Thanks, Jorun; on this forum we do usually take the Kew/Missouri Botanic Garden's
The Plant List as our authority. That is very much a "work in progress", and sometimes when we have strong often more recent taxonomic evidence to back up a different name - see the Cyclamen thread for various examples - we don't follow it so exactly.
The
Salvia aurea name had been accepted by the 1988 Flora of New Zealand by Webb, Sykes and Garnock-Jones, but Rafael Govaerts working on the 2003 World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (an earlier Kew database) opted instead for
Salvia africana-lutea, and in due course, as Jorun says, that has been followed by The Plant List.