This is edition 2026/208 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: How the overhang put the right ahead
Bryce Edwards - Democracy Briefing (The Democracy Project)
- 🧩 Bryce Edwards says Labour won 710,330 party votes to National's 706,680, yet National leads in 42 electorates and has 42 seats to Labour's 36 on the preliminary count.
- 📊 Allocated strictly by party vote, the usual 120 seats would have split 60-60. The overhang turned that dead heat into a 67-64 majority for the coalition in a Parliament of 131.
- 🏛️ National's 29.2% entitles it to 35 seats, but all 42 of its electorate leaders keep theirs, so none of its list candidates get in. Te Pāti Māori leads in five seats on 0.57%.
- 🚪 On this count National loses Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith and Gerry Brownlee, and Chris Bishop too unless he overturns an 889-vote deficit in Hutt South.
- 📢 Harry Mowbray told Stuff the result was "100% due to us". Don Brash told 1News "we contributed to the centre-right victory". Brownlee likened the campaigners to "kids playing with matches".
- 📈 Henry Cooke finds National's candidate-to-party gap grew to about 13 points, from about 5.6 last time. David Farrar says any movement toward Act and NZ First "was extremely modest, if at all".
- 🧮 McLachlan calculates that if Labour had won Wairarapa, Nelson and Hamilton West, the right would have 64 of 128, level with everyone else. National leads Wairarapa by 139 and Nelson by 1,210.
- ⚖️ Helen Clark told AAP New Zealand "could well be deemed by observers to have had a flawed election". Edwards says a government formed on these numbers is legitimate, but its mandate is thinner than its seat count.
- 🔪 Takeaway: He wants Labour and National, who together hold 78 of 131 seats, to fix the overhang rule before any snap election. A quarter of National's voters switching party votes would give the right a comfortable majority on an unchanged 49.9%.
