# Question 55: I run a café with a small team. Food and power costs are squeezing margins, customers are spending less, and we've experienced a break-in. I am considering my vote in the 2026 New Zealand general election. How do parties compare on immigration settings for hospitality workers?

Collected 23 October 2026

[NZ Election 2026 · Edition 5 study](https://nzbrands.ai/research/nz-election-2026/editions/5)

## ChatGPT

Answer ID: 5f7b323b-be53-4986-9ef4-eeeaad8c59aa

# New Zealand 2026 election: immigration policies for café and hospitality employers

For a café owner, the key question is whether a party would make it easier to recruit overseas workers when you cannot find suitable local staff, or make recruitment more restrictive — and what that means for wages, staffing costs and keeping a small team running.

New Zealand's general election is scheduled for 7 November 2026. As of 22 October, party proposals need to be distinguished from immigration rules already in force. [NZ Election 2026: Immigration Policy by Party](https://www.livinginnz.co.nz/blog/2026-election-immigration-policy/)[Key immigration changes](https://www.restaurantnz.co.nz/2026/05/27/key-immigration-changes-rolling-out-across-2026/)

One important point for your business: immigration policy affects the supply of workers, but it won't directly solve high electricity bills, food inflation or reduced customer spending. I'll keep the comparison focused on hospitality staffing and the practical implications for a small café.

## 1. How the main parties compare

| Party | Published approach | Potential relevance to a café |
| --- | --- | --- |
| National | Continues its current immigration framework and recent skilled-migrant reforms. [2026 Election Policy](https://www.national.org.nz/policies)[NZ Election 2026: Immigration Policy by Party](https://www.livinginnz.co.nz/blog/2026-election-immigration-policy/) | Familiar employer-sponsored routes continue under current settings, but eligibility depends on the role and visa rules. |
| ACT | Wants work-visa skill categories reviewed annually against evidence of labour demand, plus a NZ$6-a-day surcharge on temporary work visas and broader English requirements. [ACT New Zealand](https://www.act.org.nz/news/making-immigration-work-for-new-zealand)[ACT New Zealand](https://www.act.org.nz/news/making_immigration_work_for_nz) | The visa surcharge would add to recruitment costs; annual reviews could affect access to overseas staff in particular roles. |
| New Zealand First | Proposes replacing the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) with a more restrictive, shortage-led Skilled Work Visa, requiring employers to demonstrate genuine need and local recruitment efforts. [NZFirst to Scrap Accredited Working Visa Model](https://www.nzfirst.nz/nzfirst_to_scrap_accredited_working_visa_model) | Could make it harder to recruit overseas workers for ordinary café positions unless a genuine shortage can be demonstrated. |
| Labour | Would plan immigration around workforce, housing and infrastructure capacity, strengthen the AEWV, and let migrants change accredited employers after three months. [Immigration](https://www.labour.org.nz/immigration)[Release: Labour to ensure an immigration system that works for New Zealand](https://www.labour.org.nz/news/release-labour-to-ensure-an-immigration-system-that-works-for-new-zealand/) | Employer-sponsored recruitment would remain, alongside stronger protections and greater job mobility for migrant workers. |
| Green Party | Its published immigration policy supports equal pay and conditions for temporary migrant workers and greater refugee support. [Immigration and visas: party comparison 2026](https://partymap.co.nz/compare/immigration/) | The equal-treatment commitment is relevant to employment costs and standards; its specific approach to routine café-worker visa eligibility needs further verification. |

These are different approaches to managing immigration, not guarantees about what a future government would implement. Coalition negotiations could materially change the final settings.

## 2. The New Zealand First proposal deserves particular attention for cafés

On 11 October 2026, New Zealand First announced that it would scrap the AEWV and replace it with a shortage-led visa tied to a named occupation, region and demonstrated need. The party also proposes stronger domestic recruitment requirements and a wage safeguard. [NZFirst to Scrap Accredited Working Visa Model](https://www.nzfirst.nz/nzfirst_to_scrap_accredited_working_visa_model)

For a small café, the practical distinction is between recruiting for a specialised role, such as a chef with hard-to-find experience, and recruiting for a more general position, such as a kitchen hand or counter-service worker.

- Specialised vacancies: You would need to show that the skill is genuinely unavailable locally, under the proposed framework.
- General café positions: Overseas recruitment could become more difficult if the role does not qualify as a genuine shortage.
- Existing migrant staff: The party's announcement does not fully specify transitional arrangements for people already holding visas, so the effect on existing employees is uncertain.

The proposal is not the current law. It would need to be implemented before it changed your recruitment obligations.

## 3. What is already in force for hospitality employers?

The election matters, but so do the rules affecting your café today.

- Accredited Employer Work Visa: The AEWV currently allows eligible employers to hire migrants for qualifying full-time jobs, subject to accreditation, job-check and worker eligibility requirements. [Accredited Employer Work Visa » Immigration New Zealand](https://www.immigration.govt.nz/visas/accredited-employer-work-visa/)
- English-language requirements: Since 1 June 2026, English requirements have extended to AEWV applicants in skill-level 3 roles, including many mid-skilled occupations. Some transitional exemptions apply. [English language requirement extended to AEWV skill level 3 roles](https://www.national.org.nz/news/20260525-honericastanford-level3)[Accredited Employer Work Visa » Immigration New Zealand](https://www.immigration.govt.nz/visas/accredited-employer-work-visa/)
- Residence pathways: Since 24 August 2026, revised skilled-migrant residence settings apply. Chef, baker, pastrycook and café or restaurant manager are among the occupations on the amber list, with additional conditions affecting some applicants. [Further changes to the Skilled Migrant Category to come into effect on 24 August 2026 :: Immigration New Zealand](https://www.immigration.govt.nz/about-us/news-centre/further-changes-to-the-skilled-migrant-category-to-come-into-effect-in-august-2026/)[Release: Labour to ensure an immigration system that works for New Zealand](https://www.labour.org.nz/news/release-labour-to-ensure-an-immigration-system-that-works-for-new-zealand/)

For your business, this means that hiring someone on a temporary work visa and helping an experienced employee qualify for residence are two separate decisions. A party's policy may affect one without necessarily changing the other in the same way.

## 4. How to assess the policies against your business pressures

Recruitment and staff retention

Consider whether your main challenge is finding experienced cooks, filling general service positions, or retaining trained staff. Restricting visas for general roles could affect your options differently from restricting visas for specialist roles.

Labour costs and compliance

Compare proposed visa surcharges, accreditation requirements, English-language rules and wage safeguards. These affect the cost and administration of recruitment, although the net effect on your overall wage bill is uncertain.

Security and financial resilience

Immigration policy is not a direct answer to break-ins, electricity costs or falling customer spending. Assess parties' crime-prevention, energy and small-business policies separately rather than assuming a change in migrant numbers will resolve these pressures.

## 5. Sources to check before voting

These are useful starting points for checking the wording of the proposals yourself:

- [National — 2026 election policies](https://www.national.org.nz/policies?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
- [ACT — Making immigration work for New Zealand](https://www.act.org.nz/news/making-immigration-work-for-new-zealand?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
- [New Zealand First — proposed replacement for the AEWV](https://www.nzfirst.nz/nzfirst_to_scrap_accredited_working_visa_model?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
- [Labour — immigration policy](https://www.labour.org.nz/immigration?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
- [Immigration New Zealand — current AEWV requirements](https://www.immigration.govt.nz/visas/accredited-employer-work-visa/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

The Green Party's published immigration position can also be compared through the policy evidence summarised by [PartyMap's 2026 immigration comparison](https://partymap.co.nz/compare/immigration/?utm_source=chatgpt.com); check the party's own policy documents for the latest detail.

The key question for your café is how dependent you are on overseas recruitment for the specific roles you need. That determines how directly the parties' competing proposals could affect your staffing options.

If you tell me which roles you struggle most to fill — chefs, kitchen hands, baristas or front-of-house staff — I can narrow the comparison to the visa policies most relevant to those jobs, without making assumptions about how you should vote.

## Gemini

Answer ID: 7efb2b54-2850-4726-a4fd-dd6da500bcef

For café owners navigating tight margins, rising costs, and persistent staffing shortages, immigration settings are a critical factor in the 2026 general election. 

The hospitality sector—through industry bodies like Hospitality NZ—has been actively advocating for settings that recognize practical work experience over formal qualifications and create clearer, more stable pathways to residency for kitchen and front-of-house staff. 

Political parties offer distinct approaches to how immigration should balance business workforce needs against broader economic and infrastructure pressures:

### National
* **Approach:** Continuation and refinement of current settings (such as the "Going for Growth" agenda and Occupation Lists).
* **Impact on Hospitality:** National generally attempts to balance employer access to labor through the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) system with managed economic growth. While they have adjusted skilled migrant categories to target specific gaps, policies continue to lean heavily on formal skill thresholds. National has explicitly ruled out more extreme structural changes (such as abolishing permanent residency), offering relative predictability for existing migrant workers.

### ACT
* **Approach:** Market-driven deregulation and faster alignment with economic shortages.
* **Impact on Hospitality:** ACT proposes annual reviews of skilled job lists to ensure they rapidly track actual economic gaps and reduce bureaucratic friction for employers trying to hire. However, their broader stance includes stricter welfare controls and proposals to abolish permanent resident visas (which National has opposed), introducing a mix of easier hiring pathways but a more complex long-term retention environment.

### New Zealand First
* **Approach:** Significant tightening and a restrictive, controlled approach to net migration.
* **Impact on Hospitality:** NZ First’s policy package proposes doubling the qualifying period for permanent residence and citizenship from five years to ten years, restricting temporary work rights, and implementing a referendum to cap annual resident visas. For hospitality businesses relying on migrant talent for long-term retention and stability, these policies would make hiring and keeping experienced staff considerably more difficult.

### Labour
* **Approach:** Infrastructure- and capacity-linked planning.
* **Impact on Hospitality:** Labour frames its immigration policy around what housing, public services, and the local workforce can actively support. They have proposed lengthening permanent residency timeframes and maintaining strict wage and skill criteria for work visas. While aiming to protect domestic training pipelines, this approach often translates into higher hurdles for lower-waged or entry-level hospitality roles.

### The Greens
* **Approach:** Human-rights centered and flexible migration.
* **Impact on Hospitality:** The Greens generally push back against restrictive, anti-migrant political positioning, arguing that low wages and structural economic issues are separate from migration. Their policies focus less on restrictive caps and more on humanitarian and community-oriented pathways, making them more sympathetic to migrant workforce access, though they place heavier emphasis on lifting domestic wages across the board.

---

<FollowUp label="Want to know how the parties compare on other Hospitality NZ manifesto issues like the keg tax?" query="How do the political parties compare on the other key priorities in the Hospitality NZ 2026 manifesto, such as the keg tax and secondary tax settings?"/>

## Google AI Mode

Answer ID: 19907c4f-fffb-4e98-a2d9-375f0b16a855

Running a café under those pressures—margin squeezes from food and energy, softer consumer spending, and the added stress of a security breach—is an immense balancing act.

When looking at how the political parties line up on immigration settings affecting the hospitality workforce ahead of the 2026 general election, the focus centers on how easily you can source, retain, and offer long-term stability to migrant staff (amid broader calls from groups like Hospitality NZ to better recognize practical work experience over formal qualifications).

The major parties approach immigration and workforce settings through distinct lenses:

1\. National (Incumbent / Centre-Right)

 * **Approach:** Pragmatic adjustments and processing efficiency, balancing economic demand with controlled numbers.
 * **For Hospitality:** The current National-led government has focused operationally on improving visa processing times and engaging with sectors facing shortages. However, they have generally maintained standard settings that lean on formal skill/wage thresholds rather than opening broad, dedicated residency paths specifically for lower-skilled or operational hospitality roles. They have also distanced themselves from some of coalition partner ACT's more radical structural overhauls (such as abolishing permanent resident visas).
 * **What it means for you:** Predictability and incremental tweaks, but likely no sweeping changes to make it drastically easier to transition front-of-house or kitchen staff into long-term residency if they fall below specific skill-tier definitions.

2\. ACT (Centre-Right / Libertarian)

 * **Approach:** Market-driven, aiming to reduce bureaucratic hurdles for employers. [www.livinginnz.co.nz]
 * **For Hospitality:** ACT advocates for dynamically and annually reviewed skills lists tied directly to actual economic gaps rather than rigid bureaucratic gatekeeping. Their philosophy is that if you need a worker and the market demands it, the red tape to hire them should be minimized. However, they couple this with tighter welfare restrictions for new migrants (barring access for the first five years) and proposals to overhaul permanent residency categories.
 * **What it means for you:** Potentially faster, more responsive channels to access the specific labour your business lacks, framed around pure economic demand rather than centralized targets.

3\. New Zealand First (Nationalist / Populist)

 * **Approach:** Significantly tighter, highly controlled immigration with an emphasis on prioritizing domestic training. [www.livinginnz.co.nz]
 * **For Hospitality:** NZ First has pushed an extensive overhaul of New Zealand’s immigration settings. This includes proposals to scrap the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) and replace it with a stricter "shortage-led" visa, double qualifying periods for permanent residency and citizenship to 10 years, and hold a referendum on capping resident visas at 20,000 per year.
 * **What it means for you:** A much more restrictive environment for migrant labour. If your business relies heavily on international or working-holiday/migrant pipeline staffing, NZ First’s policies aim to compress overall numbers and shift reliance back toward the domestic workforce.

4\. Labour (Centre-Left)

 * **Approach:** Managed migration tied to infrastructure and training, with targeted humanitarian/regional adjustments.
 * **For Hospitality:** Labour’s recent policy rollouts lean toward structured, planned immigration numbers while protecting local wages and training pathways. While they advocate for easing specific regional or seasonal bottlenecks (and have proposed adjustments like Pacific access settings via NZeTA), they historically emphasize strict employer accreditation and testing to ensure local workers are considered first.
 * **What it means for you:** A balanced, compliance-heavy framework. It is less restrictive than NZ First, but unlikely to introduce the broad, fast-track residency concessions for general hospitality workers that industry bodies are lobbying for.

5\. Green Party (Left)

 * **Approach:** Human-rights-centered immigration with pathways to regularisation and residency.
 * **For Hospitality:** The Greens generally support fairer, more humane immigration settings, arguing that people already living and working in New Zealand—including those in lower-paid or essential sectors—deserve clear, accessible pathways to secure their future and residency, rather than being treated as temporary economic units.
 * **What it means for you:** More sympathetic ears to arguments for granting operational hospitality workers stable, long-term residency pathways, though paired with broader progressive economic and environmental compliance frameworks.

* * *

Summary Checklist for Your Decision

 * **If you want looser bureaucratic friction to hire:** ACT aligns closest with a frictionless, market-led supply model.
 * **If you prefer stability and incremental operational fixes:** National offers the status quo with a focus on administrative efficiency.
 * **If you want stronger local workforce prioritization and lower overall numbers:** NZ First or Labour offer tighter controls and higher bars for temporary and permanent migration.
 * **If your priority is worker welfare and fast-tracking residency for existing staff:** The Greens or targeted industry advocacy alignment offer the most vocal support for regularizing experienced hospitality hands.

## AI Overviews

Answer ID: 6d915b4c-aa81-445b-ba16-efaacb22ca6e

Running a café with rising overheads, falling consumer spending, and the added stress of a break-in is an incredibly demanding position to be in.

Ahead of the November general election, **Hospitality New Zealand** has actively lobbied political parties to establish practical residency pathways and realistic visa settings for experienced hospitality workers. However, the major political parties have starkly divergent approaches to managing the immigration settings your workforce relies on.

Comparing Party Immigration Policies for Hospitality Employers

Political Party| Primary Stance on Visas & Workforce| Key Impacts on Hospitality Employers
---|---|---
**National**| **Stability & Targeted Settings**| Focuses on high-skilled pathways; supports current framework without drastic cuts to baseline workers.
**Labour**| **Needs-Based Planning & Worker Mobility**| Wants to link visa volumes to infrastructure capacity; allows staff to switch accredited employers after 3 months.
**ACT**| **Market-Driven But Strictly Monitored**| Reviews the skilled list annually (causing visa categories to lapse if demand shifts); introduces a $6/day temporary worker charge.
**NZ First**| **Highly Restricted & Shortage-Led**| Scraps the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) entirely; pushes for strict caps on total resident visas.
**Greens**| **Migrant Rights & Open Pathways**| Proposes an easier 5-year pathway to residency; advocates for eliminating restrictive visa stand-down periods.

National Party

National supports retaining the core structure of the current **Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV)** and Skilled Migrant Category reforms. Their approach is focused on economic growth, favoring accessible international recruitment where local shortages exist. Crucially for business continuity, National has resisted coalition pressure to abolish permanent resident visas, maintaining stability for long-term staff looking to settle.

Labour Party

Labour plans to manage immigration numbers dynamically via a **Government Policy Statement** that aligns intake with the country's housing and infrastructure capacity.

 * **Worker Mobility:** To reduce exploitation, Labour would allow migrant workers to transfer to another accredited employer after three months. For a café owner, this means easier access to hire migrants already onshore, but it also means your own migrant staff could transition to competitors more easily.

 * **Residency:** They propose doubling the time a migrant must live in New Zealand before qualifying for permanent residency from two years to four.

ACT Party

ACT emphasizes market demand but pairs it with heightened compliance, user-pays mechanisms, and stricter rules.

 * **Annual Skilled List Reviews:** ACT would review and expire skilled job categories every year. If hospitality roles are deemed well-supplied locally in a given year, your ability to recruit from overseas under that category would lapse.

 * **Infrastructure Surcharge:** They propose a **$6 per day surcharge** on temporary work visas, which would raise the baseline cost of employing overseas workers.

 * **Strict Stand-Downs:** A mandatory five-year welfare stand-down would apply to all new residents.

New Zealand First

NZ First is campaigning on a sweeping overhaul to significantly curb net migration, framing cheap overseas labor as a strain on infrastructure.

 * **Scrapping the AEWV:** The party promises to entirely dismantle the Accredited Employer Work Visa scheme, replacing it with a strict, "shortage-led" Skilled Work Visa.

 * **Caps and Extensions:** They want a referendum to cap resident visas at 20,000 per year and intend to double the qualifying period for permanent residency to 10 years. This would make attracting and retaining long-term international hospitality staff considerably more difficult.

Green Party

The Greens strongly reject policies that restrict migrant flows or add financial burdens to workers. They advocate for a broad **five-year pathway to residency** for all visa holders, creating a highly stable environment for retaining migrant staff who choose to stay in the industry long-term. They also support ending stand-down periods that restrict a migrant's immediate access to support systems.

* * *

If you want to look at other ways the election could affect your business, let me know if you would like to compare the parties on:

 * **Law and order / retail crime** policies (regarding the break-in)

 * **Minimum wage** adjustments or tax relief for small businesses

 * **Energy sector** policies aimed at commercial power costs