The true extent of political donations in Australia is being obscured by a number of legal loopholes, with the actual amounts donated sometimes up to 10 times what is declared by parties.
The basic idea behind the disclosure rules is that when someone makes a donation to a political party over a certain threshold ($12,100 for the 2012-13 period), both the donor and the party need to declare the donation to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), with the donation subsequently being made public.
But on Tuesday, we saw how an "associated entity" distances donor names from political parties. And that's not the only practice that results in a party not having to list donor names on their returns.
When a donation is made in amounts smaller than $12,100 parties are not required to disclose that they received a donation, even if multiple donations total over the threshold. The donor, however, is required to declare if it totals over the threshold.
So when this happens you are going to miss the donation unless you check every donor's declaration (which is hard, unless you scrape every donation into a searchable database). There are, of course, a number of completely legitimate reasons why a donor might make multiple small donations – giving money to the campaigns of multiple candidates, for example, or any situation that results in a regular payment.
To see the extent of this practice I have compared the total amount declared by donors with the total amount declared by political parties for 2012-13. I have then shown only declarations where there's a difference between the total donor declaration and total recipient declaration, and it's over $12,100. (There is no legal requirement for this; I'm just using it as a cut-off for comparison with single donations.)
Here are the results, sorted by the difference between the amount the donor declared and the amount the party declared:
| Recipient | Donor | Number donations | Donor total | Party declared | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australian Sex Party | The Eros Association | 84 | 232089 | 20000 | 212089 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu | 26 | 78056 | 0 | 78056 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Retail Guild of Australia Inc | 10 | 55600 | 0 | 55600 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Jefferson Investments Pty Limited | 9 | 86250 | 50000 | 36250 |
| Liberal Party (W.A. Division) Inc. | Ernst & Young | 8 | 43950 | 12500 | 31450 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Mr Paul Ramsay | 4 | 30550 | 0 | 30550 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Allianz Australia Ltd | 13 | 29710 | 0 | 29710 |
| Liberal Party (W.A. Division) Inc. | Patersons Securities Limited | 6 | 27750 | 0 | 27750 |
| Liberal Party (W.A. Division) Inc. | GRA Everingham Pty Ltd | 13 | 27400 | 0 | 27400 |
| Australian Labor Party (ALP) | Jefferson Investments Pty Limited | 3 | 91000 | 66000 | 25000 |
| Australian Labor Party (South Australian Branch) | Southern Quarries Pty Ltd | 7 | 25000 | 0 | 25000 |
| Liberal Party of Australia (S.A. Division) | Southern Quarries Pty Ltd | 3 | 23000 | 0 | 23000 |
| Liberal Party of Australia, NSW Division | Barton Deakin Pty Ltd | 13 | 22960 | 0 | 22960 |
| Liberal Party (W.A. Division) Inc. | Schaffer Corporation Limited | 8 | 47500 | 25000 | 22500 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Sixmilebridge Pty Limited | 4 | 72000 | 50000 | 22000 |
| Liberal Party of Australia (Victorian Division) | Macquarie Group Limited | 7 | 20700 | 0 | 20700 |
| Liberal Party of Australia, NSW Division | Macquarie Group Limited | 5 | 20095 | 0 | 20095 |
| Liberal National Party of Queensland | J.J. Richards & Sons Pty Ltd | 7 | 41800 | 22000 | 19800 |
| Liberal Party of Australia, NSW Division | Genworth Financial Mortgage Insurance Pty Limited | 6 | 19293 | 0 | 19293 |
| Australian Labor Party (ALP) | AMP Services Ltd | 2 | 28250 | 9630 | 18620 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Willimbury Pty Limited | 3 | 68000 | 50000 | 18000 |
| The Greens NSW* | Ms Cate Faehrmann | 13 | 17327 | 0 | 17327 |
| Liberal Party of Australia | Mr Peter Mason | 5 | 17200 | 0 | 17200 |
| Liberal Party of Australia (Victorian Division) | Healthscope Ltd | 9 | 17200 | 0 | 17200 |
| Liberal National Party of Queensland | Mr Paul Darrouzet | 6 | 16000 | 0 | 16000 |
| Liberal Party of Australia, NSW Division | Mr Alfred Moufarrige | 4 | 15700 | 0 | 15700 |
| Liberal Party of Australia (S.A. Division) | Mr John Uhrig | 3 | 15000 | 0 | 15000 |
| Liberal Party of Australia, NSW Division | Medicines Australia Ltd | 10 | 27380 | 13200 | 14180 |
| Liberal Party of Australia, NSW Division | Employers Mutual Limited | 4 | 14100 | 0 | 14100 |
| Liberal Party of Australia, NSW Division | ResMed Limited | 2 | 14000 | 0 | 14000 |
| Liberal Party of Australia (Victorian Division) | Village Roadshow Limited | 13 | 145004 | 132000 | 13004 |
| National Party of Australia - N.S.W. | Registered Clubs Association of NSW (t/as ClubsNSW) | 2 | 13000 | 0 | 13000 |
| Liberal National Party of Queensland | Healthscope Ltd | 3 | 12550 | 0 | 12550 |
| Liberal Party of Australia (Victorian Division) | Allianz Australia Ltd | 3 | 12425 | 0 | 12425 |
|
*This amount is a result of duplicate declarations being submitted by accident, and is being looked into by Cate Faehrmann |
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In the most extreme example, the Sex Party was obliged to declare only that it had received $20,000 from the Eros Association when, in fact, the donations made totalled more than 10 times that much: $232,089. And, again, this is completely legal.
Fiona Patten, leader of the Sex Party and CEO of the Eros Association, told Guardian Australia they were simply complying with the disclosure rules.
"We go with the rules, and declare as per the rules," she said.
Some of the donations here may have been declared under other names, which is something that we saw in Tuesday's analysis.
The Liberal party is over-represented here, with 28 out of 37. This is because the federal Labor party tends to declare most donations whereas the Liberal party sticks with the $12,100 threshold.
This is just one of a few parts of the law around political donations that people have argued requires reforming. Before December 2005, the declaration threshold was $1500, which may have limited the issue of multiple donations by making it less practical to donate below the threshold.
However, the Howard government raised the threshold for declaration to $10,000, and the threshold has increased slightly every year as the amount is indexed.
Methods: The entire list of donations declared by donors and the entire list of donations declared by recipients were scraped into a usable format, refined to normalise entity names, and then compared using a program that flags discrepancies between the two. You can get the data and python script used here.
