The Hawke Government established the Australian Electoral Commssion as an independent office in 1984 and introduced annual reporting for political parties and their associated entities which is now online for public inspection from 1998 to the 2019-20 financial year.

Since 2006, entities referred to as 'third parties' by the AEC have been required to report sources of income and electoral spending. Third parties are entities which have spent more than the disclosure threshold -currently $14,300- in the relevant financial year.

More recently, the latest category 'political campaigners' was introduced which requires any entity with electoral spending of over half a million dollars over the past three years or $100 thousand over the past financial year if that amount was at least two-thirds of the revenue of the person or entity for that year.

While both third parties and campaigners have to provide their sources of income over the disclosure threshold, third parties only have to provide their total electoral spending whereas political campaigners have to provide a breakdown of that spending.

For the first time I extended analysis of AEC data to include payments to (and from) not only political parties but their associated entities, third parties, campaigners and candidates. Click on the links to see payments made, who get that money and explanation of who has to report under these definitions.

		Return Type	Disclosed Receipts	Value (2013-2020)
1		Associated Entities	17,118	$1.741B
2		Political Parties	13,864	$1.076B
3		Campaigners	1,960	$0.635B
4		Third Parties	583	$0.444B
5		Candidates	316	$0.003B

While this in itself is a radical step, to my knowlege not previously done, I then extended this analysis to integrate both the lobbyists and charities registers to show where organisations on either of those registers have made payments to any of the above-mentioned organisations or who are required to report to the AEC.

This database includes all data published by the AEC and so does not exclude certain types of entities for any reason. By the same token I wish to make clear that charities giving money to organisations that report their finances to the AEC should not, in and of itself, be taken as threatening their charitable registration for partisan advocacy as it is a very gray area of regulation.

You can find out more about charity obligations in dealing with the electoral process at both the ACNC page and guide and also the AEC site.

My reason for drawing attention to charities in the policial system is the belief that there is public interest in knowing where money spent by charities (for whatever reason) ends up under the control of political parties, their affiliates, campaigners or candidates.

It is worth making the point that if the AEC included ABN in the data made available, the ACNC could simply check via ABN the kinds of payments that had been made by any charity they regulate rather than rely on members of the public to raise concerns with them before they investigate charities for potential breaches of ACNC regulations regarding political advocacy.

There's a lot to think about so check out some example results below. Some will have payments to political parties, others will be in the dataset because they are a lobbyist or their client. Where there is no exact match, partial matches are displayed.

Where previous analysis has focused on funds received by political parties, this analysis allows the public to know where money is potentially able to be put toward political purposes regardless of whether it is provided directly to a political party or whether it is provided to an entity they control or who campaigns in the political sphere.

This work has not been done before because the open data made available to the public by the AEC does not contain donor/payer ABN. The quality of receipts shared with the AEC by political parties and associated entities is of low quality in terms of providing the proper legal or trading names of those they receive money from. The only way to find these organisations in other datasets is by matching them on name and without clean data that matching has to be done manually, which is very time-consuming and can introduce errors into the data. This could be avoided if the AEC included ABN in the open data downloads.

The lobbyist and charities registers provide both proper legal and trading name and ABN of both lobbyist and their clients, making it possible to match with ABNs in other datasets. It must be noted however that only half of the lobbyist clients have allowed the Attorney-General (who maintains the lobbyist register) to publish their ABN. This required additional manual matching, creating more work and increasing risk of human error. It also means that there could be lobbyist clients in receipt of grants and tenders which have not yet been picked up.

An offical source for breakdown of current lobbyist data is at this page.