Millions of dollars in political funding in the last financial year did not come from direct payments to parties, but via so-called associated entities.

Political parties in Australia are required to declare money they receive from any entity provided it is over a certain threshold. While donations and payments to parties can be made directly, looking only at these payments will not reveal the whole story about where the money is coming from.

In the 2012-13 financial year, 22.5% of Labor's declared receipt dollars came through “associated entities”, amounting to approximately $7.5m. The proportion was similar for the Liberals at 22% and $6.9m.

Associated entities are entities such as foundations, businesses, companies or unions that meet certain criteria under the Commonwealth Electoral Act. They might be controlled by a political party or operate to benefit a political party financially, for example.

So a person or business can donate to one of these entities and, as a result, the name of the donor will not be declared by the political party, only declared by the entity. With a long list of entities on the AEC site, it's not exactly straightforward to find which entity belongs to which party.

Distancing the donor from the party is not the only use of entities, as they're legitimately used to manage investments and fundraise on behalf of the parties.

Here I've compiled every declared payment from a donor that has gone to the Labor party, Liberal and National party groups via an associated entity, to show the scale and complexity of this political funding.

Here's how money flows to the Coalition:

We can see most of the money comes by way of the Cormack Foundation, with $5.4m going to the Liberal party. Donors to the Cormack Foundation include Wesfarmers, the owner of Coles, and resource companies BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.

A brief note on “donors”: the AEC appears to describe every entity that pays money to a party or associated entity as a donor, even for instances where it appears to be a financial return, such as from banks, or membership fees. I've kept their terminology throughout as it's impossible to distinguish actual donations from other payments, and indeed many entities may use things such as membership fees or event tickets in lieu of donations.

Another significant associated entity is the Free Enterprise Foundation, which came up earlier in this series when we looked at undeclared donations.

In contrast to the Liberal party, the flow of money to Labor is rather more complex (so much so I've used a network graph, rather than the Sankey diagram I used for the Coalition), with many more associated entities and donors. Here we can see the Labor party encircled by the large unions, which are listed as associated entities, which are in turn ringed by donors and other unions and associations:

The largest amount given to the Labor party comes from Labor Services and Holdings, which sent some $702,000 through to the party branches. The money flow isn't always one way, either; some Labor party branches give significant amounts to other entities, which in turn send money back to the Labor party group.

The Greens received only two donations from two associated entities, CEPU Engineering ($5000) and the Maritime Union of WA ($3000), so haven't been graphed.

Methods

I scraped the political party annual returns by party group to produce a list of payments received by each major party group (includes all branches), and recorded the AEC's categorisation of the entity as either donor, party or associated entity. I filtered and grouped this dataset by each unique associated entity and its total payment to a party.

Then I constructed a similar dataset for all the returns declared by associated entities to produce a list of all the donors who had donated to associated entities. I filtered this list to include only associated entities that had made payments to a political party, and joined the two sets together.

Graphs were produced with D3.js. Here's a bonus graph of Labor using the Sankey layout, and the Coalition using the network layout.

The raw data is available here and here.

Update

I've added a footnote to the graphs to make it clear these show all money flows, not just donations. Worth mentioning again, since a number of commenters have brought it up: the AEC appears to describe every entity that pays money to a party or associated entity as a donor, even for instances where it appears to be a financial return, such as from banks, or membership fees. I've kept their terminology throughout as it's impossible to distinguish actual donations from other payments, and indeed many entities may use things such as membership fees or event tickets in lieu of donations.