Your Daily Ten@10 - 2026/206

This is edition 2026/206 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. How National and Labour can form a Government

David Farrar - Polling and Politics (Patreon)

• 📊 The final Taxpayers' Union-Curia poll has the centre-right and the centre-left, Opportunity included, on 60 seats each. Farrar says a hung Parliament is unlikely, so he maps the paths to power.
• 🎯 National path one: Opportunity misses. It is on 5.8% with a 1.4% margin of error, which Farrar puts at around a 20% chance of falling short. Then the centre-right gets 63 or 64 seats.
• 📈 Path two: the centre-right beats its polling by even 1%. Last election National did 3% better than the poll average, but he warns not to expect 2023's error to repeat with National now in Government.
• 🗳️ He adds that all the talk of tactical voting this week makes a polling error more likely than usual.
• 🤝 Path three: National does a deal with Opportunity. He rates it very low, since Opportunity's policies are all on the left, but "it is not zero."
• 🪶 Path four: National wins more overhang seats than Te Pāti Māori, whose party vote now entitles them to one seat.
• 🔴 Labour's main path: Labour, the Greens and TPM pick up one more seat on the party vote and govern with Opportunity, which he calls "much much more compatible" with them. He rates it the single most likely scenario.
• 🔄 Labour's other path: TPM wins more overhang seats than National.
• 🧮 His sum: National has more paths, Labour's are "perhaps slightly less complicated." He expects no clear Government on the night, and recounts in marginal seats could decide it.
• 🔪 Takeaway: Every route for the right runs through Opportunity failing or National's overhang. One more seat to the left and it is Labour plus Opportunity.

2. Labour and National Have Already Lost

Simon O'Connor - On Point

• 📉 Former National MP Simon O'Connor says the real story of this election is the long decline of Labour and National. Both are polling under 30%.
• 🔮 His prediction: the centre-right holds the Treasury benches, on the back of a National overhang and stronger party votes for NZ First and ACT.
• 🪶 He says the Māori Party's strategic voting push is working. In one poll, one person out of a thousand said they'd vote for them, yet they are expected to win several electorates.
• 📺 He notes the media rarely builds the likely National overhang into its seat projections.
• 🎯 Opportunity is the big variable. If it makes 5%, he thinks the right wins narrowly. If it misses, its wasted vote all but confirms a right-wing coalition.
• 🔁 He is struck that voters seem ready to give Labour another go: same leadership, most of the same MPs, many of the same policies, three years after a thumping.
• 🧾 He blames Labour for the spending, the debt, the ram raids and a shambles of a health system.
• 🟦 His verdict on National: voters expected more, and it "has moved away from its core values and principles."
• 🗣️ He also says Michael Laws' latest comments will "understandably damage NZ First's vote". NZ First voters annoyed by them won't move left, he says.
• 🔪 Takeaway: A former National MP saying his old party is "a shadow of its former self". Two ticks, anyone?

3. Tied Up Tight in an Election that Nobody Will Win.

Chris Trotter - Chris Trotter's Substack

• 📊 Trotter says the 2026 election "has become almost impossible to predict." All Luxon will concede is that it is going to be "tight".
• 🗺️ He recalls 2023, when nobody doubted the centre-right would win and the electorate map turned blue on election night.
• 🔁 Three years on, he says National's big haul of electorates is proving a mixed blessing.
• 🧾 He says the right's Overhang Strategy could cost Luxon Nicola Willis and Gerry Brownlee, and perhaps Paul Goldsmith and Chris Bishop.
• ⚠️ A right-wing win built on overhang seats rather than the party vote, he says, would bring angry claims that it is illegitimate.
• 🔄 He flips it: picture the left winning on Te Pāti Māori's four overhang seats. Will the provinces and the leafy suburbs just shrug?
• 🌊 Then the reverse: the left wins the party vote, and National's overhang seats hand the right a wafer-thin majority.
• 🎭 His case for why the culture war matters: those changes cost little, so they are doable, and they make people feel heard. "In politics, that's worth a lot."
• 💰 He says the wealthy backers of the right's Overhang Strategy want to keep Chloe Swarbrick's economic ideas out of government.
• 🔪 Takeaway: Trotter thinks whoever wins, half the country will call it a rort. He is probably right.

4. OWEN JENNINGS: TOP in Hypocrisy

Owen Jennings - Brash and Mitchell

• 🎩 Former ACT MP Owen Jennings says Opportunity, "helped by a fawning media", is posing as kingmaker, and nobody is asking the hard questions.
• 💰 It wants a $30,000 cap on individual donations. Jennings points out the party was founded on a single donation of over $2 million.
• 🧾 He says the Electoral Commission has published at least three large six-figure donations to Opportunity this election.
• 🪑 The party's biggest donor this year, who recently changed his name, now sits on the board, the same board that had to change its rules after it was exposed as controlling policy.
• 🧠 Opportunity wants "expert" groups to set policy in health and education. Jennings says we already have experts. They are called public servants, and they have too much influence already.
• 📋 He notes the party advertised on Seek for a leader.
• 🗑️ Its founding planks, a universal income and a land tax, were buried behind what he calls "meaningless, watery" bottom lines once questions were asked.
• ❓ He asks what role former Labour minister Iain Lees-Galloway plays in the party.
• 📺 Citing David Farrar, he says Opportunity has had six times the favourable legacy media coverage of ACT and eight times that of NZ First.
• 🔪 Takeaway: The party that wants to clean up politics took the cheques first. "Just another political mop with a freshly polished handle."

5. “Two-ticks National”

Gary Judd KC - Thoughts from the North

• 🇨🇿 Gary Judd KC opens with Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who became Czechoslovakia's last president and the Czech Republic's first.
• 📸 He took the photo at the top in Prague in September, when the city marked 90 years since Havel's birth.
• 🗣️ The line he goes back to, widely credited to Havel: "Keep the company of those who seek the truth", and run from those who have found it.
• ⚠️ Judd reads it as a warning against dogmatism and a case for intellectual humility.
• ⚖️ He says a judge who believed he had absolute truth and was beyond correction would be a dangerous judge.
• 🏛️ He quotes US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1953: "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final."
• 🟦 Then the point. He went looking for the photo after hearing National politicians insist that "two-ticks National" was the only approach.
• 🔪 Takeaway: A KC with a subtitle that asks whether two ticks is "Wisdom or dogmatic stupidity?" He leaves you to answer it.

6. Seat by Seat

Peter Williams - Peter’s Substack

• 🏛️ Peter Williams says this will be the largest Parliament in our history, and the side with the biggest overhang forms the government.
• 📊 The Taxpayers' Union-Curia poll has a 60-60 hung Parliament with Opportunity on 7 seats, but credits Te Pāti Māori with only one seat off its 1.1% party vote.
• 🪶 He says TPM will almost certainly win four seats. That means a House of 123 or 124, and the right needs at least 63.
• 🧮 On that poll National gets 35 MPs, ACT 13 and NZ First 12. That is 60, not enough.
• 🌐 He works through votecheck.co.nz, a new RCR Media site built for right-leaning voters, which rates 8 of the 64 general seats as close.
• 📍 The close ones: Auckland Central, Mt Roskill, Hutt South, Wellington Bays, Wellington North, Wairarapa, West Coast Tasman and Banks Peninsula.
• 🔴 Williams backs Michael Wood to beat Carlos Cheung in Mt Roskill, Labour to take Wairarapa, and Chris Bishop to be "for now anyway, an ex-MP" in Hutt South.
• 🟦 He has National on 40 electorates, a five-seat overhang on a party vote just under 29%.
• 📈 His final count: right 65, left 63 in a 128-seat House. Enough to name a Speaker and keep the narrowest of majorities.
• 🔪 Takeaway: "And Christopher Luxon still says 'two ticks blue'!"

7. How the New Right Failed

Ross Douthat - The Free Press

• 🇺🇸 Douthat says the new right claimed power in 2024, aiming to shape Trump's second term, "And it fell completely on its face."
• 🧠 He credits what it got right: immigration control, the Middle East failures, deindustrialisation and struggling young men.
• 🪑 He judges it on four legs of a new Republican stool: immigration, foreign policy restraint, economic revival and cultural renewal.
• 🚧 On immigration, it won and "simply didn't know when to stop". The border closed, then it wanted millions deported in a few years, and the heavy-handed tactics brought a backlash.
• 🌍 On foreign policy its restrainers filled the administration, then "failed to restrain the one person who really mattered" when Trump was tempted into war with Iran.
• 🏭 On the economy, he says tariffs plus the same old upper-bracket tax cuts was at best half a pro-worker policy.
• 🖥️ Voters wanted factories building cars and rockets. What they saw were data centres.
• 🎰 On culture he says the new right in power was "a force for libertinism": the pro-life movement vanished and young men got online gambling and legal weed.
• 🔄 He says it isn't finished, but it is starting over. It needs leaders clear of the Trump record and has to "repudiate corruption and stupidity."
• 🔪 Takeaway: "reading the clock correctly isn't worth very much if you don't know what to do with the time you've been given."

8. The Overhang 2.13: Seated (Part 2)

The Overhang

• 🗺️ Part 2 of The Overhang's seat-by-seat guide. The modelling is as of 26 October, before the latest 1News-Verian poll.
• 🌏 East Coast Bays has the highest share of overseas-born voters in the country. Erica Stanford's only contest is with Mitchell, Brown and Luxon for the biggest National majority.
• 🎓 Epsom is trending away from National and ACT towards the Greens, but Seymour "should be assured of another win". Paul Goldsmith has "a Maungawhau-sized mountain to climb."
• ⚖️ Hamilton West is rated the most representative seat in the country in partisan terms. Labour's Myra Williamson is given a 1 in 10 chance.
• 🎯 Hamilton East is Labour's 9th best pick-up chance at a little over 1 in 4, and basically must-win if Labour wants to limit the overhang.
• 🥊 Hutt South: Chris Bishop's personal vote makes a Labour seat a contest, but the call is for Ginny Andersen in the fourth rematch. The writer says that could easily prove wrong.
• 🔔 Maungakiekie has voted for the largest party at every MMP election. The writer would call Greg Fleming versus Priyanca Radhakrishnan a dead heat.
• 🔴 Mt Albert, an 18-vote squeaker in 2023, is called a solid Labour hold.
• 🏙️ Māngere is the most religious seat in the country and sits at a Labour lean of +33.
• 🔪 Takeaway: The modellers think the left wins some of the seats that matter. National's overhang is not in the bag.

9. Why Trump got the bloodbath he deserved

Sean Collins - spiked

• 🩸 Sean Collins: "Well, that was a bloodbath."
• 🏛️ As spiked went to press the Democrats had a 228 to 139 edge in the House and 54-44 in the Senate.
• 🗳️ Trump told rallies "Pretend I'm on the ballot". Voters did, and gave him a bloody nose.
• ⛽ Exit polls had inflation, gas prices and the cost of living on top. Voters blamed tariffs and the Iran war.
• 🤠 Democrat James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the Texas Senate seat, and Governor Greg Abbott lost to Gina Hinojosa.
• 🎯 Collins says Trump handpicked weak candidates, including Paxton.
• 🔄 With no answer on bread-and-butter issues, Republicans went after Talarico on gender. Collins says it looked like they were changing the subject.
• 👷 The working-class coalition of 2024 was never consolidated. Exit polls showed big swings away among Latinos, under-30s and suburbanites.
• 📜 He says the Democrats have no mandate. The result was a defeat for Trump, not a win for them.
• 🔪 Takeaway: "Live by Trump, die by Trump." Take your voters for granted and they will find someone else.

10. A patina of majesty

Peter Craven - The Spectator Australia

• 🎭 Peter Craven marks the death of Patrick Stewart in Los Angeles at 86, of Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia.
• 🖖 Craven says Stewart used his late fame as Jean-Luc Picard to conquer the peaks of classical theatre that might otherwise have eluded him.
• 🏚️ He had a rough Yorkshire childhood. His father would knock his mother around.
• 🧢 Olivier told the already bald young actor: "Try it without the cap." No job, but he was clearly struck.
• 🌏 His first break came from Vivien Leigh on a Commonwealth tour, much to Robert Helpmann's displeasure.
• 🏛️ He spent 15 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and played Sejanus in the BBC's I, Claudius in 1976.
• 👑 Craven says Stewart knew Star Trek gave his performance "a patina of majesty, like Prospero in a comic book."
• 🎬 Later came X-Men with Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman, Claudius to David Tennant's Hamlet in 2008, and Waiting for Godot with McKellen.
• 🔪 Takeaway: A proper obituary of a working actor who earned the big roles the hard way. A break from the election.

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.