Who funds the right

Two public registers record this money and they measure different things. The Australian Electoral Commission publishes annual returns; the Victorian Electoral Commission publishes a live register of individual donations. The federal threshold is $16,900, so most donations never appear in it. The Victorian threshold is $1,290, so nearly everything does AEC VEC .

The two are not additive. Federal money may not be used for a Victorian state campaign, and the registers cover different electoral purposes. They are read side by side here because each shows something the other cannot.

The disclosure gap is the finding

A party’s total receipts are not its donations. Receipts include public funding, interest, ATO refunds, transfers between branches and payments for services. Only the part above the threshold is itemised, and the share that is itemised is the measure of how much the register can tell you AEC .

One Nation itemises a fifth of what it receives. The other 79%, $2.63m, arrives below the threshold and is reported only as a total. The party is not funded by a handful of companies; it is funded by a very large number of small payments, and the register is built so that none of them appear AEC .

The largest donor in the country is a foundation

Cormack Foundation Pty Ltd is a Liberal-aligned investment company. It received $11.81m in 2024-25 and paid out $10.13m, including $4.7m to the Liberal Party’s Victorian division. That single line is 14.6% of the division’s $32.15m in receipts AEC .

Cormack’s own inflows are the corporate register the parties never publish: $7.09m from Finclear Services, $1.24m from the Commonwealth Bank, $615k from NAB, $556k from Wesfarmers, $538k from Rio Tinto, $380k from BHP, $256k from Transurban, $190k from Coles, $114k from Westpac, $68k from Woolworths and $41k from Woodside. Every one is booked as an other receipt of an investment company AEC .

Victoria has a matching pair: Vapold Pty Ltd, $4.22m in receipts of which $3.1m came from Credit Suisse, and the Higgins Foundation at $680k. Labor’s equivalent is Labor Services & Holding Pty Ltd, with $6.86m in receipts AEC .

Victoria has no sector bans

The Electoral Act 2002 prohibits exactly two kinds of donation: foreign money and anonymous gifts at or above the threshold. There is no ban on property developers, tobacco, gambling or liquor. The ACT bans developer donations; Victoria does not VEC .

The register shows what that permits. Sportsbet gave $2,000 and Responsible Wagering Australia gave $2,000 to One Nation Victoria within a day of each other in late August 2026, and the Australian Hotels Association gave $2,000 in September and $4,000 in August VEC .

One Nation’s Victorian record stops for three years

The party disclosed $7,101 in eight small gifts around the 2022 state election. It then disclosed nothing at all until 10 January 2026. Everything since is $85,268 from 28 donors, and its first corporate money in four years arrived in the same three weeks as the gambling donations VEC .

The individuals behind those donations are mostly small givers, and several are the party’s own people. Six of the 22 dated individual donors are One Nation candidates — John O’Connor (Ringwood, $5,000), Michael Piastrino (Berwick, $3,000), Peter Angelico (Hastings, $2,000), Jeremy Johnson (Yan Yean, $1,269) — and the undated rows include the state leader Warren Pickering, the party’s only Victorian MP Rikki-Lee Tyrrell, and the Morwell and Nepean candidates. Matchable by name, the party’s candidates and officers account for $18,880 of the $134,805 it has disclosed since 2020 VEC .

No individual gift exceeds $5,000, which is the cap; the median is $2,000 and twelve of the 22 individuals gave $2,000 or less. There is no Victorian equivalent of the $1m and $500,000 federal gifts. The donors with outside prominence are few and each gave small: Christopher Flipo of Kew gave $4,000 here and $4,000 to Advance Australia; Tom Francis gave to Labor and the Nationals as well; Rod Fenwick gave to the Liberals as well VEC .

The cap has changed the shape of giving

From 1 July 2026 the general cap is $5,190 and the disclosure threshold $1,290. Of 1,034 donations dated on or after that date, 222 sit at exactly $4,990 to $5,190. The median donation in the first three months of 2026, before the cap, was $2,500 VEC .

Twenty-five donations exceed it. Four go to the Victorian ALP, eight are candidate self-donations, and the rest are $10,380 gifts to teal-aligned independents under the doubled new entrant cap VEC .

Two parties, two shapes of money

The two are funded in opposite ways, and the difference is the point. The Liberals’ federal party takes $30.9m of public money and $14.5m from named donors, and its Victorian division routes $7.78m through three investment vehicles whose own contributors never appear on the party return. One Nation takes $81,880 of public money federally and $177,671 from five named donors, and two thirds of its receipts are payments too small to itemise AEC .

Neither is more transparent than the other; they are opaque in different places. The Liberals’ opacity is institutional — a chain of foundations, each of which files its own return. One Nation’s is arithmetic — a very large number of small payments no register can resolve. Only the second is visible in the party’s own filing, which is why the chart for one shows a single hatched block and the chart for the other shows a band labelled Cormack AEC .

On the state side the comparison is starker. Victoria’s Liberals had $32.15m in receipts to One Nation’s $127,704 — 250 times the money. But One Nation’s $85,268 of 2026 donations came from 28 payers including six of its own candidates, while the Liberals’ $10.3m of itemised donations came from 44 entities with a median individual gift of $2,500. One is a candidate self-funding scheme; the other is a donor base VEC VEC .

Where the ideological money actually sits

Coal Australia Limited gave $5.39m in 2024-25. It gave $5.15m to three advocacy vehicles, $131,000 to the Nationals, $84,500 to the LNP, $10,000 to the Liberals and $14,150 split across four Labor branches. It gave One Nation nothing. The ratio of campaign vehicle to party funding is 21.5 to 1 AEC .

Climate 200 is the mirror image, with $14.89m in gifts dispersed to teal campaigns and its own vehicles. The symmetry is real but not equal: $52.89m from Mineralogy Pty Ltd to Trumpet of Patriots exceeds the entire Climate 200 operation threefold AEC .

The party registers miss most of this money. A third-party campaigner reports its own receipts and its own electoral expenditure, and the three largest conservative vehicles in 2024-25 spent $14.3m on electoral communication between them — more than the Liberals’ and One Nation’s declared gifts combined AEC .

Advance Australia is the biggest of them, and the least visible where it matters. It spent $10.11m on electoral communication — 75% of everything it took in — and itemised $5.27m of $13.46m in receipts. The year before, 91% of its itemised money, $11.89m, arrived from one entity, Australians for Unity Ltd, booked as an other receipt rather than a donation AEC . That entity files no return of its own and appears in no year of the federal donor file.

The coal money is more legible, because one company declares it: the three vehicles Coal Australia funds itemise between 95% and 100% of their receipts, and the payer is the same name in all three AEC . A single funder is easy to name. The vehicles the left runs are not more transparent, they are differently opaque. Climate 200 itemises 63% of $23.6m, all of it booked as donations, so its 75 funders are named. The ACTU itemises $29.10m and none of it is a donation — departmental funding and union transfers booked as other receipts — so the union movement’s money appears in the donor file almost nowhere. GetUp itemises 19% AEC . The measure that matters is not how much is itemised but whether the itemised rows carry a name.

Victoria’s version is smaller and harder to see

Federal vehicles must register, so they file. A Victorian group that advertises without naming a party or candidate does not have to, unless it runs the ads during the campaign period Guardian . Fix Victoria spent just under $100,000 on Google and Meta advertising in August 2026 — about a quarter of all election-related advertising that month — and Better Victoria about $40,000, both outspending the Liberals, the teal independents and One Nation on social media Guardian .

On 30 September Fix Victoria pulled its ads and went dark. Its own legal advice was that continuing into the campaign period would make it a third-party campaigner, subject to the $5,030 cap and disclosure above $1,250 — so it stopped advertising rather than disclose The Age . The organisation’s membership, about 30 people, and its funding are not public, and its founders declined to say whether Cormack money reached it The Age .

That is the asymmetry in one state election. A union or a climate group that registers gives its funders’ names, because its money is booked as donations. A conservative group that stays under the registration threshold keeps its funders private and spends in the weeks when disclosure would begin. The state register shows $35,593 to Advance Australia’s Victorian arm and $6,500 to the Australian Christian Lobby in the current cycle; it shows nothing at all for Fix Victoria or Better Victoria, because neither is in it VEC .

What it means for the next five years

None of this donor money is the main event. One Nation stands to receive $219m in public funding over five cycles under the new $5-a-vote rate, against the $6.08m it banked in 2025 The Saturday Paper . Corporate backing is start-up capital for a party that will be funded by the taxpayer once it converts its polling into votes.

The disclosure rules change on 1 January 2027: the threshold falls to $5,000 and private donations are capped at $50,000 per donor per recipient per year The Saturday Paper . The current returns are the last that will be this opaque, and One Nation’s 2025-26 return is not published until 1 February 2027.