There are two major datasets that this project is making use of, the political donations data from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and the Tax Transpareny dataset published by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

The Tax Transparency dataset has been integrated with political donations data to show which 'top-earning' corporations are also political donations and show the amount each corporation has paid to political parties in recent years.

It is important to note that only donations that fall above the disclosure threshold are made by the AEC in machine-readable format regardless of whether political parties provide records of all donations received to the AEC or not.

The disclosure threshold was $13,800 in the 2018-19 financial year and is pegged to the CPI. I have charted the breakdown by Party of the gap between the total receipts of each party and those that have been reported and published by the AEC.

With the exception of payments excluded from collection or publication by the AEC, this donations project includes all payments received by political parties regardless of whether they are designated as a political donation, 'other receipt' or government funding (with appropriate labelling).

This is because I think a lot of people want to know all sources of funding received by political parties regardless of their receipt type. Having said that, it is worth pointing out that only payments designated by the donor or party as a 'donation' attract the legal requirements associated with donating to a political party. ie Payments that are not donations can be made by charities or other types of organisations without the same legal implications that those payments would attract were they designated as 'donations'.