Decimal change easy to swallow
Fifty years ago, New Zealand took to decimalisation with relish, especially one hungry 3-year-old
Today marks 50 years since decimal currency went “into circulation” in New Zealand — both in the economy and in young Delia Lissette’s tummy.
After years of preparation, July 10, 1967 was the day we began the switch to dollars and cents, from the more complex pounds, shillings and pence we had inherited from Britain.
As a 3-year-old in Hastings, Delia Lissette was delighted when her father, a bus driver, brought home one of the shiny, new 2c pieces for her treasure box.
“I thought it was a lolly and promptly swallowed it,” says the now 53-year-old office manager and mother of two teenagers, who lives at West Harbour in Auckland, and has changed her surname to MacKay.
“No one was concerned it was going to do me any harm, especially as I hadn’t choked on it initially. “It did turn up — in the usual way. “My mother kept it for a few years but it’s long gone now.”
The joke in the local paper was that Hastings had the first decimal coin “in circulation”. The story also made the front page of the Herald and was reported on television.
MacKay’s gulp was one of few hiccups in Finance Minister Robert Muldoon’s decimal currency plans.
Another mishap was the stamping of “Bahama Islands” instead of “New Zealand” on around 100,000 2c coins by the Royal Mint in London.
A year earlier a furore had broken out — one that matched the much later row over changing the New Zealand flag — after the Governmentapproved designs for the new coins were leaked.
Including a contemplative rugby player on the 20c coin, a horse-riding musterer on the 50c and an oversized Southern Cross on the 1c, the designs were slated as “corny”, “tasteless”, “banal”, “childish” and “uninspired” by Aucklanders asked by the Herald.
“If they are intended to make us a laughing stock overseas, they are just right,” said a commercial artist whose name the paper did not print.
The wrangle, which dragged on for months, even earned Muldoon, a parliamentary-undersecretary, a slap from Prime Minister Keith Holyoake.
Muldoon had reportedly mused in Melbourne that Kiwis “did not particularly care” what the new coins looked like, as long as they had enough of them.
Holyoake, having received a steady stream of letters mostly attacking the original designs, retorted: “Known public reaction does not support such a statement.”
Labour leader Norman Kirk weighed in, saying the undersecretary’s remark indicated the growth in National of the “Muldoon doctrine”, that the Government was no longer the people’s servant, it was their master.
Despite fears of widespread public confusion, the Herald was able to write of day one of the new era: “New Zealanders take decimals in their stride; scarcely a quibble.”