As most readers will be aware, the Reserve Bank has recently announced that it will be issuing new bank notes over the next few months, with new $5 and $10 notes being issued at the moment and new $20, $50 and $100 notes being issued early next year. The new notes will have the same portraits as the notes which are currently in use – Sir Edmund Hillary on the $5 note, Kate Sheppard on the $10, the Queen on the $20, Sir Apirana Ngata on the $50, and Lord Rutherford on the $100. I’m very pleased about that, because the use of those portraits was my own decision when we moved away from having Her Majesty on all bank notes in the early nineties.
My own decision? Yes, the Reserve Bank has been legally responsible for the design of New Zealand bank notes since the Bank was founded in the mid-1930s – bank notes are, after all, legally a non-interest-bearing liability of the Reserve Bank. And since the 1989 Reserve Bank legislation, all key decisions are legally the responsibility of the Governor. Of course, no Governor sits in the corner of his office ignoring the views of his colleagues, and in the case of bank notes I certainly consulted quite extensively both inside and outside the Bank about what people thought about the matter.
It wasn’t an easy decision. Public opinion seemed to be almost equally divided between those who wanted to retain the Queen’s portrait on all our bank notes, and those who wanted to have all our bank notes carrying the portraits of New Zealanders. In the end, we decided to retain the Queen on the most widely used note (the $20), and this meant there were only four other notes on which we could put New Zealanders. By long-held international convention, the only people who appear on bank notes are people who have died, with the exception of heads of state. Which four should be given that honour in New Zealand’s case? There wasn’t much scope for gender or ethnic diversity with only four notes to play with!
But even in retrospect, I think the choices made in the early nineties remain sound. We actually broke the international convention by putting Sir Edmund Hillary on the $5 note – he was still very much alive at the time – but he was universally regarded, outside New Zealand almost as much as inside New Zealand, as an absolutely outstanding New Zealander.
So the new notes which are being issued now retain the same portraits, though updated in the case of Her Majesty. The new notes also retain the same New Zealand birds on the reverse side of the notes.
But there will be some significant changes nonetheless, mainly designed to enhance the security features of the notes. Clearly it is vitally important that bank notes not only retain their value (achieved by the Reserve Bank delivering a low rate of inflation) but are also widely regarded as “genuine”. People would rapidly lose confidence in bank notes if they were easy to counterfeit. One of those changes involves dropping the watermark of the Queen on all the bank notes, and some have wondered whether this involves some subtle attempt by the Bank, or perhaps even by the Prime Minister, to move New Zealand further towards being a republic. But in fact having the Queen in the watermark of the notes is actually a rather recent development. Prior to the current set of portraits, the Queen was on the previous series of bank notes, with James Cook in the watermark. And at an earlier stage still, King Tawhiao was in the watermark. So the portraits and the watermarks have changed from time to time over many years.
I’m told that the Reserve Bank found that very few people were looking at the watermark to confirm the authenticity of the current bank notes, so it wasn’t proving to be a very good security feature. The new notes now being issued will have very sophisticated features, including holographic images, which will be immediately visible if the notes are genuine.
What I find more disturbing about the new notes is the invention of a Maori name for the Reserve Bank. Having a Maori name for the Bank was suggested when I was Governor, and I resisted that on the grounds that “Reserve Bank” is a name, like your name or my name, and names are not often “translated”. Moreover, there was no concept of a central bank in pre-European New Zealand, so the phrase used on the new notes to “translate” Reserve Bank – Te Putea Matua – is at best rather meaningless. I understand that it literally means “the prime source of finance”, though “putea” was in fact a bag or basket of finely woven flax, and “matua” simply means parent, main, or chief. To me, that is trying too hard.
I also resist the increasingly widespread use of “Aotearoa” as the name for New Zealand. The name of our country is in fact “New Zealand”, and has been since Abel Tasman named it thus. Maori had no name for the country we now call New Zealand; indeed, pre-European Maori had no concept of nationhood at all. We are being overwhelmed by political correctness – even, alas, at the Reserve Bank!
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.