Democracy For Sale

The Greens built the Democracy for Sale website to create a searchable database, where donors are sorted by donor industry category.

Although details of donations have been available from the AEC since 1998, navigating the labyrinth of forms on the AEC website was not easily done.

It was only with the establishment of the Greens’ Democracy for Sale research project in 2001 that the public could readily access information on the quantity of money coming from individual donors and from categories of donors such as property developers, the finance sector, clubs and hotels.

The Democracy for Sale project began as an initiative of former Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon before passing the torch onto our current spokesperson on Democracy, Senator Larissa Waters.

This website has proved to be an invaluable tool for journalists, community groups and concerned individuals wanting to highlight the impact of political donations on the democratic process.

But with more people attuned to the massive amounts of money being used to buy policy outcomes, the media have rightly focused their attention on donation data in detail when it’s released, and the usability of the AEC’s Transparency Register is much improved, which means that Democracy for Sale is no longer filling the gap it once did!

A big thank you to the many volunteers over the years who have put in thousands of hours of work.

The data will live on as an archive. If you want to find anything from 1998-2023, you can still explore the raw data:
 Democracy for Sale archive (.csv.zip, 2.7MB)

Additional resources

The Greens

Join the campaign to End Dirty Donations


Australian Electoral Commission

AEC Transparency register


Other Sources