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Fifty years since NZ switched to decimal currency

Author
Sam Thompson,
Publish Date
Mon, 10 Jul 2017, 5:38AM
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Fifty years since NZ switched to decimal currency

Author
Sam Thompson,
Publish Date
Mon, 10 Jul 2017, 5:38AM

It's 50 years today since pounds, shillings and pence were replaced with dollars and cents.

A man instrumental in the conversion to the decimal currency was 87 year-old Royce Doyle from Wellington. He was liaison officer between the then five trading banks and Treasury for Decimal Currency.

Mr Doyle said the big challenge was how to convert the huge volume of cheques swapping between banks to the new currency .

"This required many staff to work a lot of overtime to get the pipeline totally cleared, processed into the ledger accounts, before the conversion could take place."

He said the public were also invited to submit designs for the new notes and one sticks in his mind after all these years.

"That was a dear old lady sitting in her rocking chair, knitting straight from the sheep's back.

"Obviously this was impractical to put on a note but it did cause a lot of mirth in the office."

A massive haul of 27 million new banknotes were printed and 165 million new coins were minted.

We had one, two and five cent coins - and one and two dollar notes - all of which have since been removed from circulation.

The sweeping 'Mr Dollar' publicity campaign was used to inform Kiwis about the change.

There was much public discussion over what to call the new currency: 'Zeal', 'fern', 'tui', and 'kiwi' were considered as names. But New Zealand ended up following Australia and using the simple "dollar".

 

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