A tale of two Scott Farquhars: how one small change set back political transparency in Australia

In the latest round of political donation disclosures there was a curious detail. It appeared as if Scott Farquhar, the billionaire co-founder of Atlassian, had donated $22,250 to the Queensland Greens in addition to giving $1.5m to support Climate 200.Had the tech guru fallen prey to the Greens’ legendary email marketing apparatus?At least one news website reported that the Atlassian-associated Farquhar was responsible for the Greens donation, only to later delete it from their news story. We also made the same mistake, with my data analysis putting the two together – surely there couldn’t be more than one Scott Farquhar giving money to political causes?In fact, the Greens donation was actually made by Scott Farquhar, resident of Brisbane, and not Scott Farquhar, billionaire tech mogul. The confusion is a result of a little-known change in how political donations are reported.It has significantly set back political transparency in Australia.chart showing donations amounts by scott farquharsBefore 2025, all political donations came with a PDF of the declaration form, which included the donor’s name and address. This allowed journalists (and others) to figure out, for example, if donations attributed to Terence White were from the former politician and pharmacy chain owner Terry White, or from Terry White*, a retired chiropractor from Wyong, NSW.This is an important distinction, both for reasons of political transparency – it’s important to know who our politicians are getting money from – and for reasons of basic accuracy … and not getting sued if donations are wrongly attributed to a prominent person.The information in the forms also made it possible for journalists to conduct important investigative work by matching donations with other information such as company records.However, after an incident in which the AEC accidentally published the addresses of political candidates, and a subsequent external review of the incident, the PDF forms were removed from the AEC’s transparency register.Then, in February 2025, the Albanese government made changes to the Electoral Act to remove the requirement for the AEC to publish the addresses of donors, effectively making the removal permanent.The changes were retrospective too, meaning that there are now about 5,000 entities (based on my analysis of the Greens’ old donations database which has a category identifying individuals) in the donations database for which we only have a name, and nothing else, to identify them by.While it is true that journalists can employ other means to verify the identity of donors (as we did in the case of the two Scott Farquhars) this is far more time consuming than being able to cross-match details from the transparency register with other government databases.Even the ability to do this cross-matching is under threat, with the AFR reporting that addresses for directors registered in the Asic company database will be removed.The end result is that timely reporting on political donations is now much more difficult.In the case of people sharing the same name, at least, there are still some tricks available to us – the AEC assigns a unique identifier to each entity in their database, and reports the different entities on different rows in some of their datasets, and the AEC confirmed that this can be reliably used to distinguish two different people from one another, saying in a statement: It is very uncommon for two donors in a single disclosure period to have the same name. In that very unusual occurrence, the unique client identifier is a method to distinguish them as separate individuals. The AEC is further considering such matters for the implementation of other Electoral reform amendments due to commence 1 July 2026. The identifier only shows up publicly in the web URLs of the transparency register, and not in any of the data exported from it, so it is still hard to use for most people.There must be a better balance struck between protecting the privacy of donors and preserving the transparency of how political parties are funded.There are, of course, obvious privacy and security concerns with publishing donor addresses, or addresses of company directors.However, there are surely other options available that could be explored. For example, the inclusion of a postcode or date of birth would allow further verification of who the donors actually are without exposing their exact residential locations.* This is a made-up person and any resemblance to Terry Whites, living or dead, is purely coincidental