Political parties will not publicly disclose campaign financing for the federal election until February 2020

Australians won’t know who bankrolled the major parties’ election campaigns for another eight months, due to a weak donations reporting regime that experts say is feeding “secrecy and distrust”.

The major parties have repeatedly ignored calls to introduce real-time disclosure in Australia’s donations system, which will not publicly disclose campaign financing until February 2020.

The federal system now lags far behind Queensland, where real-time donation disclosure technology introduced in 2017 requires money to be declared within seven days. In Victoria, donations are now revealed within 21 days, and New South Wales requires funding to be disclosed within 21 days during elections.

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Even when the sluggish federal system finally reveals election financing, parties will only be compelled to disclose donations above $13,800. Victoria, Queensland and NSW all require donations of $1,000 or more to be declared.

Danielle Wood, a director at the Grattan Institute, said there is “no good reason” why voters have to wait eight months to know who has paid for the campaigns of the Coalition and Labor.

“The current system feeds secrecy and distrust,” Wood told Guardian Australia. “In a world where (close to) real-time disclosures are feasible and indeed already happening in some state elections, there is no good reason why we should have to wait to see who’s funded the parties at the election.”

Successive studies have shown that public confidence in democratic processes is waning. University of Canberra researchers found last year fewer than 41% of Australians are satisfied with the way democracy works in Australia. That is a vast decline since 2007, when satisfaction was at 86%. The third biggest grievance detected in the study was that “big business has too much power”.

Wood said the current flawed system means voters were going to the polls without knowing who was funding the party they were voting for.

“Many people are concerned about the influence of vested interests in the political process and so the identity of major donors is relevant information for voters,” she said. “By February the election is old news, and that’s the point. There is simply less accountability to voters in a system with long lags in disclosure.”

Earlier this year, Labor and the Liberals combined to vote down Greens amendments to the foreign donations ban, which would have paved the way for a real-time disclosure system. Guardian Australia understands the software provider that is behind the Queensland system has offered it to the federal government.

Labor has a party policy of disclosing donations of above $1,000, and supports lowering the disclosure threshold to this level for all parties. Prior to the election, it was also considering support for a donation cap of $4,000 to reduce the influence of big donors.

A recent report by the Grattan Institute found that the disclosures – when eventually made – still hide much of the parties’ finances. The report found the source of about 30-40% of donations remained hidden.

Pressure for reform has also mounted in Tasmania, where a vast injection of gambling-lobby funds helped the Liberal party defeat the Labor opposition, which was proposing a pokies ban. It took 11 months for the scale of the industry’s contribution ($500,000) to be revealed. Since then, the Liberal speaker, Sue Hickey, has described reform to the system as “absolutely essential” and Labor and the Greens have kept the issue firmly on the local agenda.

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Federally, the Greens went to the election with a policy of implementing real-time donations disclosures and dropping the disclosure threshold. Crossbenchers have also been broadly supportive of donations reform.

The Greens’ democracy spokeswoman, Larissa Waters, said earlier this year the current system allowed private interests to have undue influence on the election.

“The real-time disclosure of donations to political parties would reveal to the public who is attempting to seek influence – and would enable closer tracking of whether any favours were granted as a result,” she said. “Real-time disclosure of donations would discourage donations that seek to buy policy outcomes that favour corporate interests over the community’s.”