The Prime Minister wanted evidence. He's got a seven page audit report.

An independent review of One Nation's Fire the Liar fundraising drive has found the money is real, concluding the campaign's $2.2 million counter includes "only successfully received and validated donation payments". The finding lands two days after Anthony Albanese publicly questioned whether the donations existed at all. The question nobody has put back to him, until now: where's his number, and where's the audit of the $4.3 million his party took from a union now under administration?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who questioned One Nation's donation figures before the audit found them real. Image: Sky News Australia.

What the audit found

The review was carried out by software engineer Daryl Monnink, with the report produced by AI Strategy Consulting. Monnink reviewed the website's source code, inspected the live databases and walked through the end to end donation process alongside Peter Arvoll, who built the site, before signing off on the total.

Sky News, which obtained the seven page report first, added detail from inside the campaign:

  • A One Nation official said more than 28,000 individual donors have given through the website, at an average of $59 each
  • Sky ran the audit past independent tech experts, who backed its findings
  • One expert suggested the true figure could be higher still, since security measures on payment gateways like PayPal and BPAY can delay donations appearing in the party's accounts by a day or two

Hanson posted the report on X herself, declaring the site and the money "ridgy didge". Albanese had dismissed the haul on Thursday as "slogans being put forward, not substance", while Labor operatives privately suggested the counter might be fraudulent. The day before, he'd offered "Oh, did she, though? Did she, though? Did she?" Hanson's answer, given in Perth before the audit reported, was that faking it made no sense for someone running a campaign about honesty: "It would destroy me."

Pauline Hanson speaking in Perth as Sky News reports the audit found One Nation's donations are real. Image: Sky News Australia.

The $20,000 Labor won't talk about

So One Nation's books are open. Labor's are shut, and here's the thing, they're allowed to be.

Under the disclosure rules running until January, individual donations below the threshold, currently around $17,000 and indexed annually, are never itemised anywhere. A $27 donation to Labor's anti One Nation drive is invisible forever. No running tally is required, no audit obligation exists, and Labor's campaign page carries no counter. The party demanding receipts from One Nation has published nothing about its own drive, and on the current rules it never has to.

Hanson put a number on it in Perth anyway, sourcing included: "I heard on the grapevine he's only received about $20,000 for the Labor Party." Labor has neither confirmed nor denied the figure. If the grapevine is right, the campaign that started this fight has been outraised roughly a hundred to one, audited against unaudited, counter against no counter, 28,000 receipts against silence.

The CFMEU millions Labor kept

If the Prime Minister wants to talk about the legitimacy of political money, there's a much bigger pile of it sitting on his own side of the ledger.

The CFMEU has donated $4.3 million to the Labor Party, a figure on the parliamentary record. Liberal MP Zoe McKenzie put the fuller figure to Parliament in an adjournment speech, telling the chamber that under this Prime Minister's leadership Labor has accepted $11.5 million in donations and support from the CFMEU, the same speech in which she cited the Watson SC report's finding that union controlled worksites had become drug distribution points.

What did the union get? The government that took the money abolished the ABCC in 2022, the building watchdog that prosecuted the CFMEU's lawbreaking. Two years later the union's construction division was placed under administration amid revelations of corruption, organised crime links and bikie infiltration.

The accountability since has been a study in closed doors, as One News Australia reported in its live coverage this week. When Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie asked at Senate estimates how much CFMEU money had flowed to individual Labor ministers and MPs, she got nothing back beyond the public declaration forms. When the Coalition asked the Prime Minister directly in Question Time what else the union would get for its donations, the question was ruled out of order before he had to answer it. Labor's national executive did suspend donations from the construction division in July 2024, after the Nine investigation forced the issue, and only for some state branches. The millions already banked stayed banked. Calls to hand the money back went nowhere.

Bridget McKenzie's verdict on the demand that One Nation prove its $59 donations are real: "Fair game, PM. You want us all to do that? You start."

The cap window all of this is happening in

None of this money would move the same way next year. Labor legislated a $50,000 annual donation cap through the Electoral Reform Act 2025, due to start on 1 July this year, the centrepiece of Special Minister of State Don Farrell's answer to Clive Palmer's $123 million spend at the 2022 election. On 31 March, the commencement date was pushed back to 1 January 2027, announced by Farrell himself.

In fairness to the government, the delay came months before this week's fundraising war. Even the Sydney Morning Herald's framing was that it inadvertently handed One Nation an extra six months to court "high-rolling donors", a line their post attached to the Fire the Liar campaign while describing the money as something the party "claims to have raised". Both halves of that sentence have a problem.

The claims framing ran in the same news cycle as the audit confirming the money is real, and the campaign it was aimed at is 28,000 people giving an average of $59 each, which is roughly the opposite of a high roller. The donations that do fit the description, the $500,000 gifts from two employees of companies in Gina Rinehart's Hancock group, are real, declared and lawful. Until January, every dollar of all of it flows under the old rules.

The $36 million from taxpayers

While the argument ran over whether One Nation's $59 donors were real, the Daily Telegraph published an analysis of AEC public funding from the last election, reported by Sky News today:

  • Labor: more than $36 million
  • Liberals: more than $28 million
  • Greens: more than $12 million
  • One Nation: $6 million
  • Nationals: $4 million

Public election funding is lawful and every party above the vote threshold receives it. The contrast is still the point. The party holding $36 million of taxpayer money, $11.5 million of CFMEU money by its own Parliament's record, and an unpublished total for its current campaign spent two days demanding an audit from the one party that produced one.

The caps start on 1 January 2027. The Fire the Liar trucks are already in the Sydney electorates held by the Prime Minister and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. The window Labor opened has 29 weeks left to run.

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