New South Wales never legislated for riba-free home finance, and its duties statute says nothing about Islam, Muslims, religion or a financier

Australia has eight duties jurisdictions and this corpus has been working through them one at a time, because duty on a transfer of land is State and Territory law and a riba-free purchase commonly moves the land twice. Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory were found to have written express provision for those structures. Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory were found not to have. New South Wales and South Australia could not be read at all, and every one of those earlier entries says so in terms and claims nothing about either of them in either direction. This entry closes New South Wales. South Australia is now the only Australian jurisdiction still unread.

The obstacle was never the law. The State's legislation host answers a machine with a bot challenge instead of a document. What is archived, though, is better than a rendered page: the NSW Parliamentary Counsel's Office publishes every instrument as an exchange XML export, which is the drafter's own file and carries its version in its first element. Two were read whole. The Duties Act 1997 is read here in the version stamped in force from 1 January 2025, and the Duties Regulation 2022 in the version stamped in force from 3 December 2025. Say the limit plainly rather than bury it: this entry describes the Act as it stood on 1 January 2025, no later version of it could be obtained, and nothing is claimed about amendments made after that date.

Start with the charge, because New South Wales casts it wider than any other jurisdiction read anywhere in this corpus. Section 8 says "This Chapter charges duty on" a transfer of dutiable property and on a list of other transactions - an agreement for sale or transfer, a declaration of trust, a surrender, a foreclosure, a vesting, "a lease in respect of which a premium is paid or agreed to be paid" - and then, at the end of the list, "another transaction that results in a change in beneficial ownership of dutiable property, other than an excluded transaction". Everywhere else in this corpus the tax has been charged on a document. Here it is charged on a movement of beneficial ownership however it happens, unless the movement has been put on an exclusion list. The rate is progressive, and at the top threshold it is a base of "$41,017" plus "$5.50 for every $100 (or part) by which the dutiable value exceeds the minimum threshold amount".

Now the negative finding, and it is exhaustive for these two instruments because both were read whole. The Duties Act 1997 and the Duties Regulation 2022 contain no provision of the Victorian kind. Islam, Muslim, Shariah, religion and faith appear zero times in each. So do financier, interest-free, riba, murabaha, ijara and musharaka. New South Wales did not do what Victoria did in 2004, or Tasmania in 2022, or the Australian Capital Territory in 2023. It never wrote the second transfer of a riba-free purchase into its statute at all.

What it did instead, to the other side of the comparison, is more drastic than any exemption read anywhere here. Section 203A: "Mortgage duty is abolished on and from 1 July 2016". Not relieved, not excepted, not conditioned on the identity of the lender - abolished, with the Chapter kept alive only for mortgages first executed before that date. And then the Regulation does it a second time by another route: among the transactions excluded from the change-in-beneficial-ownership limb is "the grant, creation, variation or extinguishment of a mortgage, charge or other security over land". So the conventional security is untaxed twice over, by two different techniques, while every transfer of the land itself is taxed on its value. This is the sharpest form of an asymmetry this corpus has now recorded in eleven jurisdictions, and it is the first time the asymmetry was produced by abolition rather than by exemption.

New South Wales does have a once-only rule, and a good one. Section 18 is headed "No double duty": "If a dutiable transaction is effected by more than one instrument, one instrument is to be stamped with the duty payable on the dutiable transaction and each other instrument is chargeable with duty of $100", and "The duty chargeable in respect of a transfer of dutiable property made in conformity with an agreement for the sale or transfer of the dutiable property is $20 if the duty chargeable in respect of the agreement has been paid". That is the contract-then-transfer sequence relieved properly. Subsection (3) then does something more interesting: it keeps the $20 even where the transfer goes to someone who was not the purchaser under the contract - but only where "the purchaser under the agreement (other than a purchaser who purchased as a trustee) and the transferee under the transfer were related persons". The Act defines that term, and its limbs are family and corporate group: "natural persons are related persons if" "one is the spouse or de facto partner of the other", or a parent, brother or sister, or the spouse of one of those; companies if they are related bodies corporate; a person and a private company where the person is a majority shareholder or director; a person and a trustee where the person is a beneficiary. A financier and the household it is financing are none of those things. So New South Wales relieves the second transfer generously, and keys the relief to relationship - which is a fourth kind of gate, after Ontario's loan, Victoria's financial institution and Alberta's absence of interest.

The trust route is gated the same way. Section 55 charges only "Duty of $100" where property is "vested in the apparent purchaser upon trust for the real purchaser who provided the money for the purchase of the dutiable property". A structure in which a financier holds title for a household would want that provision. It cannot reach it on its own terms, because the household did not provide the money - and the subsection written to solve exactly that problem solves it only in one direction: "money provided by a person other than the real purchaser is taken to have been provided by the real purchaser if the Chief Commissioner is satisfied that the money was provided as a loan and has been or will be repaid by the real purchaser". A loan. Repaid. That is the fifth jurisdiction read in this corpus where the hinge of the relief is a loan, and the fifth where a financier that bought the house instead of lending against it falls outside the words. Worth recording that this corpus went looking for exactly this provision before it found it. Both the Northern Territory and the Ontario entries searched their own statute books for the apparent purchaser and the real purchaser - "the technique some statute books use to relieve a transfer from the holder of title to the person whose money bought the property" - and both recorded zero occurrences. New South Wales is where the corpus finally meets the technique in a live statute, and it turns out to be shut by the same word that shut Ontario.

And then, in the general exemptions at the back of the Act, New South Wales does something no other jurisdiction read anywhere in this corpus does. Section 281 lets the Chief Commissioner approve a "shared equity scheme", and defines one. Read the definition with a diminishing partnership in mind. It means arrangements providing for "2 or more persons to jointly acquire ownership of a property under an agreement for sale or transfer"; for one or more of them, the home buyers, "to have the exclusive right to occupy the property after the transfer occurs, with no limitation as to time"; for the others, the equity partners, "to acquire an interest in the property that includes the right to a specified share of the capital gain in respect of the property but does not include a right to occupy the property"; for the home buyers "to acquire not less than a 20% share in the ownership of the property"; and for each of them "to purchase from the equity partner or, if there is more than one, any of them, an increased share in the ownership of the property at an amount agreed between the home buyer and the equity partner".

Co-ownership from the start. Exclusive occupation by the household, with no end date. A partner who takes a share of the gain and no right to live there. A floor on the household's opening share. And a mechanism for buying the partner out in steps at an agreed price. That is the skeleton of a diminishing partnership, written in a State revenue statute for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's religion, and the entry does not suggest otherwise. New South Wales built it for public and community housing. What matters for this corpus is that the definition describes what the arrangement DOES rather than who needs it - no lease is required, no rent, no interest, no lender - and that in a corpus where legislatures usually have to be asked before they will describe such a thing, one of them wrote it down without being asked. Note what the definition does not contain as carefully as what it does: there is no rate of return in it, no repayment schedule, and no debt.

The relief that attaches to it is the relief every riba-free structure in this corpus has been asking for. Section 65 (25): "No duty is chargeable under this Chapter on the transfer of land, a land use entitlement or an interest in land or in a land use entitlement if" "the transferor or, if there is more than one, each of them, is an approved equity partner under an approved shared equity scheme", the transferee is a home buyer under it, and "the transfer occurs as part of the approved shared equity scheme". Every step of the buy-out is free of duty, not reduced and not deferred. The Regulation covers the same ground for the beneficial-ownership limb, excluding "a transaction that results in an increase in a person's interest in dutiable property under an agreement, relating to the dutiable property, entered into between the person and the State under a shared equity scheme", and, separately, "a change in an interest in dutiable property that occurs as a result of an increase in a person's share percentage in land purchased under a Help to Buy arrangement".

Then comes the gate, and it is an identity gate. "A shared equity scheme can be approved under this section only if the equity partner in the shared equity scheme or, if there is more than one equity partner, each of them, is an approved equity partner", and an approved equity partner is one of three things: "the New South Wales Land and Housing Corporation"; "a registered community housing provider within the meaning of Part 3 of the Community Housing Providers (Adoption of National Law) Act 2012"; or "a person who is prescribed by the regulations as an approved equity partner for the purposes of this section or who belongs to a class of persons so prescribed". The first two are the State and the community housing sector. The third is a door left open in 2017 for the executive to widen the class without going back to Parliament.

It matters whether anyone has been walked through that door, and this is where the reading has to be careful about its own limits. The principal regulation under the Act - the Duties Regulation 2022, read whole in the version in force from 3 December 2025 - has seven operative sections. It prescribes excluded transactions, it prescribes two statutory bodies as qualified investors for an unrelated provision, and it carries two transitional sections. It prescribes no approved equity partner, and its own table of amending instruments lists the three instruments that have ever amended it. What was NOT obtained is a list from the publisher of every subordinate instrument ever made under the Duties Act 1997, so the honest statement is this: in the principal regulation, the power in section 281 (4) (c) has not been used. That is a finding about one instrument, not about the whole of the subordinate statute book. The Treasurer's guidelines for approving a scheme, which section 281 (5) says are to be published on the legislation website, could not be read either, because they sit on the host that cannot be read from here.

One more provision is worth recording, because it shows the same habit of mind at full strength. In the miscellaneous Chapter at the back of the Act there is a Part headed for two housing arrangements named by their brand names. It applies to land that is "the subject of an arrangement known as the Public Equity Partnership Arrangement" and to land subject to "a scheme known as the Rent/Buy Scheme", and it says that "The New South Wales Land and Housing Corporation is to pay the duty that would otherwise be payable by an eligible owner" on instruments executed for them. Not a class of arrangement, not a description of a structure: two named schemes, with the State picking up the duty. New South Wales relieves home purchase structures readily. It relieves them by naming the party.

So the practical picture in New South Wales, on the words of these two instruments as they stood at those dates. A conventional purchase pays duty once, on the household's own transfer, and the mortgage that funds it pays nothing at all, twice over. A purchase routed through a financier that takes and passes title presents two transfers; the second is relieved to $20 only where the parties are related persons, to $100 only where the household provided the money or was lent it and repays it, and not at all under section 57A of some other State's Act, because New South Wales has no such section. A co-ownership arrangement of exactly the shape section 281 describes, with every buy-out step exempt under section 65 (25), is available where the co-owner is the State housing corporation or a registered community housing provider - and, since the change-in-beneficial-ownership limb now catches movements between co-owners that a document-based tax would have missed, a co-ownership arrangement outside those categories has more exposure here than it would have had anywhere else read in this corpus, not less. No figure is offered for what any of this costs a particular household: the rate runs on the dutiable value of a particular property and nothing in this entry is calculated.

Limits, stated rather than buried. Only two instruments were read. No New South Wales case law, no Revenue NSW ruling or practice note, and no Treasurer's guidelines. The Act was read in the version in force from 1 January 2025 and later amendments are unknown here. Whether any particular arrangement would satisfy section 281, section 55, section 18 or section 65 (25) depends on documents this entry has not seen and on a Chief Commissioner's satisfaction it cannot anticipate, and nothing here should be read as saying that a Muslim household can or cannot use any of these provisions. No provider is named or graded. And the finding that no further approved equity partner has been prescribed is bounded to the principal regulation read, as set out above.