The New Zealand dollar

Who puts the notes and coins into circulation

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand is the issuing authority. Its notes have been polymer since 1999. Series 6 replaced paper that year and added two transparent windows; Note Printing Australia supplies the base polymer. Series 7 arrived in October 2015 and May 2016, and Series 6 and Series 7 notes were both legal tender as of 2021.

Five notes and five coins make up the set. Nothing below ten cents is left, because inflation and the cost of production took the lower denominations out of circulation.

Why a pound became two dollars

The New Zealand pound had been a currency apart from sterling since 1933. It counted in pounds, shillings and pence: twenty shillings to the pound, twelve pence to the shilling. A government committee looked at decimal currency in 1957. The decision came in 1963, and the Decimal Currency Act of 1964 fixed the date.

Naming it took longer; the public put forward crown, fern, tūi, kiwi and zeal, partly to avoid a word many people tied to the United States. New Zealand followed Australia and chose dollar anyway. The conversion ran at one dollar to ten shillings and ten cents to the shilling.

At launch the dollar was pegged to sterling and the US dollar, at half a pound or US$1.40. It floated on 4 March 1985.

How the new money reached every bank

Notes began arriving from England in October 1966, and for the changeover the Decimal Currency Board had 27 million notes printed and 165 million coins minted. Between April and June 1967 an operation code-named Overlander moved $120 million of it, some 730 tons, to about 600 banks by plane, ferry, truck and train.

A New Zealand Film Unit newsreel shows the loading. Sacks and ammunition cases of new coin went onto six special trains, guarded by police two to a wagon and dogs two to a train. Behind the counters, more than 50,000 cash registers were converted by hand. The Reserve Bank puts the cost of the whole conversion at $6.5 million, met by selling the old coins as scrap.

Where the bronze cents went

The 1967 coins ran from one cent to fifty cents. James Berry designed all six, after the government printed candidate designs in newspapers and asked readers to vote on them. Bronze one-cent and two-cent pieces were demonetised on 30 April 1990, and cash totals were rounded to the nearest five cents. Aluminium-bronze $1 and $2 coins replaced the notes of the same value on 11 February 1991.

In 2006 the five-cent coin went and rounding moved to the nearest ten cents. The ten, twenty and fifty were made smaller in plated steel, since the old sizes had matched British-derived Commonwealth coins so closely that vending machines accepted foreign coins as local ones; the old pieces stopped being legal tender after 31 October 2006.

Which islands beyond New Zealand spend it

Four places on the list sit outside New Zealand proper. The Cook Islands and Niue are states in free association with New Zealand, Tokelau is a dependent territory of it, and the Pitcairn Islands are a British Overseas Territory. The New Zealand dollar is legal tender in all four. A Niue dollar and a Pitcairn Islands dollar exist at par as non-circulating issues, and the Cook Islands dollar was once pegged to it as well.