voices of underrepresented artists".
• 🤔 Apparently that doesn't stretch to an Israeli DJ who won't make a political statement on cue.
• 🔪 Du Fresne's verdict: "Hypocrisy is one word that comes to mind. Priggishness, bigotry and intolerance are three others."

6. A Sacred Trust Betrayed

Gary Judd KC - Thoughts from the North

• ⚖️ Gary Judd KC says the biggest threat to a free and democratic society here may be the judiciary embracing tikanga Māori.
• 🏛️ His charge: judicial independence is "being sacrificed on the altar of the institutionalization of tikanga."
• 📜 He leans on medievalist M T Clanchy's study of how England moved from memory to written record after the Norman Conquest.
• 🧠 Clanchy wrote that remembered truth was flexible, because "no ancient custom could be proved to be older than the memory of the oldest living wise man."
• ✍️ Judd notes no written system existed in New Zealand before Europeans arrived, so tikanga has no written record to test claims against.
• 🧑‍⚖️ In the Ellis case, a Supreme Court majority accepted Sir Hirini Moko Mead and Sir Pou Temara's statement that tikanga is the "first law".
• ❗ He says that rested on nothing but the assertion itself, and has been echoed by law schools and the Law Commission.
• 🔍 He argues judges who defer to extra-judicial authorities aren't deciding cases according to the law and the evidence.
• 🔪 Takeaway: If the content of the law is whatever the experts say it is, the judges aren't independent. Judd calls it "betraying a sacred trust."

7. RICHARD PREBBLE- Interesting electorate races: Epsom

Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell

• 🗣️ Prebble calls John Key the best natural politician of his time in Parliament.
• 💱 But he says the skills that made Key a successful currency trader, reacting to the present, are also his weakness.
• 🗳️ Key is right if you only think about next Saturday. Electing Paul Goldsmith in Epsom might give National another MP.
• 📚 It might also save Goldsmith "from returning to writing vanity biographies for the wealthy."
• 🏠 Prebble's point: without Epsom returning ACT MPs, the party would not have survived the swings of politics.
• 🌍 Elsewhere, conservative parties increasingly depend on illiberal, anti-immigration parties of the populist right.
• 🤝 Epsom has given National something better: a reliable partner committed to individual freedom, personal responsibility and the rule of law.
• 🔪 Takeaway: "Key is thinking about next Saturday. Epsom voters should be thinking about the elections that follow."

8. How American Politics Became a Tower of Babel

Peter Savodnik - The Free Press

• 🗽 Ahead of the US midterms, Peter Savodnik goes back to voters to see what they're thinking.
• 💖 He starts with Faith Merrill, 20, who drove 11 hours with her mother to see Candace Owens at a Turning Point USA summit in 2023.
• 📱 Merrill resolved to become an influencer. She's now on her ninth TikTok account after repeated bans, with 65,000 followers.
• ✝️ She was baptised Catholic this year after Owens did the same, and says she will "always support Candace no matter what she says."
• 🌀 Her agenda, she told him, was always shifting.
• 🏷️ Savodnik's argument from 2024 still stands: liberal, conservative, Democrat and Republican have been sapped of their meaning.
• 🧱 He called it "The Great Scramble" and says Americans are still trapped in a Tower of Babel, unable to talk to each other.
• 🔪 Takeaway: The old labels don't tell you much any more. Here, the overhang fight has National and its own coalition partners at each other's throats.

9. King Charles shouldn't apologise for Britain's role in the slave trade

Hugo Timms - spiked

• 👑 On his Caribbean tour, Hugo Timms says, it's been hard to tell if King Charles is a visiting monarch or a captured fugitive.
• 💰 Every country on the nine-day tour, the Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua and Barbuda, has a government that supports reparations.
• 🇬🇧 UK prime minister Andy Burnham has expressed his "sorrow and regret" and is reportedly open to indirect reparations.
• 📖 Timms leans on Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs' new book, Our Islands' Story.
• 🏭 They argue that of all the slave-owning societies, only Britain produced an Industrial Revolution. Its wealth came from science, not slavery.
• 📊 In 1800, British slave owners held less than two per cent of the global enslaved population.
• ⚓ After 1807 Britain spent heavily stamping out the trade. In 1850 nearly 13 per cent of the Royal Navy was off West Africa.
• 🔪 Takeaway: Britain's big role in the slave trade was ending it. Sound familiar? Our own grievance industry works off the same script.

10. A disappointed libertarian votes

Liberty Scott - Liberty Scott

• 🗳️ Liberty Scott calls general elections "the advance auction of stolen goods", and says this one has been particularly woeful.
• 🙅 He says there's no libertarian option on the ballot. ACT isn't one, but is mostly "a party of the conscience of the National Party".
• 🤨 NZ First he calls fundamentally a party of opportunism, though he credits Winston Peters for ending funding of UNRWA.
• ✂️ He rates National's term better than the Key-English years because it actually repealed Labour's laws: Three Waters, the Māori Health Authority, Auckland Light Rail and more.
• 📚 But on education, healthcare and welfare he says it's all tinkering.
• 😬 His biggest disappointment is Luxon himself, "one of the most uselessly uninspiring and awkward Prime Ministers in recent history."
• 🔮 He reckons Luxon won't be Prime Minister at the 2029 election, short of a remarkable turnaround.
• ✅ His call: vote for one of the three coalition parties. He'll be party voting ACT, with many reservations.
• 🔪 Takeaway: A disappointing government is still "much less dangerous" than the alternative.

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