The Labor, Liberal and Greens parties have revealed tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of previously undeclared political donations in documents filed with the Australian Electoral Commission.

Among the parties’ declarations – which total $84,880 – the West Australian branch of the Labor party filed an amendment for their 2012-13 declarations, detailing a $30,000 donation from the Dutch multinational Van Oord.

The payment was made to the campaign fund for Labor candidate Adrian Evans, and was raised in the trade union royal commission.



The commissioner, Dyson Heydon, described the payment to the Hasluck election campaign as “extraordinary” in his final report, saying there was “a direct temporal connection between a meeting on workplace issues” and the “request for a contribution to the campaign”.



When asked why the donation was previously undeclared, the WA Labor branch secretary, Patrick Gorman, said the party office was not initially provided with the details of the donation.



“At the time of preparing the 2012-13 disclosure to the Australian Electoral Commission, Party Office was not provided with the appropriate information relating to this donation to the Hasluck campaign,” he said.



“WA Labor became aware of this following a query from The Australian. Having become aware of this omission, WA Labor has disclosed the donation to the AEC as an amendment to the 2012-13 disclosure.”



“Our fundraising code of conduct clearly states ‘The Labor Party does not accept funds that are subject to conditions of any kind.’”



The New South Wales branch of the Liberal party revealed a donation from STW Communications Group Limited of $40,000 in 2013-14. STW Communications Group owns a number of marketing and communications companies, including the political lobbyists Barton Deakin and Hawker Britton.



An NSW Liberal party spokeswoman said the STW Communications Group donation amount was declared as part of the NSW Liberal party’s overall return.



“The donations came from companies under the STW Communications Group. The Party has amended its return to include them under STW Communications.”



The federal branch of the Greens filed an amendment declaring a donation of $14,880 from Avant Card. The Greens also amended the total amount they received in the 2013-14 financial year, adding $328,907 to bring the total money received to $6,675,280.



Giz Watson, national co-convenor for the The Greens, said not declaring the Avant Card donation was an “oversight”.

“The Avant Card donation was included in the total in-kind donations reported in the original annual return for 2013-14 but was incorrectly overlooked when reporting individual donations exceeding the reporting threshold,” she said.

“This oversight was brought to the attention of the AEC by us in the process of their audit of that annual return.”

Watson said the change in total receipts was due to the AEC audit identifying discrepancies with internal transaction amounts.

“Also during the audit the AEC identified that we had inadvertently cancelled out twice some internal transactions between two of our bank accounts. This had the effect of incorrectly understating both our receipts and payments as reported on the original return which have now been corrected in the amended return.”

“We have implemented measures to ensure that these errors are not repeated in future annual returns.”

The donation amendments were revealed by DisclosureBot, a Twitter bot that tweets whenever political parties file donation amendments, or when politicians update their register of interests.

