King Charles III will not “automatically” appear on Australia’s $5 note because Queen Elizabeth II featured due to her “personal” status, the assistant minister for treasury has said.
Andrew Leigh made the comments at the Royal Australian Mint on Tuesday, refusing to rule out featuring an Australian other than the new monarch on the smallest denomination note and even floating the possibility of abolishing the 5c coin.
The mint is preparing to mint new coins featuring King Charles III to be released in 2023, although no effigy design has yet been approved. Coins featuring Queen Elizabeth II will remain legal currency.
With 15bn coins featuring the Queen in circulation and only 110m to 150m new coins minted a year, Lizzies are likely to outnumber Charleses on Australia’s coins for many years to come.
Despite the Albanese government’s aim to make Australia a republic, Leigh told reporters in Canberra the monarch would feature on Australian coins “as a matter of tradition”.
“As the prime minister has made clear our first-priority constitutional reform is [an Indigenous] voice to parliament,” he said.
But the $5 note was a different matter. “The decision to include the Queen’s face on the $5 note was about her personally rather than about her status as the monarch so that transition [to Charles on the note] isn’t automatic,” he said.
“We’ll have a sensible conversation within government and make an appropriate announcement in due course.”
Before the introduction of polymer banknotes, paper $5 notes featured philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, but the Queen did appear on the $1 note, until the note was scrapped in 1984.
Later on Tuesday the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, refused to be drawn on the $5 note, telling reporters he had not “turned [his] attention towards that matter”.
“I think this is a time for a bit of respect … we will deal with these issues appropriately, in an orderly way, in a way that is respectful.”
Earlier, Leigh did not rule out putting an Indigenous Australian on the $5 note, saying only that the “focus now is on the coins, which necessarily need to change over”. “There’s no rush about it.”
Leigh was also asked about calls to withdraw the 5c piece from circulation, given the cost of producing it is now more than its face value, at 12c a coin.
Leigh replied that the “challenge with removing the 5c coin is the rounding problem” – that it is “not obvious” whether prices ending in 5c increments should be rounded up or down.
“That will delay the removal of the 5c coin, although it does currently cost more to produce than its face value.”
The Royal Australian Mint chief executive, Leigh Gordon, said the mint had been preparing for the task of minting coins with the new monarch “for quite a while”.
Gordon said the Australian mint did not intend to submit a design of Charles, but would use the same effigy as the UK, approved by Buckingham Palace.
Gordon said the mint des not remove coins from circulation as a “distinct task” but accepts them back from banks when they have “worn out”, melting them down to be recycled.
Coins last for about 30 years, he said, and some already-minted coins featuring the Queen sitting in the mint’s vaults would still be released.
