What counts as a gift for AEC disclosure

The support a campaign or a charity receives that is hardest to account for is often the most generous. The pub that lets you have the function room for the launch. The design shop that runs the printing at cost because it believes in what you are doing. The lawyer who looks over a candidate's eligibility for nothing. None of it arrives as a tagged deposit in the bank account, and that is the honest reason it slips past even a careful treasurer: it does not look like a donation, it looks like people helping.

Under the Commonwealth Electoral Act, though, a lot of that help is a gift. The threshold and the lodgement form are the visible end of disclosure. The earlier and more interesting question is what counts as a gift in the first place, and it is one you can get firmly on top of with a single change of habit. This article is mostly about that habit.

The threshold is the visible part

The disclosure threshold for the 2025-26 financial year is more than $17,300. From 1 January 2027 it drops to $5,000, under the funding and disclosure reforms in the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Act 2025. The Special Minister of State moved the commencement date from 1 July 2026 to 1 January 2027 on 31 March 2026, so there is more runway than there looked to be a year ago.

The threshold is only the most visible part of those reforms. The same package brings in donation caps, expenditure caps, expedited near-real-time disclosure, and a move from financial-year to calendar-year reporting. This article stays with the threshold and the gift definition, because that is where the day-to-day recognition work sits, but it is worth knowing the 2027 change is broader than a smaller number.

A threshold is easy to apply once you know what you are counting. The work that rewards attention is one step earlier.

What the Act actually calls a gift

The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 defines a gift as a disposition of property made by one person to another without consideration in money or money's worth, or with inadequate consideration. The provision of a service for no consideration or for inadequate consideration is included. Volunteer labour is excluded, and so are annual party-membership subscriptions.

Most of that definition is plain enough. The phrase that does the quiet work is "or with inadequate consideration". It is easy to read "without consideration", picture an outright free gift, and stop there. The benefits that are easiest to overlook live in the inadequate-consideration half of the definition: things that were paid for, just not at their full value.

The benefits that are easy to overlook

Four kinds come up again and again.

Donated goods are the first. Corflutes a printer runs off for nothing, an office lent to the campaign rent-free, a box of branded shirts a supplier adds to the end of a longer print run. None of it touches the bank account. Disclose it at the fair value the goods would have on the open market.

Donated services with real commercial value are the second. The pro bono legal opinion, the accountant who keeps the books for a retainer that does not cover the hours. These are services provided for inadequate consideration, so they are gifts. The exclusion is for volunteer labour, not for all donated work, and the difference is worth a section of its own below.

Discounts beyond normal commercial terms are the third. A supplier who takes 10 per cent off a quote, where 10 per cent is what they would offer anyone, has not made a gift. A supplier who takes 70 per cent off, where 10 is their usual ceiling, has given the extra 60. AEC disclosure guidance is clear that a discount given other than in the normal course of business is a gift-in-kind.

Excessive payment is the fourth, and it is the same idea the other way around. Someone pays well over the odds for a raffle ticket, or for a table at a fundraising dinner. The difference between what was paid and the fair value of what was received is a gift.

The volunteer-labour line

The volunteer-labour exclusion is the part of the rule that is genuinely soft, and it is worth being honest about that. It exists for a good reason: the alternative would have campaigns putting a dollar value on every Saturday doorknocker, which would be unworkable and would miss the point of the exclusion entirely.

A practical way to hold the line: if the person doing the work would, in their own business, send an invoice for the same task, it is a service for inadequate consideration rather than volunteer labour. A partner from a law firm advising the committee on electoral law is not volunteering in the sense the Act means. The same partner letterboxing their own street on a Saturday is. The test is not who the person is; it is whether the activity is the kind they are normally paid for.

Value it at what it is worth

For anything other than cash, the figure you disclose is the fair value of what was received: what the goods or services would have fetched on the open market. Not the cost to the donor, not a friendly invoice, and not nil because no money changed hands. AEC disclosure guidance is direct on this: a gift-in-kind is disclosed at an amount that reflects its fair value.

This is the rule that has operations staff going back to a donor for a market quote, which can feel awkward when the donor was simply being kind. It is far less awkward at the time than later. Asking a printer at the point of delivery what the job would have cost a paying customer is an ordinary conversation. Asking the same printer in November about a job from March is not.

The habit that makes 2027 a non-event

While the disclosure threshold sat above $17,300, in-kind support that an organisation never quite recognised often stayed below the line anyway. At $5,000 it will not. A single donor's in-kind help totalling $10,000 across a year fell short of the old threshold and clears the new one.

This is less daunting than it first sounds, because the response is the same whatever the threshold is. An organisation that records in-kind support when it arrives already has what it needs, and 2027 is a non-event for it. The lower threshold only troubles the organisations reconstructing a year of generosity from a bank statement in the fortnight before the deadline, and that was hard work at any threshold.

So the useful response to 2027 is not worry. It is to move recognition earlier, starting now, while the runway is long.

A simple practice

The change that does the work is small: recognise an in-kind gift at the moment it happens, not at year-end. When someone provides a venue, donates a service, or applies a discount well outside their normal terms, the value goes into the donor record that week.

A short check the committee can run each month:

• Did anything used this month, on or off the bank statement, come to the campaign for free or well below market price?
• For each yes, what would the market price have been?
• For each yes, who provided it, and where does the year's running total against that donor now sit?

Three questions, once a month, is a light load. The annual return is due to the AEC by 17 November, and the work to meet it is either spread gift by gift across the year or compressed into the last fortnight. Spread thin, it is genuinely manageable. The habit is the whole game.

This is general information about the Commonwealth Electoral Act disclosure regime, not legal advice. Confirm your own obligations with the AEC, and seek professional advice where whether a particular benefit is a gift is not obvious.