Folio Australia in ten minutes

Australia's public record is fragmented. Political donations sit with the Australian Electoral Commission. Government contracts sit with AusTender. Lobbying activity sits with the Attorney-General's Department. Parliamentary interests sit with the two chambers. Each is public, and each lives in isolation.

A journalist, researcher, campaigner or lawyer asking a simple question — “Has this donor also been awarded government contracts?” — has to open four different systems, learn four different search interfaces and reconcile four different spellings of the same organisation.

Folio Australia connects those datasets in one place, keyed on stable identifiers such as the ABN, and shows every connection alongside a link back to the original public source.

• AEC donation returns — annual disclosures of donations to political parties and candidates.
• AusTender contract notices — Commonwealth government contract awards, including supplier ABN, agency and value.
• Federal Register of Lobbyists — registered third-party lobbyists and the clients they represent.
• Parliamentary Registers of Interests — declared financial, employment and gift interests of federal parliamentarians.

Every record is mirrored into an entity graph so that organisations and people appear once, no matter which dataset first mentioned them. See the full list on the Sources page.

1. Open any entity profile or timeline event.
2. Click the source link next to it — the link opens the original AEC, AusTender, Attorney-General's or Parliamentary page.
3. Confirm the figure or the relationship on the source page. If anything ever differs, the source is authoritative.

The same applies to exports. A brief copied from an entity page includes the source URL for every line so a reader can verify it independently.

The overlap between political donors and government suppliers is one of the most-asked questions in Australian public-integrity reporting. It is also one of the hardest to answer, because donations and procurement live in different systems with different identifiers.

The Donors who received contracts view answers it directly. ABN-matched overlaps are verified by a stable business identifier. Name-only overlaps are surfaced separately in a review queue — a shared name alone is never treated as a verified identity.

Overlap is a factual, source-backed observation. It is not, on its own, an allegation of wrongdoing.

• No corruption scores, risk ratings or verdicts.
• No AI-written summaries or narrative commentary.
• No inferred relationships. Two entities are only connected when a public record names them together.
• No automatic merging of uncertain matches — these sit in a human review queue.
• No political framing, endorsement or opinion.