Candidate and Senate Group Returns

Part XX of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 requires all candidates and unendorsed or multi-party endorsed Senate groups in an election to lodge financial disclosure returns.

These returns set out:

• the total amount of donations received
• the total number of donors
• the details of donations received that were above the disclosure threshold and;
• total electoral expenditure incurred.

Returns for federal electoral events held after 1 January 2019 also set out the details of any discretionary benefits that were received from the Commonwealth or a State or Territory in the 12 months before polling day in a federal election. Discretionary benefits include grants, contracts, payments or other benefits requiring the exercise of discretion by the Commonwealth or State or Territory.

All candidate and Senate group returns from the 1996 federal election and by-election returns from the 2014 Griffith by-election onwards are listed.

By-election returns prior to 2014 can be accessed on the By-election & supplementary election disclosure returns page on the AEC website.

Returns can be filtered and sorted based on:

• Electoral event
• Candidate or Senate group name
• Return type
• If it is a nil return
• Party name
• State
• Electorate name
• Total donation
• Number of donors
• Amount of electoral expenditure
• Amount of any discretionary benefits received by the candidate or Senate group.

Individual returns can be accessed by clicking on the name of the candidate or Senate group.

All data contained in the table can also be exported to Excel. The export will reflect any filtering applied to the list.