South Australia, the last of Australia's eight duties jurisdictions to be read here, never wrote a word 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, the Northern Territory and, in the entry immediately before this one, New South Wales were found not to have. South Australia was the only one left, and every earlier Australian entry here said so in terms and claimed nothing about it in either direction. This entry closes it. The Australian statute book is now read end to end, and the count is final: three of eight legislatures wrote riba-free home finance into their duties law, and five did not.

The obstacle was never the law, and it was the same obstacle three times over. legislation.sa.gov.au answers a machine with a bot challenge rather than a document, exactly as New Brunswick's and New South Wales's publishers do. The route that opened those two opened this one within minutes: South Australia publishes each consolidation as an authorised PDF at a stable, guessable path, and the Internet Archive has been capturing those PDFs for years. The Act is read here in the authorised consolidation whose cover page reads "Version: 4.12.2025", and the principal regulations in the one whose cover reads "Version: 28.6.2018". Say the second limit plainly rather than bury it: the newest archived version of the regulations is seven years older than the Act, and this entry describes the regulations at that date and claims nothing about amendments made to them since.

Start with the negative finding, because it is exhaustive for both instruments, both having been read whole. Islam, Islamic, Muslim, Shariah, financier, interest-free, riba, murabaha, ijara and musharaka appear zero times in each. So does the word religion. South Australia did not do what Victoria did in 2004, or Tasmania in 2022, or the Australian Capital Territory in 2023. There is no section 57A here, no financing-arrangement Division, no relief keyed to a party that buys a home in order to finance it.

Two near-zeros deserve to be stated exactly rather than rounded down, because a claimed zero that is nearly true is still false. The word religious appears three times, and all three are in one place. The word faith appears once, and it is "good faith", in the section headed "Evasion of duty". Neither is what a reader hoping for a religious accommodation would want, and the entry says so directly below.

Now the shape of the tax, which is where South Australia turns out to be genuinely unusual. In 2018 this State abolished conveyance duty - but not on the home. Part 4A of the Act is headed "Abolition of various duties", and its Division 6, section 105A, is headed "Abolition of duty on designated real property transfers". It works by defining what still gets taxed in the negative: "qualifying land means land that is being used for any purpose other than" land "taken to be used for residential purposes" or land "taken to be used for primary production". For qualifying land, from transfers "executed on or after 1 July 2018", "No liability to duty arises". So South Australia took the tax off the office block, the shop and the warehouse, and left it on exactly two things: the farm and the house. Every other jurisdiction read in this corpus taxes the home alongside everything else. This one narrowed its conveyance duty down until the home was most of what remained.

What remains is not small. Schedule 2 charges duty on a "Conveyance or transfer on sale of any property (not otherwise charged), including contract or agreement for sale", on a scale that runs to "$21 330 plus $5.50 for every $100 or fractional part of $100 of the excess over $500 000 of that value". No figure is offered here for what that costs any particular household, because the charge runs on the value of a particular property and nothing in this entry is calculated.

And there is no once-only rule for a double transfer of a home. This matters more here than the absence of an alternative-finance provision does, and it is worth being precise about what was searched for. The phrases "apparent purchaser" and "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 - appear zero times in the Act. So does "sub-sale". The phrase "double duty" appears once in the whole Act, in Part 4, about land holding entities, and says only that some subsections do not operate "so as to impose double duty with respect to the same transaction". New South Wales has a section headed "No double duty" and Ontario a rule headed "Tax only paid once". South Australia has neither. A purchase that moves the land twice presents two conveyances on sale, and the Act contains no general machinery for treating the pair as one.

There is a relief for a security transfer, and it is keyed to the word this corpus has now met in six jurisdictions. Section 60C is headed "Refund of duty on reconveyance of property subject to a common law mortgage", and it applies where ad valorem duty was paid on a conveyance, "the sole purpose of the conveyance is to secure a liability under a loan, indemnity or guarantee", and a later conveyance gives the property back. Then "no stamp duty is payable on the conveyance", and the Commissioner "must, on application by the person to whom the property is reconveyed, refund the duty paid on the prior conveyance". Read what that offers and what it withholds. A lender that takes title purely as security gets both transfers back for nothing. A financier that takes title because it has actually bought the house - which is what a murabaha or an ijara requires it to do - has not taken it for "the sole purpose" of securing "a liability under a loan", and the section does not reach it. Ontario keyed relief to a loan, Victoria to a financial institution, Alberta to the absence of interest, New South Wales to kinship. South Australia keys it to the purpose of the transfer being security for a loan, which is the same hinge in a sixth form.

Then there is the religious exemption, and it is worth reading closely because it is the second one this corpus has found and it does the same thing the first one did. Schedule 2 exempts "A conveyance or transfer of property to a body established wholly for charitable or religious purposes, or to a person who acquires the property in the person's capacity as trustee for a body established wholly for charitable or religious purposes, where the Commissioner is satisfied that the property will not be used (wholly or predominantly) for commercial or business purposes". That is the mosque, the school and the burial society. It is not the believer's home, and it could not be: a household buying a house to live in is not a body established wholly for religious purposes. British Columbia used its religious-exemption power the same way, on the congregation's land rather than on the member's. Two jurisdictions in this corpus have now written the word religious into a transfer tax, and both times it relieved the institution and not the family.

Which brings the entry to the two provisions that actually decide what a riba-free purchase costs in South Australia.

The first is section 71DD, "Relief from duty in respect of certain purchases of new homes and land", and it is the largest concession in the Act. For a contract entered into on or after 6 June 2024, the rule is four words long: "no duty will be payable". Not reduced, not capped, not thresholded - the price ceilings of $700 000 and $450 000 that governed the earlier version of the section apply only to contracts entered into before that date. A first home buyer of a new home in South Australia pays nothing, whatever the house costs.

Now read the conditions, because they are where the riba-free household loses. The relief runs to "the purchasers under the contract", who must be at least 18, at least one of whom must be "an Australian citizen or permanent resident", none of whom may have held a relevant interest in residential property before. And then subsection (4) imposes what the Act itself names "the residence requirement": "the purchasers under the contract must occupy the home as their principal place of residence for a continuous period of at least 6 months" beginning within twelve months of the transfer.

A financier cannot occupy a home as its principal place of residence. In a structure where the financier is the purchaser under the contract of sale - which is the structure a murabaha needs, and the structure an ijara needs, and the structure this corpus has watched Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT write express provision for - the purchaser under the contract is a company that will never live there, and the household that will live there is not the purchaser under the contract. The relief is not refused to the household for being Muslim. It is simply unreachable, because the Act measures eligibility at the party that signs the contract of sale and requires that party to move in. This is the sharpest form of the problem this corpus exists to document: not a prohibition, but a benefit designed around an assumption, worth the whole of the duty, and forfeited by a structure adopted for religious reasons. South Australia wrote no exception for it, and there is no other provision in the Act that gives it back.

The second is section 60AB, and it is the newest section in the Act - inserted by Act 66 of 2025 and commencing on 4 December 2025, the same date the consolidation read here is stamped. It is headed "Land under Help to Buy arrangement", and it does two things. For the purchase itself, "an interest the Commonwealth or Housing Australia has in the land is to be disregarded" in assessing duty, so the household is taxed on its own share rather than on the whole house. And then, for every step afterwards: "An instrument that records or effects a change in an interest in land that occurs as a result of an increase in a person's share percentage in land purchased under a Help to Buy arrangement is exempt from duty."

That is staircasing, made free of duty. Co-ownership at the start, the household buying up its share over time, and not a dollar of duty on any step. Structurally it is close to what a diminishing partnership does, and South Australia has now put it into its revenue statute - for housing-policy reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's religion, and the entry does not suggest otherwise.

But follow the definition through, because that is where the optimism has to stop. Section 60AB(3) says "Help to Buy arrangement has the same meaning as in the Help to Buy Act 2024 of the Commonwealth", so the Commonwealth Act was read too, whole, in compilation No. 1. Section 6 of that Act says a Help to Buy arrangement is a shared equity arrangement that "Housing Australia enters into, on behalf of the Commonwealth". Section 7 then defines a shared equity arrangement as one under which Housing Australia "contributes (including by means of a loan) part of the cost of the individual or individuals acquiring the residential property", "is entitled to a return on that contribution worked out, in whole or in part, by reference to the value of the residential property at one or more times", and "secures that entitlement by means of a mortgage or other right relating to the residential property".

Read those three limbs against the shape they superficially resemble. The contribution may be a loan - the Commonwealth Act says so in a parenthesis, in its own definition. The return is measured by the value of the property, which is the equity-like part and the part a Muslim reader would look at first. And the entitlement is secured by a mortgage. So the one arrangement in South Australian law whose every buy-up step is exempt from duty is defined, in the Commonwealth statute that supplies its meaning, in words that include a loan and a mortgage. Whether any particular Help to Buy contract is or is not acceptable is a question about documents this entry has not seen and a characterisation question no revenue statute settles, and nothing here should be read as saying that a Muslim household can or cannot use the scheme. What the entry records is narrower and firmer: the door South Australia opened is identity-gated in the hardest way this corpus has found. New South Wales gated its shared equity scheme on the equity partner being a State corporation, a registered community housing provider, or someone the regulations prescribe - three categories, one of them a door the executive could widen. South Australia's is gated on the other owner being the Commonwealth or Housing Australia, and nothing else, under a scheme defined in another Parliament's Act. There is no prescribing power here for anybody else to be let in.

One more limit on that section, stated because it is a real gap rather than a tidy one. Section 60AB(2) turns on an increase in a person's "share percentage", and that exact phrase appears nowhere in the Help to Buy Act 2024. South Australia does not define it either; subsection (3) defines only "Help to Buy arrangement" and "Housing Australia". Where the term is fixed - the Help to Buy rules, the program directions, or the contract itself - was not established here, and none of those was read.

So the practical picture in South Australia, on the words of these instruments as they stood at those dates. A conventional first home buyer of a new home pays no duty at all, whatever the price, provided they move in. A conventional buyer of an established home pays duty once, on the scale above. A buyer whose financier takes and passes title presents two conveyances on sale, with no once-only rule to relieve the pair, no alternative-finance provision to relieve the second, no reconveyance refund unless the first transfer was security for a loan, and - the largest loss of the four - no access to section 71DD at all, because the purchaser under the contract must occupy the home. A household in a Commonwealth Help to Buy arrangement staircases free of duty, and may not choose who its co-owner is.

Limits, stated rather than buried. Two South Australian instruments and one Commonwealth Act were read, and nothing else. No South Australian case law, no RevenueSA ruling, circular or practice note, no guideline, and no subordinate instrument other than the principal regulations. The Act was read in the version stamped 4.12.2025 and the regulations in the version stamped 28.6.2018; later amendments to either are unknown here, and the gap on the regulations is seven years wide. The Help to Buy rules and any regulations under the Commonwealth Act were not read. Whether any particular arrangement would satisfy section 71DD, section 60C or section 60AB depends on documents this entry has not seen and on a Commissioner's satisfaction it cannot anticipate. No provider is named or graded, and no figure is calculated for any household.