Largest donors to Australia's political parties revealed in new list

A list of Australia's top political donors has been released to the public, exposing the often underground connections between the nation's major political parties and big-spending businesses as well as wealthy individual supporters.

The list, released by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on Monday, shows the exact amounts of declared donations and other receipts made over the 2014/15 financial year.

Overall, the Liberal Party received 53.7 million U.S. dollars, while fellow major political group the Labor Party attracted 46.5 million dollars over the same period.

Minority groups, the National Party (7.8 million), the Greens (6.4 million) and the Palmer United Party (7.1 million) also pulled in their fair share of funds.

It was revealed that the single largest donation to any political party was made to the Palmer United Party (PUP), which only has two elected members in Australia's federal parliament.

According to the AEC report, PUP's Australian billionaire founder Clive Palmer channeled almost 7 million U.S. dollars from his vast business empire into his own party, including 4.3 million dollars from his struggling company, Queensland Nickel.

The came under fire last month for accusations of gross mismanagement, before going into voluntary administration and shedding 237 workers.

Australia's Treasurer Scott Morrison said on Monday that Palmer, also a sitting member of the federal parliament, was running "a very shabby show," with PUP's donations in 2014/15 a mere tenth of what it received in the 2013/14 election year.

"It's all fallen apart. It's all gone down the path that I think some of us always thought it would," Morrison said.

"There's a warning in that: if it's too good to be true it usually is and what he was promising and what he was saying ... I think has been laid bare now."

Apart from group donors, the most significant personal donor to the Liberal Party was Nimrod Resources' mining and resources chairman, Paul Marks, a close friend of former prime minister Tony Abbott.

For the Labor Party, currently in opposition in federal ranks, technology entrepreneur Sean Tomlinson, an investor for software group Revel Systems, ranked highest among individual donors.

Under the Australian law, all political parties must declare donations in excess of 9,000 U.S. dollars.

In a bid to give the system more transparency before the last federal election in 2013, that threshold was set to drop to around 3,500 U.S. dollars before Abbott, then the opposition leader, quashed the bill following party-room unrest over the proposal. Enditem