Alcohol and gambling firms donate to political parties multiple times. And new rules won’t stop them

Good quality information about when and how alcohol and gambling industries try to influence government decision making should be easily accessible. But in Australia, it’s not.

When we mapped the network of alcohol and gambling interests in Australia in our recent study, we revealed a complex web of memberships and partnerships.

We then used the latest data on political donations from the Australian Electoral Commission to show how these companies can “double donate”, or potentially donate more than twice. That’s once directly and via their often-multiple associations.

However, recent political donation reforms will not stop these kinds of multiple donations.

We’re concerned about the lack of transparency in these associations and political donations, and the potential for influencing public health policy on everything from gambling reform to alcohol labelling.

Read more: Parliament has passed landmark election donation laws. They may be a 'stitch up' but they also improve Australia’s democracy

Hidden webs of influence

Understanding which companies are connected with alcohol and gambling associations can be challenging. This was immediately apparent when we mapped alcohol and gambling industry associations (such as Clubs Australia, which represents both community clubs and large pokies venues, or Alcohol Beverages Australia, which represents drinks manufacturers, distributors and retailers).

Just 75 (59.5%) of the 126 industry associations we identified disclosed their members or corporate partners.

When we documented the members and corporate sponsors of those 75 associations, we found a large and well-connected network.

Unsurprisingly, major alcohol and gambling companies were among the members and corporate sponsors. But these were in the minority. More than three-quarters (78.3%) were from other industries such as health, finance, construction, law, entertainment and telecommunications. Some of these were among the most well-connected organisations in the network.

The figure below shows the links between the most connected associations and corporate partners, using data from 2022.

The larger circles indicate more connections in the network (for example, associations with more partners). Circles of alcohol interests are blue, gambling is pink, industry associations are orange, and other industries are shown in grey. The lines show a direct link (for instance, between a company and industry association).

We also investigated how transparent these relationships were. We mapped disclosures about two prominent groups: the hotels associations (which represent pubs and hotels) and the clubs associations.

Of the 658 relationships assessed, only 91 (13.8%) were transparently disclosed. Alcohol companies were the least transparent (disclosing none fully). Gambling companies fully disclosed only 19 relationships.

The figure below compares the number of disclosures from alcohol, gambling and other companies about their relationships with hotels and clubs associations.

On the left, we have industry sectors. On the right we have the clubs and hotels associations they partner with. In the middle we show how many of those relationships were fully, partially or not disclosed at all.

Poor transparency is just the start

Poor transparency in membership of hotels and clubs associations makes it even harder to keep track of which companies are making political donations to which parties, and how much they’re donating in total.

Donations are often said to buy access to politicians, which can facilitate political influence. Companies who may not want to visibly support political parties can donate via intermediaries – in this case, associations that represent their interests. Depending on how many associations a company belongs to, companies can cultivate multiple access points to government.

This gives them more opportunities to influence politics – and perhaps oppose public policies that threaten their commercial interests.

These multiple access points are often opaque. The potential links between the thousands of donors in political donation data from the Australian Electoral Commission are not explicit. This makes it challenging for someone with limited time and resources to easily understand which company is giving money to which party, how much, and why. So much of the money in Australian politics is effectively hidden.

It was only through extensive data collection, cleaning and linking that we could map links between alcohol and gambling sectors. We then linked our dataset to the new data published by the Australian Electoral Commission on February 1.

If we look at just alcohol and gambling companies, we can see that several essentially “double donate”. They donate once directly and a second time (or more) indirectly via their associations.

We put together a simple visual below to show the flow of funds for the largest alcohol and gambling donors and associations in our dataset.

On the left we have the alcohol and gambling companies donating to political parties on the right. In the middle, we have have alcohol and gambling industry associations also donating to the political parties. The lines represent the financial connection between entities. The wider the lines, the more money we know is donated.

Why aren’t recent reforms enough?

The most recent donation reforms mean political donations over A$5,000 must be disclosed, and these must be disclosed monthly. However, these reforms are far weaker than originally proposed (real-time reporting, $1,000 disclosure cap). This potentially allows alcohol and gambling industries to influence government and hide it.

Our current political integrity safeguards are failing us. That’s because the reforms do not compel industry groups to disclose their members or funders. This potentially allows companies to donate to political parties under the radar.

This would be the case for the 51 organisations we found that did not have a list of members publicly available.

Better transparency – about donations, lobbyists, conflicts of interest and more – can help ensure government decision-making is not unduly influenced by vested interests.

With a federal election looming, it is important the public can trust policies from all sides of politics are free from undue influence.

Cara Platts from the University of Melbourne coauthored the academic paper on which this article is based, and contributed to this article.

Jennifer Lacy-Nichols receives funding from the Victorian Health Promotion Association and the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is a member of Transparency International Australia, the Public Health Association of Australia and Healthy Food Systems Australia.