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Denoted as NZ$ or NZD, the New
Zealand dollar is New Zealand’s official currency.
The informal term for the New Zealand dollar is
“Kiwi” and it is also used officially in Niue, the
Cook Islands, the Pitcairn Islands, and Tokelau.
Each NZ dollar can be divided into a hundred cents.
Introduced in 1967, the New Zealand dollar was used
after New Zealand decimalized it currency to replace
the New Zealand pound. |
It is interesting to know that the NZ$50 is the
NZD’s only denomination to feature the Maori on its
front side. Also, all the bird names on the obverse
of the NZD are in Maori and that each one starts
with a consonant.
Most of the NZD bank notes feature male characters except
for the 10 and 20 dollar notes which feature women. Also,
most of those featured in the notes are of people who have
already passed on except for the 5 and 20 dollar notes which
feature people who are still alive.
The twenty dollar note is the only one with a personality of
a different country on its reverse side. The five dollar
note is the only one with a special symbol on its bottom
left hand corner.
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The New Zealand bank notes of $1,
$2, $5, $10, $20 and $100 were introduced in 1967.
All of these denominations, except the $5, were used
to replace the New Zealand pound notes.
The front
part of the notes originally had an image of the
Queen while the reverse side featured native plants
and birds.
Because the printer used to produce the notes was
changed, the notes were slightly changed in 1981.
The most noteworthy change made was the image of the
Queen which at first had been facing to the left and
is now facing forward.
In 1983, the NZ$50 note was
added to fill in the long gap between the twenty and
hundred dollar notes. The one and two dollar notes
were replaced with coins in 1991. |
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In 1992, a new line of notes was
introduced. The front side of each note had a New
Zealand notable featured on it except for the twenty
dollar note which still showed the image of the
Queen.
The reverse side showed a native bird of New
Zealand set against a NZ scenery. The paper notes
were replaced by polymer notes in 1999. |
The designs of the NZD
notes remained mostly the same except for the slight changes
made for security reasons such as the two transparent
windows.
After the Bretton Woods system broke down in 1971, both the
New Zealand and Australian dollars changed the predominantly
fixed foreign exchange routines against the United States
dollar in a moving peg.
In 1974 of September, the Australian dollar moved about a
peg versus a whole group of currencies called the TWI (Trade
Weighted Index) in an attempt to decrease fluctuations
correlated with its peg to the United States dollar.
Since the latter part of the 1990s, and assuredly since the
close of the Cold War, the United States dollar has had an
ever decreasing overall influence on the value of both the
AUD and the NZD versus other currencies.
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