Election despair as hospitality leader says business is ‘under attack’
Friday, 29 May 2026
One of the country’s largest independent hospitality owners says he views the upcoming election with despair, arguing there is no one in Government or across the political spectrum who has an answer to the economic hole New Zealand is in.
Bar 101 owner John Lawrenson, chief executive of the Lawrenson Group, which runs a string of bars and venues in Hamilton and Auckland, made the comments when asked by The Post about the pressures facing the hospitality sector, largely driven by soft consumer spending.
Lawrenson is not backwards in coming forward about what he thinks is wrong with the country.
“We've got the choice of politicians who think the most important things are sorting out school lunches and arguing over the treaty and EFTPOS charges on swipe free credit card transactions and Robbie Williams concerts … the alternative is people who want to increase taxes by another $80 billion a year,” said Lawrenson, who has been running nightclubs for 20 years.
He said there were “no sweet options” when it came to political leadership, and that the country was “basically stuffed” regardless of who was in charge. Based on the choices available, he did not believe there was anyone in Wellington who understood what the economy needed or how to turn it around.
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Hamilton-based Lawrenson, whose student venue Bar 101 is one of the country’s most popular nightclubs - and the largest seller of Vodka Cruisers in the country - said there was sadly now “a politics of envy” in New Zealand.
“A lot of people have lost sight of the fact that to have a social safety net, you first need a successful business community to tax to pay for it. If you just make it incredibly hard for the business community to operate - to the point where they just don't want to do it any more - then you don't have any jobs and you don't have anyone to tax.”
He said there had once been an attitude that success should be encouraged and, once people were doing well, they could fairly contribute more. But he believed the mindset had shifted, with many now assuming anyone successful was greedy, had exploited or oppressed others, didn’t deserve their success, and should be torn down or made to struggle.
Lawrenson, who said he had shifted around the centre-right politically over the last 15 years, said he - like many business owners - felt “under attack”.
Bar 101 attracted between 1100 and 1400 patrons on an average Saturday night, and 2500 to 3000 each week.
Despite that, the bar - known for its well-priced alcohol - yielded only small margins and faced high rent, making it increasingly difficult to run, like many hospitality businesses, he said.
Being a business owner in a democracy felt like the Thomas Jefferson analogy about two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. In that scenario, he said, the wolves would always outvote the sheep and justify the outcome as democracy in action — and he believed the same dynamic often applied to businesses.
“Businesses don't make up a very large percentage of the population, so if you go to a large group of people and say ‘Hey, vote for me because businesses are bad, and we'll tax them more’ … people say ‘That sounds great, we should tax the 1%’, but the 1% is already paying about 40% of the tax.”
The 47-year-old, who owns nine bars and pubs in Auckland and Hamilton, estimates that he has paid $100 million in wages and more than $40m in GST and payroll taxes since going into business.
“$40m, and I'm just a pub owner. People have no concept of the amount that is contributed by an incredibly small part of the population to the lifestyle that all of us take for granted.
He said that hospitality, which employs between 130,000 and 180,000 people nationwide, contributes hundreds of millions in wages and tens of millions in taxes and rates.
“Just in Hamilton, I pay a quarter of a million dollars a year in rates, and council fees, just on seven businesses here … If I were a residential property investor, and I just own houses around the city, I would need to own 68 houses to pay the same amount to council.
“If you look at Queen Str, and how empty it is, people just don't want to fill up the shops, [but] the average punter has no understanding of how much it now costs to fit out a space.
“You're talking $3000 to $4000 a square metre. you could have a little 300 ²m bar that you want to build, and you're talking $900,000 to $1.2m just for a little bar. Then once you finish that, you've got to pay enormous rates to council, which keep going up by 15% a year - way more than inflation - and you've got to pay enormous minimum wages and power bills.
“My power bills in Hamilton on my seven businesses are $150,000 a year more than they were six years ago,” he said.
“All of these things mean hospitality is going to find it harder and harder, and what you're going to see is less hospitality businesses and more and more empty spaces in the CBDs of Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga and Wellington.”
Lawrenson said lowering the minimum wage would go a long way to helping society and the economy move ahead. He is of the belief it is currently about $4 an hour too high.
That puts his views in line with the New Zealand Initiative, which this week suggested the minimum wage should be cut for youth, and vary depending on where people lived.
“Minimum wage drives up the cost of things like groceries, it drives up the costs of hospitality, because again a lot of minimum wage jobs are in hospitality. People say ‘Why are you paying minimum wages, because we're employing 18 and 19 year olds who are working their first jobs; I'm not going to pay an 18 year old who doesn't have any qualifications the same amount as a 35 year old with 17 years of experience as a worker. That doesn't make any sense. You can't pay $24 an hour in the New Zealand economy when we were paying $16 an hour only seven years ago, and expect that's not going to drive the prices up for everyone.
“Then everyone's sitting here in New Zealand saying why does everything cost so much? I don't understand. The solution is to decrease minimum wage,” Lawrenson said.
“There are some real structural problems that we need to address, and politicians don't want to address them.”