Australian Notes Act 1910

Australian Notes Act 1910
Private currency issued by the City Bank of Sydney c. 1900
Parliament of Australia
Date assented to	16 September 1910
Date repealed	14 December 1920
Status: Repealed

The Australian Notes Act 1910 was an Act of the Parliament of Australia which introduced an Australian national currency, the Australian pound. The Act was enacted on 16 September 1910 by the Fisher Labour Government under Section 51 (xii) of the Constitution of Australia that gives the Commonwealth Parliament the power to legislate with respect to “currency, coinage, and legal tender.”

The Act gave control over the issue of Australian notes to the Commonwealth Treasury and prohibited the circulation of state notes and withdrew their status as legal tender. The Bank Notes Tax Act 1910, enacted in October of that year imposed a prohibitive tax on banknotes issued by banks in Australia by imposing an annual tax of 10% on "all bank notes issued or re-issued by any bank in the Commonwealth after the commencement of this Act and not redeemed," which effectively ended the use of private currency in Australia.

For the next three years, some of the earlier private banknotes were overprinted by the Treasury as a temporary measure and circulated as Australian banknotes until new designs were ready for Australia's first federal government-issued banknotes, which commenced in 1913. Blank note forms of 16 banks were supplied to the Australian Government in 1911 to be overprinted as redeemable in gold and issued as the first Commonwealth notes.

The Australian Notes Act 1910 was repealed on 14 December 1920 by the Commonwealth Bank Act 1920, which gave note issuing authority to the Commonwealth Bank. In 1960, responsibility for note printing passed to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). The RBA has been producing Australia's polymer banknotes since 1988. Its note printing branch was corporatised in July 1998, as Note Printing Australia, which is a now a wholly owned subsidiary of the RBA.