The source of millions of dollars in political party funding has been obscured since the Queensland government made changes to the donations threshold last year.
In May 2014, the Newman government scrapped limits on political donations and election spending, and lifted the threshold at which donations have to be reported.
Previously, the source of any amount of money over $1,000 received by a political party had to be disclosed. This threshold was then changed to be in line with the federal disclosure limit, which was $12,400 for the 2013-14 financial year. This includes both donations and other funds, such as financial transactions like investments, subscriptions to forums, or membership fees.
This resulted in the LNP only having to declare the origin of just 40% of its funding for the 2013-14 financial year. The Queensland Labor party declared only 62% of its funds in detail, despite voluntarily keeping to the old threshold of $1,000.
I’ve analysed donations for the 2012-13 financial year to see how the change in threshold affected the amount of money that needs to be attributed.
I compared funds declared by the LNP and ALP in 2012-13 under the old threshold with funds declared in 2013-14 under the new threshold.
Where it was available, I’ve used the parties’ own subtotals for detailed declarations and compared this with the total amount of money received. Where it wasn’t available, I calculated the total myself (see below for an important caveat about this process).
This analysis shows that the change in threshold has vastly reduced the amount of funding the LNP has to provide details for. In 2012-13, they declared the source for 87% of total funds. In 2013-14, this dropped to 40%:
For the ALP, the proportion has remained relatively similar as they’ve kept the same threshold – they declared the origin of 56% of funds in 2012-13, and 62% in 2013-14.
The Queensland premier, Campbell Newman, originally said it was necessary to raise the disclosure limit because advice from the crown solicitor said it was vulnerable to a high court challenge. However, other states and territories continue to have a disclosure limit lower than the federal one.
When asked if the change in laws had reduced transparency in political funding, the Queensland attorney general replied with the following statement:
“Our laws are consistent with the Commonwealth Electoral Act and the legislation includes an automatic adjustment if the Commonwealth reduces the disclosure threshold.
“We made a commitment to Queenslanders that we would restore accountability in government and we’ve done that in several ways, including being the only state in Australia to release ministerial diaries, our open data initiative and taking Right to Information application decisions out of the hands of ministerial staff.”
Evan Moorhead, the secretary of the Queensland ALP, said in a statement that the ALP had committed to reintroducing the $1,000 threshold and disclosed the source of “around 80% of donations”.
In this case, he is referring only to transactions classified as donations in the financial disclosures, which is why his figure is different to the figure of 62% above, which counts all transactions.
“The LNP has lifted the threshold for declaring donations to $12,400, meaning 96% of donations are not disclosed,” Moorhead said. “The LNP also hide donations in their reporting, describing events as business transactions rather than fundraisers.”
• A note on calculating donation totals: unfortunately, the only source for these donations are PDFs lodged with the Queensland electoral commission, which have been scanned – making the text no longer readable by a computer. To get around this, I ran the PDFs through OCR software, and then extracted the figures. I double-checked the figures as well as I could, but there may be some errors introduced during the OCR process. My final spreadsheet is here – please get in touch if you spot any errors.
