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We believe that easy access to insights into donations received by political parties is fundamentally important for the integrity of our democracy.

This site can be used to quickly gain an impression of the money that is flowing through our political system, and explore where it's coming from.

This website uses party receipt data between 1998 and 2016 from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) Annual Returns Locator Service. Data is published in terms of financial years, and typically released early in the year after the financial year ends.

The data is presented as a network, with political parties depicted as squares and donors as circles. Each donor is linked to the party they donated to, and the size and colour of the donor circles represent the size of the donations.

The visualisation is primarily performed using the javascript d3 library. The code to download the AEC data and run the visualisation is open source and available on github.

We are currently performing updates and testing this website using the latest data. Some code may not yet be pushed.

We’re always keen to hear suggestions for how the site could be made more useful, or how it has been used. We can be contacted at info@politicaldonations.info.

Contributors (in alphabetical order)
Ascelin Gordon @ascelin
Ben Lyall @BenLyall
Harry Martin @hcjmartin
Jarrah Bloomfield
River Satya
Tim Osborn @memelab

With politicaldonations.info it’s easy to get all sorts of interesting and useful information regarding donations to political parites. To get you started here are some examples of ways you can use the site to answer simple questions.

How much did the Coalition receive in donations each year between 1998-2015?

1. If the Filter Panel on the left is not visible click the filter button above the zoom slider, then select 2014-2015.
2. Zoom out until you can see the full network.
3. Click on the square node that represents the Coalition (an easy way to find this node is to type Coalition into the Search field in the Filter Panel–the Coalition node will then highlight in pink).
4. Click on the Coalition node and details will appear on the Info Panel on the right side of the screen. Here you can see the total money received each year for the Coalition since 1998. The top 10 donors to the Coalition for the year currently selected in Filter Panel will also be shown.
5. Useful tips: Clicking on the name in the top of the Info Panel will launch a Google search for that donor. Clicking on a name in the details list in the Info Panel will take you to information on that party or donor.

Who donated to both ALP and Coalition in 2013-2014?

1. If the filter panel on the left is not visible click the filter button above the zoom slider, then select 2013-2014.
2. Zoom out until you can see the full network.  
3. Under Select Parties make sure only “Australian Labour Party” and “Coalition” are selected” (if all parties are selected the easiest way to do this is to first click the clear link).
4. You can then see all the donors (round nodes) to both the “Australian Labour Party” and “Coalition” (square nodes). The entities that donated to both parties are clear as they have links to both parties.
5. You can click on the donors to both parties and details will come up for that donor on the Info Panel on the right side of the screen. For example the largest donor was Village Roadshow Limited (largest circle with a link to both parties). From the Info Panel you can see Village Roadshow Limited donated a total of $532,500 ($305,00 to Labour and $227,500 to the Coalition). The Info Panel also shows the full donation history of Village Roadshow Limited since 1998.

Who gave donations over a $1 million in 2014-2015?

1. If the Filter Panel on the left is not visible click the filter button above the zoom slider, then select 2014-2015 as the Financial year.
2. Zoom out until you can see the full network.  
3. At the bottom of the Filter Panel there are sliders where you can select the minimum and maximum donations to display. Adjust the lower slider till it is just under $1,000,000.
4. The donors (round nodes) who donated over this account are displayed.Click on donors or parties, and their details will come up on the right side of the screen in the Info Panel.

Searching for a specific donor to see how much they gave ín a specific year?

1. If the Filter Panel on the left is not visible click the filter button above the zoom slider, then select the year of interest (for this example use 2014-2015) and zoom out so the whole network is displayed
2. Type text in the search bar in the Filter Panel to find specific donors (for this example search for “Cormack”). You’ll see the node representing the “Cormack Foundation” highlighted in pink. Click on that node and you’ll see in the Info Panel that the Cormack Foundation donated $4,460,000 to the Coalition in 2014-2015. The history of all donations by the Cormack Foundation is also shown.