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When Will We See King Charles On Our Currency?
Keiller MacDuff, Senior reporter
It will be several years before currency bearing the image of King Charles III comes into circulation.
The new 10 cent coin featuring King Charles will be released in 2027, with the rest of the coins to follow around 2029.
Reserve Bank director of money and cash Ian Woolford told Morning Report the wait was partly due to the King's antipathy to waste.
Buckingham Palace made it "fairly clear to us that the King didn't want to see waste", he said.
"We need to hold a decent inventory to met the currency needs of the public, so we hold quite a lot of ten cent coins with the Queen's face on it," Woolford said.
"Rather than destroy those coins, they'll continue to be issued and continue to circulate, and when we do issue the King's coins we won't destroy the Queen's coins, they'll circulate side by side."
He said the other reason is the complex process, which included liaising with the palace, testing and getting production scheduled at a mint.
"There's actually more science than art to things like bank notes and coins."
Woolford said, contrary to popular belief, there's more cash in circulation than ever.
"It's a bit of a myth that no one uses cash anymore." he said.
"There's more cash in circulation than there's ever been, it's sort of doubled over the past ten years."
While there's less cash used as a proportion of all transactions, surveys and StatsNZ data, showed "a bit of a turn around - the high users of cash are using it more and more".
New Zealand's coins of King Charles would use an image the Royal Mint created for Commonwealth countries.
New Zealand could have chosen to have our own image created, but it would have required sign off from Buckingham Palace regardless, Woolford said.
The coins, which will be minted in Canada, would have the same physical characteristics as those featuring Queen Elizabeth II, but he will face to the left, as convention dictates new sovereigns face the opposite way than their predecessors.
Queen Elizabeth II has appeared on the "heads" side of New Zealand coins since 1953, but did not appear on banknotes until 1967, when the Reserve Bank printed its third series of banknotes, this time decimal currency.
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