Victoria was not alone

The Victorian entry in this corpus settled a question and left a warning attached to it. Victoria's duties statute does make express provision for riba-free home purchases, written as pure mechanics, with the religion it exists for never once named. The warning was that nothing whatever followed from this about any other Australian State — several State legislation sites refuse automated reading, and no unread statute could be assumed to lack an equivalent. One more State can now be read, and it has one. Tasmania legislated for the same problem eighteen years later, in the same silent way, and then drew the boundary of who is allowed to be the financier in a materially narrower place than Victoria did.

THE INSTRUMENT. Duties Act 2001 (Tas), No. 15 of 2001, section 57B, headed "Exemptions – certain financing arrangements". The section is recent: the publisher's consolidated text carries the editorial note "Section 57B Inserted by No. 18 of 2022, s. 11, Applied:01 Jul 2022". It sits in the Part of Chapter 2 headed Exemptions, beside the exemptions for the break-down of a marriage, for personal relationships and for certain vestings. Read here from the authorised version, which certifies itself on its own first page — "I certify that this is a copy of the authorised version of this Act as at 5 June 2026" — over the name of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel: "K Woodward Chief Parliamentary Counsel".

THE PROBLEM IT EXISTS TO SOLVE. In a riba-free purchase the land commonly moves twice. A financier takes title, and later the occupier does. Duty on a transfer of land is charged on transactions, not on intentions, so the second movement can be taxed as though it were an ordinary second sale — and the household pays the tax twice for buying one house once. That is not a religious objection to anything; it is an arithmetic consequence of using two transfers instead of one. A borrower who signs an interest-bearing mortgage moves the land once and meets the duty once.

WHAT SECTION 57B ACTUALLY DOES. Two purchase sequences, then two protections around them.

FIRST SEQUENCE — the agency purchase and re-sale. Section 57B(2) opens: "This subsection applies if a natural person and an authorised deposit-taking institution enter into an agreement where" — and then sets out the mechanics. The buyer is the financier's agent for the purchase from the seller: "the natural person, acting as agent for the authorised deposit-taking institution, and a third party enter into an agreement for sale in relation to real property (the relevant property)". Title goes to the financier first: "the relevant property is transferred from the third party to the authorised deposit-taking institution (the first transaction)". Then it comes back to the household: "the authorised deposit-taking institution transfers the relevant property to the natural person for consideration (the second transaction)." That is a mark-up sale described entirely in the vocabulary of agency, sale and consideration.

SECOND SEQUENCE — co-ownership, then a staged buy-out. Section 57B(3) has the two of them take title together in stated shares: "the relevant property is transferred from the third party to both the authorised deposit-taking institution and the natural person (the first transaction) in the percentages specified in the agreement". The household then contracts to buy the financier out: "the natural person is to purchase such percentage of the relevant property as is owned by the authorised deposit-taking institution". And here Tasmania wrote something Victoria did not. The buy-out is expressly allowed to happen by instalments — the financier "transfers, in one or more transactions, the relevant property to the natural person for consideration (the second transaction)." A shrinking co-ownership share, bought back in steps, is the shape a reader of this site will recognise; the statute never calls it anything.

THE RELIEF ITSELF. Section 57B(1): "No duty is chargeable under this Chapter in respect of a transaction, relating to dutiable property, that is a second transaction within the meaning of subsection (2) or (3)."

FIRST PROTECTION — changing financier. Section 57B(4) relieves both legs where the household moves to a different institution mid-arrangement: "No duty is chargeable under this Chapter in respect of a transaction, relating to dutiable property, that is a first transaction, or a second transaction, within the meaning of subsection (5)." Subsection (5) describes the move: "the authorised deposit-taking institution transfers the dutiable property to another authorised deposit-taking institution (the first transaction) on the condition that the other authorised deposit-taking institution complies with the terms of the relevant agreement". Refinancing, in other words, does not restart the tax.

SECOND PROTECTION — death before completion. Section 57B(6): "No duty is chargeable under this Chapter in respect of a transfer (the relevant transfer), of an interest, held by an authorised deposit-taking institution", where the person "who held an interest under the agreement, has died", and "the relevant transfer is made to another natural person, to whom the interest, under the agreement, of the natural person has been transferred by virtue of" a testamentary gift, "the right of survivorship", or the State's administration statute. A half-finished riba-free purchase does not become a tax event because the buyer died in the middle of it.

WHAT IS NOT RELIEVED, AND THIS IS THE PART TO READ TWICE. In the two purchase sequences it is only the SECOND transaction that escapes. The financier's own acquisition — the first transaction — is not relieved by subsection (1). What Tasmania removed is the DOUBLING, not the duty. A household using one of these arrangements still meets Tasmanian transfer duty once, exactly as a mortgage borrower does. Only in the change-of-financier case does the section reach both legs. Anyone reading this as an exemption from duty on a riba-free purchase has read it backwards.

THE DIFFERENCE FROM VICTORIA THAT MATTERS MOST: WHO MAY BE THE FINANCIER. Victoria's provisions — each of which carries the marginal note "No. 71/2004 s. 17", which is where the eighteen-year gap comes from — run through a defined "financial institution", and that definition has two limbs — "an authorised deposit-taking institution within the meaning of the Banking Act 1959 of the Commonwealth", or "a body approved by the Governor in Council by Order published in the Government Gazette". The second limb is a door for a financier that is not a bank. Tasmania's section has no such door in its own text: the phrase "authorised deposit-taking institution" is the only actor named, it occurs fourteen times in the Act and every one of those occurrences is inside section 57B, and no alternative approval route appears anywhere in the section. The Duties Act supplies no definition of the term. The general one is in the Acts Interpretation Act 1931 (Tas), in the section headed "Definitions of certain common phrases", which applies "In any Act" and reads: "authorised deposit-taking institution means a body corporate that is an authorised deposit-taking institution for the purposes of the Banking Act 1959 of the Commonwealth" (authorised version, "I certify that this is a copy of the authorised version of this Act as at 24 October 2022").

WHAT THAT MEANS, STATED NO WIDER THAN THE TEXT. Tasmania's relief is tied to the Commonwealth banking perimeter. Victoria's can also be extended by an executive act to a body outside it. Whether any particular financier in the market is inside or outside that perimeter is a question about that financier's Commonwealth authorisation, and it is not answered here: this entry names no provider, grades none, and asserts of none that it is or is not within either State's provision. The Victorian Gazette was not read for the Victorian entry and no Tasmanian instrument was read here that would extend the term.

THE SECOND DIFFERENCE: HOW MANY STRUCTURES. Victoria wrote four sequences into its Act; Tasmania wrote two. Two Victorian shapes have no counterpart in section 57B — a lease of the financier's share, and a lease carrying an option to purchase, and neither does a declaration of trust in the financier's favour. This is not an inference: the words lease, option, trust and declare do not occur anywhere in section 57B at all. What follows for a household whose arrangement takes one of those shapes is not stated here, because the section does not state it.

THE RELIGION IS NEVER NAMED, AND THAT IS CHECKED RATHER THAN ASSERTED. Islam, Islamic, Shariah, Sharia, Muslim, halal, usury, usurious, riba, interest-free: zero occurrences across the whole of the authorised Duties Act 2001 (Tas), not merely across section 57B. Tasmania used the same drafting technique as Victoria in 2004 and as the United Kingdom did in its own regulated-activities order — describe the mechanics precisely enough that the arrangement is unmistakable, and let the word for it go unwritten. For a reader who has been told these products are a legal curiosity, the useful observation is the reverse: two Australian legislatures have written their mechanics into a tax statute, eighteen years apart, and neither needed the religion to do it.

TWO MORE STATES WERE READ IN FULL, AND WHAT WAS AND WAS NOT FOUND. Western Australia's Duties Act 2008 ("Western Australia Duties Act 2008 As at 19 Dec 2025 Official Version") and Queensland's Duties Act 2001 ("Queensland Duties Act 2001 Current as at 1 August 2026") were each read whole, not by section. Neither names the religion, on the same ten-word test. Neither uses the drafting the two relieving States used: searching each complete text for "natural person", for "authorised deposit-taking institution", for "second transaction" and for "acting as agent for" returns nothing of this kind in either Act — the only thing answering to "the first transaction" in Western Australia is an anti-avoidance rule about family farms, sitting in a Part headed "Exemptions, nominal duty and concessions", and in Queensland it is a transitional provision about a repealed Act. That is the finding, and it is a finding about statutory text and nothing else. Revenue-office rulings, published administrative practice, regulations and any relief living outside these two Acts were NOT read, and this entry asserts nothing about them in either direction.

WHAT REMAINS GENUINELY UNSETTLED. New South Wales and South Australia could not be read at all — both publishers refuse automated requests — and no claim is made about either, in either direction. The Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory were not settled either. So the honest count is not "two States out of eight". It is: of the four Australian jurisdictions whose duties statutes could be read in full, two have express provision and two do not, and the remaining four are unread. A household in an unread jurisdiction should ask its own State revenue office rather than infer anything from this entry.

WHAT A READER SHOULD TAKE FROM IT. Three things. First, the tax obstacle that makes a riba-free purchase more expensive than a mortgage is a real, mechanical one, and it has been fixed by legislation in more than one place — which is the strongest available answer to the claim that it cannot be. Second, what was fixed is narrow: the doubling, not the duty, and in Tasmania only where the financier sits inside the Commonwealth banking perimeter. Third, and least comfortable, whether the fix reaches a given household depends on which State it is buying in and which structure the contract actually uses, and neither of those is a question a website can answer for anyone.