Methodology

The data used here comes from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and specifically from the "Donations Made Details" dataset that the AEC publishes. It includes all political donations documented there since 2014, exceeding AUD 1.

It's worth noting that the AEC dataset may contain some typographical errors, which could result in certain donations being unaccounted for or not properly assigned to a specific party due to data entry inconsistencies. Additionally, the AEC's annual disclosures are released on February 1 each year, but the data does not provide a complete picture of all contributions due to the disclosure threshold of $15,000.

Donor types are classified by matching donor names. All common trade unions are manually mapped to the Trade Union donor type. Companies are detected by checking for specific corporate identifiers in the donor name: 'Pty' (Proprietary), 'Ltd' at the end of the name, 'Corporation', or 'Corp'.

Visit official source register (AEC)

The dataset covers published political contributions starting from 2014.

Records since 2025 are preliminary and subject to ongoing filings or retrospective updates by the source authority.

This dataset includes all published contributions without a minimum amount filter.

Party-level inclusion: All political parties with valid reported contributions above the transaction threshold are included.

Refunds and net-zero filtering: Some registers record returned or refunded contributions as negative entries. Donors or recipient parties whose cumulative net contribution sum across the dataset is zero or negative are excluded.

Raw disclosures undergo deterministic, rule-based normalization during ingestion to standardize entity names, consolidate organizational branches, and exclude non-qualifying entries:

• Base string cleaning: All entity names undergo Unicode NFKC normalization, trimming of surrounding quotation marks and trailing commas, and collapsing of duplicate whitespace.
• Donor key clustering & country rules: A canonical lookup key (stripping all non-alphanumeric characters and case-folding to uppercase) groups casing, spacing, and punctuation variants under a single canonical donor name. Where configured for a country's loader, additional rules standardize local legal entity suffixes, strip personal titles, or map known aliases—with every merged variant listed in the Aggregated Donors section below.
• Receiver mapping & consolidation: Reported recipient names are mapped to canonical political party entities. Where registers report contributions to regional, local, or youth party units separately, they are consolidated into a single party total (listed in Aggregated Receivers below when applicable).

Important limitation on donor identity (homonyms vs. unmerged variants): Official party funding registers rarely publish unique personal identifiers (such as national identity numbers, tax IDs, or birth dates) for individual donors. Contribution totals on donor profile pages are aggregated strictly by normalized donor name. As a result, a single donor profile may combine contributions from multiple distinct individuals who share the exact same name (over-aggregation), while variations containing middle names or unmapped abbreviations may remain separate profiles (under-aggregation).

Our compiled, normalized dataset and visualizations are released under the CC BY 4.0 licence.

For researchers, journalists, and data scientists, the complete normalized dataset for Australia can be downloaded via our Download bulk dataset (CSV / JSON), and the exact ingestion and normalization rules can be audited in our Inspect country loader source code (GitHub).

Dataset last processed: October 17, 2026.

Latest recorded transaction in dataset: June 30, 2025.

The processing timestamp indicates when our pipeline last synchronized and compiled data from the official register, whereas the latest transaction date reflects the most recent contribution date present in the published records.