Banks had trained their staff to deal with the new currency, and held talks for members of the public. It also produced a monthly Decimal Currency Digest which it sent to staff, and cashiers had to read four booklets and complete six training exercises to make sure they understood the new systems.
The Royal Mint spent years producing millions of new coins, and these were distributed to banks around the country ahead of the switch. Before and after D Day, shops carried posters with the prices in old and new money. On the day itself, these were switched, so the new prices were shown first. This meant a pound was made up of a huge pence in total.
The old system had been in place for hundreds of years, so to give people a chance to get used to the new system, some of the new decimal coins were introduced in , a few years before the full rollout.
The country had been considering changing the way currency worked for around years, with other countries having already adopted decimalisation. Part of the reason that the process took so long was that Parliament kept voting down proposals for the change.
Eventually, in , the government was convinced by a report by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of British Chambers of Commerce. Following big debates about the merits of introducing a new decimal system versus keeping the existing one, the pound system came to be selected, largely for political reasons.
Different designs of native birds and plants were depicted on the reverse. British coins were official currency in New Zealand from Distinctive New Zealand coins were introduced in using the same weights, sizes and denominations as British coins.
By British coins were no longer legal tender, making New Zealand the last and most remote of the self-governing dominions of the British Commonwealth to introduce its own coinage. The first call for decimalisation came as early as and the idea gained momentum during the s. The bill that eventually resulted in the Decimal Currency Act was a government bill from the National government which in announced New Zealand would switch to decimal currency.
The process was overseen by then under-secretary for finance and future Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. Search Advanced Search Search. Search Search. For more information about tours and visiting Parliament, click here.
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