This is edition 2026/205 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: Red against green in Wellington North
Bryce Edwards - The Democracy Project
- 🏙️ In 2023 Labour lost both central Wellington seats to the Greens: Wellington Central to Tamatha Paul and Rongotai to Julie Anne Genter.
- 🥊 Former health minister Ayesha Verrall is now trying to take back the renamed Wellington North from Paul.
- 🗺️ The new seat lost Mount Cook and parts of Brooklyn and gained Khandallah, Ngaio and Wadestown. Farrar's figures give it the highest median household income in the country, at $140,000.
- 🧾 Paul won in 2023 with Labour votes. About a quarter of Labour's party voters gave her their electorate vote.
- 📊 The only electorate poll had Paul on 35.3%, Verrall on 32.6% and National's Jonathan Pitts on 16%, with a 6.2% margin of error. It was commissioned by a lobbying firm run by a former Labour staffer.
- 🤝 At the final candidates' meeting Verrall told Paul: "if I wasn't on the ballot, I'd vote for you."
- 📋 Pressed for the first thing she would do for the city, Verrall recited Labour's policy list and said: "Well that's it, that's the plan."
- 🔍 Edwards gives Paul a slight edge on organisation and her record of winning Labour votes. Both are near-certain to return on the list anyway.
- 🔪 Takeaway: The richest seat in the country is a two-horse race between the Greens and Labour, and National's candidate is running a distant third.
2. The only poll that counts
Liam Hehir - The Blue Review w/ Liam Hehir
- 📉 Hehir says a gloomy narrative settled over the coalition after the RNZ-Reid Research poll put National below 25 per cent.
- 🧐 He calls that poll "quite an outlier" and says it's a mistake to treat it as definitive just because it's the most dramatic.
- 🙋 He admits up front he is a National voter, so readers can call it cope, and sets out his expectations in advance.
- 📺 He picks the final 1News-Verian poll as the one to watch. Verian has a modest house effect favouring National, but it has polled regularly through the campaign, so it compares like with like.
- ⚖️ Test one: are National and Labour level? Level pegging, or a point or two behind, would reset the narrative.
- 🤝 Test two: do ACT and NZ First together still outpoll the Greens? Being 3 to 4 points clear would be grounds for optimism.
- 🎯 Test three: how far is Opportunity above 5 per cent? He says 5.5 per cent looks shaky and 7.5 per cent looks like "a dead cert".
- 🥈 He'll also watch whether ACT stays ahead of NZ First. His sense is that NZ First "has generally failed to fire".
- 🔪 Takeaway: No single poll settles a close election. Hehir at least had the guts to set his markers before the numbers came out.
3. NZ’S ELECTION IS RIGGED!
John McLean - John's Substack
- 🗳️ McLean takes on claims from Trevor Mallard and others that the coalition has rigged Saturday's election.
- 📅 The main complaint is the new rule that you can't enrol once voting opens, which this year was 25 October. McLean says the change was justifiably made to speed up the count.
- 🗣️ Chris Hipkins called it "the most draconian restriction to people's right to enroll to vote that we have ever seen".
- 🎓 Andrew Geddis warned lower youth enrolment could be a "looming disaster". Vernon Small wrote of a "disturbing sense that the outcome might be illegitimate."
- ⚠️ McLean's read: the left is preparing the ground for unrest if the election doesn't deliver a Labour-led government.
- 🧮 He says Te Pāti Māori is playing the overhang game too, standing in all seven Māori seats without chasing the party vote.
- 🚔 He notes National complained to the Electoral Commission about Harry Mowbray's split-your-vote website, and the Commission referred it to Police, even though the Mowbrays are National's biggest donors.
- 🤔 His theory: National may be angling for a deal with Labour rather than another coalition with ACT and NZ First.
- 🔪 Takeaway: McLean concludes the election probably won't be rigged by any proper definition. Losing an argument about enrolment rules isn't the same as voter suppression.
4. How National and Labour can form a Government
David Farrar - Polling and Politics (Patreon)
- 📊 The final pre-election Taxpayers' Union-Curia poll is out.
- 🟦 It has the centre-right bloc on 60 seats.
- 🟥 It has the centre-left bloc, including Opportunity, on 60 seats as well.
- ⚖️ Farrar says that could mean a hung Parliament.
- 🙅 He also says it's unlikely to happen.
- 🛣️ So he has mapped out the paths to power for both National and Labour.
- 4️⃣ He says National has four paths to power. The detail is for Patreon supporters.
- 🔪 Takeaway: A 60-60 tie in the last Curia poll shows how close this is. Every party vote counts on Saturday.
5. Douglas vs Seymour
Roger Douglas - Kiwiblog
- 🏛️ Kiwiblog runs a statement from Sir Roger Douglas titled "Muldoon Is Back", taking aim at ACT's plan to make KiwiSaver investment earnings tax-free.
- ❓ He asks whether it is good economic policy or "an attempt to win votes by offering another special tax concession".
- 📜 He points back to 1970 to 1984, when tax concessions on life insurance premiums and superannuation contributions steered household savings into favoured products.
- 💸 His lesson: when governments favour investments through the tax system, they reward tax advantages rather than economic performance.
- 🧮 He wants answers first: what it costs in forgone revenue, who gains most, and whether it creates new savings or just shifts existing money into a tax-favoured structure.
- 🗳️ He says a tax exemption shouldn't be accepted "simply because it sounds attractive to voters."
- 🎯 He closes by telling Seymour and Prebble to take heed of the lessons of history.
- 🔪 Takeaway: When the architect of Rogernomics tells ACT its flagship policy looks like Muldoon, ACT owes voters an answer.
6. Why is the BBC so intent on sneering at America?
Stephen Pollard - The Spectator Australia
- 🇺🇸 Pollard has followed US politics for 40 years. His advice for midterms coverage: "Go anywhere but the BBC."
- 😏 He says the BBC has an institutional sneer towards the US, and especially towards Trump.
- 🎬 He cites the doctored Panorama edit of Trump's 6 January 2021 speech, which gave the impression he had called directly for violence.
- 📰 He says BBC headlines on gender medicine and migrant raids leave out that the order targets puberty blockers and surgery on children, and that deportations target illegal migrants.
- 👍 He singles out former North America editor Justin Webb as a great exception who actually loves the place.
- 🎙️ He says the pendulum swung the other way when Sarah Smith took over in 2021.
- 🗳️ Smith told listeners the attention on Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was because he "has been strongly critical of Israel".
- 🧕 Pollard says the real issue is alleged family links to the Muslim Brotherhood. He cites old posts by El-Sayed's half-sister suggesting family members, including his mother, were active in the group. El-Sayed denies any connection.
- 🔪 Takeaway: If you only got your US news from the state broadcaster, you'd miss half the story. Sound familiar?
7. Iran is waging war on Britain - and it's winning
Jonathan Sacerdoti - The Spectator Australia
- 🚢 Iran has declared the Royal Navy and RAF "terrorist organisations" and designated MI6 a "hostile group".
- 🛩️ British prosecutors are pursuing an alleged Iranian intelligence operation centred on RAF Fairford, a base used by the US Air Force.
- 🕵️ MI5's Sir Ken McCallum says Iran-linked operations led to more than 50 arrests in Britain in the past 12 months, many aimed at British Jewish communities.
- 🤝 Sacerdoti says the Foreign Secretary posed for a handshake photo with Iran's foreign minister at the UN while the base was being targeted.
- 📣 The Al-Quds Day march ran in London for more than 40 years before it was finally banned in March 2026.
- 🕌 The Islamic Centre of England is still a registered charity nearly four years into a Charity Commission inquiry, despite the Intelligence and Security Committee's warnings about its links to the Supreme Leader's office.
- ⛓️ British couple Craig and Lindsay Foreman are serving ten-year espionage sentences in Iran, which they deny.
- 🚑 An Iran-linked proxy group claimed seven attacks on UK sites this year, including the arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.
- 🔪 Takeaway: Sacerdoti says Tehran has learned that Britain fears escalation more than Iran fears retaliation. Appeasement has a price.
8. Israel’s Fight in the North
Aaron MacLean - The Free Press
- 🎥 This is a video report by Aaron MacLean from northern Israel.
- 🪖 He sits down with two unidentified Israeli army officers.
- 🤝 He also talks to Druze community leader Tamir Murad.
- 🛡️ They look at the threats facing Israel's northern frontier.
- 🛸 One theme is how drones are changing the battlefield.
- 🕊️ Another is the plight of Syria's Druze.
- 🏡 Their conversations show how closely war touches everyday life in the north.
- 🔪 Takeaway: The Free Press describes a region where security, identity and survival are inseparable. Worth watching if you have a subscription.
9. RICHARD PREBBLE: We decide how we vote
Richard Prebble - Brash and Mitchell
- 🗳️ Prebble rejects "hysterical claims" that splitting your vote is against the spirit of MMP.
- 📐 He says MMP is not even fully proportional. Last election 159,585 party votes elected nobody.
- ✂️ He has split his own vote for the last three elections: Todd McClay for the electorate, ACT for the party vote.
- ✅ Apparently that is perfectly legitimate, he says.
- ❌ But when a National supporter votes for McClay and gives ACT the party vote, commentators call it rorting MMP.
- 🧮 On current polling, he says, perhaps 800,000 National party votes will elect no additional MPs.
- 🤔 So why is a voter's wish not to waste their vote illegitimate?
- 🔪 Takeaway: "In a democracy, it is voters who decide." Prebble says Luxon may be determined to commit electoral suicide, but voters don't have to help him.
10. "It's been 20 years since 'Inconvenient Truth' and climate change is still questioned"
Russell Cook - Watts Up With That?
- ✉️ Cook takes apart a September letter to the LA Times claiming climate change has been labelled a hoax by the fossil fuel industry for 20 years.
- 🐄 The letter leaned on an LA Times story about Colorado ranchers backing the Boulder v Suncor climate case. Cook cites Energy in Depth saying there was really no rancher support for the plaintiffs.
- 🎬 He says the first hour and twelve minutes of Al Gore's 2006 film set up man-made warming as settled science, then claimed a 100% consensus.
- ✋ Cook says no science conclusion has ever been validated by "a show of hands".
- 📄 Gore's "spilled beans" moment was a leaked memo: "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact".
- 🔎 Cook says it took him seven months to find that memo in Greenpeace USA's archive. He then found it was never implemented anywhere.
- 🚬 Gore compared it to the tobacco industry's "Doubt is our product" memo, which was real and easy to find.
- 📰 Cook says legacy reporters never asked where the memo came from or whether it was ever used.
- 🔪 Takeaway: Cook says it's the journalism that needs investigating, not the fossil fuel industry.
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