Two more findings from a third Australian statute book

Two entries in this corpus have now read an Australian duties statute and found express provision for riba-free home purchases hidden inside it, written as pure mechanics with the religion it exists for never once named. Victoria's, from 2004, ran to four structures. Tasmania's, from 2022, ran to two. Both entries closed with the same warning attached: several State and Territory publishers refuse automated reading, so nothing whatever followed about any jurisdiction that had not been read, and no unread statute could be assumed to lack an equivalent. One more can now be read. The Australian Capital Territory has provision too, it is the newest of the three, and it is the one that repays reading most, for two reasons that pull in opposite directions.

THE INSTRUMENT. The Duties Act 1999 (ACT), A1999-7, Division 2.5.2A, sections 64 to 64F. Read here from the republication that certifies itself on the foot of every page - "Authorised by the ACT Parliamentary Counsel" - and describes its own currency in its opening pages: "This is a republication of the Duties Act 1999" as it stood "as in force on 16 December 2025". The whole division is new. Every one of its seven sections carries the same note in the amendment history, "ins A2023-47 s 5", under the division heading entry "div 2.5.2A hdg". The inserting Act is the "Revenue Legislation Amendment Act 2023 [No 2] A2023-47 pt 2", "notified LR 15 November 2023", and the operative part began later still: "pt 2 commenced 1 July 2024 (s 2)". These provisions are therefore younger than the Tasmanian ones and two decades younger than the Victorian ones. Whatever else this is, it is not a settled historical curiosity from 2004 that no legislature has revisited since. The practice was still spreading in Australia last year.

THE PROBLEM IT EXISTS TO SOLVE is the one the earlier entries set out, and it is arithmetic rather than theology. In a riba-free purchase the land commonly moves twice - a financier takes title, and later the occupier does - and duty is charged on transactions rather than on intentions, so the second movement can be taxed as though it were a second sale. The household pays the tax twice for buying one house once. A borrower who signs an interest-bearing mortgage moves the land once and meets the duty once.

THE HEADING IS THE FIRST FINDING, and it is a third drafting technique. Victoria and Tasmania both buried their provisions inside a general exemptions Part and let the section headings describe plumbing. The ACT gave its division a name of its own: "Alternative finance transactions". It is still silence about the religion - the division could as easily be about any non-standard financing - but it is silence of a different kind. Victoria and Tasmania declined to name the category at all. The ACT named the category and declined to name the community. Its definition section is headed, in the same spirit, "Meaning of financial institution—div 2.5.2A".

WHAT THE DIVISION ACTUALLY CONTAINS IS VICTORIA'S ARCHITECTURE, REBUILT. Four purchase structures, then two sections for what happens to a real life in the middle of a long arrangement. Not four structures that resemble Victoria's loosely: four that correspond to Victoria's one for one, in freshly drafted words. The ACT writes "individual" where Victoria writes "natural person", "scheme" where Victoria writes "arrangement", and "first transfer" and "second transfer" where Victoria writes "first transaction" and "second transaction". Nothing was copied. Everything was matched.

THE FIRST SHAPE is the diminishing co-ownership. Section 64A, "Land transferred to financial institution and individual then leased and transferred to individual", applies where, "under a scheme between an individual and a financial institution", "a person transfers land in the ACT to the individual and the financial institution as co-owners (the first transfer)", and "at the time of the first transfer, the financial institution leases the land to the individual for a fixed period", and the institution transfers its share out at the end. Victoria's counterpart is headed "Land sold initially to financial institution and natural person and then leased to natural person". The relief is stated in one line: "Duty under this chapter is not payable in relation to the second transfer."

THE SECOND SHAPE is the mark-up sale. Section 64B, "Land transferred to financial institution then transferred to individual", applies where "the individual, acting as an agent for the financial institution, enters into a contract of sale for land in the ACT with another person", "the other person transfers the land to the financial institution under the contract (the first transfer)", and then "the financial institution transfers the land to the individual under the contract mentioned in paragraph (c) (the second transfer)." Victoria's is headed "Land sold initially to financial institution and then re-sold to natural person". The household buys as the financier's agent, the financier takes title, and the house comes back at an agreed price.

THE THIRD SHAPE is the lease with an option to buy. Section 64C adds to the agency purchase a lease "that gives an option to the individual to purchase the land at the end of the fixed period or another period agreed by the parties to the agreement", completed when "the individual exercises the option to purchase the land under the agreement" and "the financial institution transfers the land to the individual for consideration agreed by the parties to the agreement (the second transfer)." Here the relief reaches past the transfer to the instrument that created the option: "Duty under this chapter is not payable in relation to— (a) the agreement; or (b) the second transfer." Victoria's counterpart is headed "Land sold initially to financial institution and then leased to natural person".

THE FOURTH SHAPE leaves legal title with the household from the beginning. Section 64D, "Land transferred to individual with beneficial interest transferred to financial institution", applies where the buyer takes the transfer and, at the same time, "the individual declares a trust in favour of the financial institution in relation to the individual's beneficial interest in the land" and "the financial institution leases the beneficial interest to the individual for a fixed period", with the beneficial interest transferred back at the end. Again the relief covers the creating instrument as well: "Duty under this chapter is not payable in relation to— (a) the declaration of trust; or (b) the second transfer." Victoria's counterpart is headed "Land sold initially to natural person, beneficial interest then transferred to financial institution".

AND TWO SECTIONS FOR THE THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO PEOPLE. Section 64E, "Change of financial institution", covers refinancing - where "the financial institution transfers the land to another financial institution (the first transfer) on the condition that the other financial institution will transfer the land to the individual in accordance with the scheme" - and its relief is the widest in the division: "Duty under this chapter is not payable in relation to the first transfer or second transfer." Section 64F is headed "Individual dies before arrangement completed", and applies where "the individual dies before a transfer could take place under" any of the four structures, relieving the passage of the interest "in conformity with the trusts contained in the will of the individual or arising on an intestacy", by survivorship, or under the Territory's administration statute. A legislature that drafts for the death of a customer halfway through a twenty-year arrangement has thought about the product properly, and this is now the third Australian legislature shown here to have done it.

THE COMPARISON THAT ACTUALLY REACHES A HOUSEHOLD, and it is not comfortable. Three jurisdictions have been read in full for this corpus, and they do not relieve the same things. Victoria relieves four structures. The ACT relieves the same four. Tasmania's section relieves two, and the limit is in its own operative words - duty is not chargeable on a transaction "that is a second transaction within the meaning of subsection (2) or (3)", and there are only those two applying subsections. Tasmania's two are the mark-up sale and a co-ownership bought out in stages. Across the whole of Tasmania's financing-arrangements section the words lease, option, trust and beneficial interest do not appear at all, which is checked here rather than assumed. So the lease-with-option structure and the declaration-of-trust structure - two of the four shapes a riba-free financier may actually use - have express relief in Victoria and the ACT and none in that section in Tasmania. Exactly one structure, the mark-up sale, is expressly relieved in all three jurisdictions that have been read. Whether a particular household meets the tax once or twice therefore depends on two things at once: which jurisdiction it is buying in, and which structure its contract actually uses. Neither is a question a website can answer for anyone, and a reader who wants an answer needs the contract and local advice, not this page.

WHO IS ALLOWED TO BE THE FINANCIER, which is the limb that decides whether any of the above reaches a real product. The ACT defines it in three limbs: "financial institution means— (a) an authorised deposit-taking institution; or (b) a co-operative under the Co-operatives National Law (ACT); or (c) a body prescribed by regulation." The first limb is the Commonwealth banking perimeter, which is where Tasmania stopped. The second limb is a co-operative, which Victoria also allows. The third limb is a door for anyone else - and it is a door of a different construction from Victoria's, which opens by "a body approved by the Governor in Council by Order published in the Government Gazette". The ACT's opens by regulation.

AND THE ACT'S THIRD DOOR CAN BE CHECKED, WHICH IS WHY THIS ENTRY EXISTS. The Victorian entry had to leave its equivalent question open, because answering it means reading a Government Gazette. The ACT's question does not, because a regulation is published law with a name. There is one: the "Duties Regulation 2023", which states on its face that it is "made under the" Duties Act 1999, and confirms itself in its first section - "This regulation is the Duties Regulation 2023." It was read here in full, and it is short. It contains exactly one substantive section, and that section is about something else entirely: "Prescribed relevant acquisitions—Act, s 87 (2)". There is no prescription under section 64 (c) in it. Its own legislation history records a single instrument, "Duties Regulation 2023 SL2023-18", "notified LR 10 August 2023", with no later amendment recorded.

SO THE THIRD LIMB IS OPEN IN THE ACT AND UNUSED IN THE REGULATION. On the published law as read, a financier in the Territory qualifies for this relief by being an authorised deposit-taking institution or a co-operative, and by nothing else. That is a statement about the regulation as published, not about any provider: a regulation can be made at any time, and this entry names no provider, grades none, and asserts of no body that it is inside or outside these sections. It is worth noticing what the sequence means, though. The Territory legislated the structures first and left the widest gate to be opened later by subordinate law, and as at the version read here that gate has not been opened - even though the division itself has been in force since the middle of last year.

WHAT IS NOT RELIEVED, and every reader should hold on to this. The first transfer is not relieved by any of the four structural sections. Each of them ends by relieving the second transfer, and in two cases the instrument that creates the arrangement; only the refinancing section reaches a first transfer, and only in the narrow case of moving between financiers. What the ACT removed is the DOUBLING, not the duty. A household using one of these structures should expect to meet duty once, as a conventional borrower does - which is the point of the division - and should not read any of this as an exemption from duty on a home purchase.

THE RELIGION IS NEVER NAMED, AND THAT IS GATED RATHER THAN ASSERTED. Across the whole of the Duties Act 1999 (ACT) and the whole of the Duties Regulation 2023, the words Islam, Islamic, Shariah, Sharia, Muslim, halal, usury, usurious, riba and interest-free do not occur once. The Territory did what Victoria, Tasmania and - in a different field, drawing a regulatory perimeter rather than relieving a tax - the United Kingdom all did: it described the transactions, named the category at most, and left the community out of the text. Those instruments are doing different jobs and this entry does not treat them as equivalents. What they share is that four legislatures found it possible to legislate for a religious community's finance without mentioning the religion.

WHAT REMAINS UNREAD, stated plainly so that nothing is smuggled in by silence. New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory have not been read for this corpus; their publishers either refuse automated requests or have not yielded a full text here. No claim is made about any of them, in either direction. Western Australia and Queensland were read in full for the Tasmanian entry and neither uses this drafting, which is a finding about the text of those two Acts and not about rulings, administrative practice or instruments outside them. The remaining three are unread.

WHAT A READER SHOULD TAKE FROM IT. Three things, and the third is the useful one. First, the tax obstacle that makes a riba-free purchase dearer than a mortgage is mechanical, and three Australian legislatures have now fixed it in their own words - which is the strongest available answer to anyone who says it cannot be fixed. Second, what each of them fixed is narrow: the doubling, not the duty, and only for a financier the statute lets in. Third, the fix is not uniform across the country and does not follow the structures evenly, so the questions that decide whether it reaches a household are which jurisdiction, which structure, and which financier - none of which is answered by the fact that a provision exists somewhere.