Updated November 15, 2018 23:04:22

Photo: Foreign donations to political parties of more than $100 have been banned.

Voters will be left in the dark about who donated to the major political parties ahead of the next federal election, after Labor and the Coalition united to reject legislative changes being pushed by the crossbench.

New laws banning foreign donations to political parties have passed the Senate, but the minor parties were angling for further reform, calling for real-time donation disclosure and stricter caps on anonymous donations.

The changes that passed will see foreign donations to political parties of more than $100 banned.

However, the Greens failed to amend the legislation to have political donations disclosed as they occurred.

Under current federal laws, voters have to wait months to find out who donated more than $13,000 to the parties, but if the amendments had passed, the public would have gone into the next federal election with more information about political party funding than ever before.

The Greens also failed to pass amendments that would see all political donations above $1,000 declared, meaning anything less than $13,000 will remain anonymous.

The laws have been controversial, as the Coalition was attempting to widen the ban on foreign donations to "third parties" that participate in the political process.

Charities had urged caution over those proposed changes, saying they would see all groups who had spent $100,000 or more on political activities in the previous four years forced to register as political campaigners.

But the Government scrapped those changes to secure Labor's support, and guarantee the bill's passage through the Senate.

The Government's Senate Leader Mathias Cormann told Parliament the changes that passed were "historic".

"This bill, once it is legislated, will effect a ban on foreign political donations to further strengthen the integrity of our electoral system," he said.

However, Greens senator Larissa Waters told the Senate the bill would not stop foreign donations, as there were loopholes allowing foreign interests to give money to political parties through Australian subsidiaries.

"It is not drafted in a way to actually fix the problem of corporate control of our democracy. Everybody in this place knows exactly that. I think the Australian public won't buy this either," Senator Waters said.

"What we have here is a deal by these two big parties to ram through a quite complex piece of legislation that manages to achieve looking like it's doing something about a corrupt democracy while in fact letting 94 per cent of the donations to big parties carry on unregulated."

Topics: government-and-politics, federal-parliament, parliament, political-parties, alp, greens, liberals, australia

First posted November 15, 2018 21:44:14