Ask a Tasmanian voter, in the closing days of the March 2024 state election, who had paid for the corflutes and the letterbox flyers backing their local candidate, and the honest answer was that nobody could tell them. Four months earlier, in December 2023, the Tasmanian Parliament had already passed a law built to fix exactly that problem — the Electoral Disclosure and Funding Act 2023, which would for the first time force parties, candidates and the third-party groups that fund campaign advertising to disclose donations while a campaign was still live. But the government did not switch the new regime on. It sat, passed but dormant, all the way through the 2024 campaign and the government that followed it, and did not commence until 1 July 2025 — nineteen months after royal assent, and just eighteen days before Tasmanians went back to the polls a second time, after a no-confidence motion had toppled the government that had let it sit unused. For the entire term of the government elected in March 2024, Tasmania had a donations disclosure law on its books and, in practice, none at all.
A law nineteen months in the waiting
The Electoral Disclosure and Funding Act 2023 is Tasmania's first ever state-based scheme for disclosing political donations and capping electoral expenditure, administered by the Tasmanian Electoral Commission (TEC). It defines a "reportable political donation" as a gift of $1,000 or more, either as a single payment or as several donations from the same source adding up to $1,000 or more in a year, made to a registered party, an MP, a candidate, an associated entity or a third-party campaigner. During an election campaign period those donations must be disclosed within seven days of being made or received, with the TEC publishing updated returns twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday evening, for the length of the campaign. Outside campaign periods, disclosure reverts to a monthly cycle. The Act also bans cash donations of more than $100 outright, prohibits donations of $1,000 or more from foreign donors, and caps electoral expenditure — for Legislative Council candidates, at $19,500 per campaign, rising by $500 each year — while requiring any third-party campaigner spending $5,000 or more during a House of Assembly election to lodge its own return.
The strongest case
A genuinely new scheme, built from nothing, in a jurisdiction too small to hide behind
Before this Act, Tasmania was the only Australian state relying solely on the Commonwealth's disclosure regime to know who funded its state politics — and that regime only ever applied to parties and candidates that also ran federally. A donor backing a state-only party or an independent Legislative Council member faced no disclosure obligation of any kind, at any threshold, ever. Measured against that starting point, a $1,000 reportable-donation threshold with seven-day, twice-weekly disclosure during campaigns is not a token reform; it is markedly tighter than the federal scheme it replaces as Tasmania's default, and it was legislated, built and switched on by a government that had no electoral incentive to speed up scrutiny of its own campaign funding. Building a live donations-disclosure portal, a compliance unit and an enforcement framework from a standing start is genuine administrative work for an electoral commission the size of Tasmania's, and the government deserves credit for funding and delivering a scheme more transparent, on paper, than several jurisdictions that got there years earlier.
What the numbers show
The gap the Act was built to close was not small. Where the federal scheme applied by default, the Australian Electoral Commission's financial disclosure threshold stood at $16,300 for the 2023-24 financial year and $16,900 for 2024-25, indexed annually — more than sixteen times the new state threshold — and it required only an annual return, published by the AEC roughly seven months after the financial year it covered. A donor to a Tasmania-only entity, meanwhile, faced no threshold and no return at all. Set beside that, Tasmania's new $1,000 reportable-donation threshold and seven-day campaign disclosure is a genuine step-change in how quickly the public can see who is funding a candidate, at least for donations large enough to register.
That first real test came fast. The Act commenced eighteen days before the 19 July 2025 state election, meaning the campaign that returned Jeremy Rockliff's Liberals to a second minority government was the first in Tasmanian history conducted under any state donations law at all. It was also the first time Tasmanians could, in principle, watch a live return update twice a week rather than wait to find out who had funded a campaign only after the votes were already counted. It landed in a parliament reshaped for exactly this kind of scrutiny problem: the House of Assembly grew from 25 seats to 35 at the March 2024 election, under the Expansion of House of Assembly Act 2022, after years of argument that a 25-seat chamber — a size set in 1998, largely to cut costs — left too few non-executive MPs to staff committees, question ministers or watch where campaign money was going in the first place. A bigger parliament and a faster disclosure law arrived within sixteen months of each other; whether either is enough to offset how concentrated Tasmania's donor base is remains to be tested.
Money with a house advantage
Tasmania is a small economy with a handful of industries large enough to matter to whichever party governs it, and each has tested where transparency ends. Gambling is the clearest case: Federal Group held the exclusive right to license every poker machine in the state's pubs and clubs under a deed with the government renewed in 2003, an arrangement that became the central issue of the 2018 "pokies election," when gambling-industry advertising and donations helped return the government that kept machines in pubs and clubs. The Gaming Control Amendment (Future Gaming Market) Act 2021 ended that exclusive deed from 30 June 2023 — genuine reform on competition grounds — but it also cut the tax rate on Federal Group's own casino machines by roughly half (approx.), a concession negotiated in the same package that broke its monopoly.
Salmon farming shows a subtler version of the same problem. Petuna, one of the three companies that dominate Tasmanian salmon farming, has confirmed paying $12,000 to attend Liberal Party business forums that were also attended by government ministers — describing the payment as a forum subscription rather than a donation. Tassal, the largest producer, has declined to say whether it donates to Tasmanian parties at all, while Australian Electoral Commission data show it gave $60,000 (approx.) to the major parties nationally between 2018 and 2023; Huon Aquaculture says it donates nothing. The industry's peak body, the Tasmanian Salmonid Growers Association, says it has made no payments to Tasmanian parties or candidates. Whether a $12,000 seat at a ministerial forum counts as a "political donation" under the new Act, or sits outside it as a service fee, is exactly the kind of definitional boundary the Act has not yet been tested against. Forestry carries a similar opacity: Ta Ann, the Malaysian-owned company that has anchored the state's native-forest logging industry for two decades and has received substantial state and federal financial support over that time, has drawn repeated criticism from opposition MPs over how little is known about its political giving — criticism made, before this Act, with genuinely no means of checking it. None of these three industries is named in the Act at all: unlike New South Wales, which bans donations from property developers, and other jurisdictions that restrict donations tied to gambling licences, Tasmania's reform lowered the threshold and sped up the timetable for every donor equally, but did not single out the industries whose approvals — a fish-farm lease, a logging coupe, a gaming licence — sit most directly in a minister's hands.
An integrity commission without teeth
A donation that is disclosed still needs a body that can ask what it bought, and Tasmania's is unusually constrained. The Integrity Commission, operating since 2010 under the Integrity Commission Act 2009, has never held a public hearing — unlike its counterparts in New South Wales, Victoria or Queensland — and it cannot investigate a member of parliament's conduct during an election campaign, which is precisely when donation-driven pressure is highest. It also cannot investigate a business, lobbyist or industry group for conduct intended to improperly influence a public official; its jurisdiction reaches only the official's side of that exchange, not the donor's. The Commission's own annual reporting has noted it holds close to the lowest per-capita budget of any state or territory integrity body, and it has referred only two people for prosecution since it was established — fewer than any comparable Australian body, according to research published by the Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank, in March 2022. That is not for lack of matters to examine: its Report No. 1 of 2024, tabled 22 May 2024, investigated misconduct allegations against a former Parliamentary Secretary and Minister for Mining, while a separate investigation into a former Minister for Human Services and her chief of staff was ultimately dismissed after the Commission found no misconduct had occurred. The Commission can and does investigate individual conduct once a complaint reaches it; what it cannot do, under its own governing Act, is examine the campaign-period conduct or the donor's side of the transactions that its counterparts in larger states are able to test in public.
A donation can now be seen within seven days; the commission meant to ask what it bought still cannot hold a single public hearing to find out.
The government has been told this directly. In April 2024, as part of a confidence-and-supply agreement with two Jacquie Lambie Network members needed to keep his minority government afloat, Premier Jeremy Rockliff agreed to commission an independent review of the Integrity Commission. It did not happen. By February 2025 the government was still describing the review as "proposed," and it was ultimately shelved, with the Premier citing legal advice that an independent review would conflict with the oversight role already held by Parliament's own Joint Standing Committee on Integrity. A commitment made to secure the votes needed to govern was, once those votes were secured, allowed to lapse.
The risk to the future
The easy part is done; the part that matters is still untested
Making donations visible is the easier half of political integrity reform, and Tasmania has only just finished it — the Act is barely a year old, has been tested at a single election, and has not yet faced a genuine dispute over what counts as a "donation" versus an access fee, a sponsorship or a forum subscription. The harder half was always going to be the body meant to act on what disclosure reveals, and on that measure nothing has changed: the Integrity Commission still cannot hold a public hearing, still cannot examine a donor's conduct, and the review promised to fix its resourcing has been shelved. In a parliament of 35 seats where a minority government depends on courting a handful of crossbenchers one at a time, and where a small number of industries carry outsized weight in a small economy, visibility without investigative power risks becoming its own kind of reassurance — Tasmanians can now see more of the money than they ever could before, with no guarantee anyone with real power is watching what it buys.