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Power Network: Who Runs Australia's Civic Sector?
0 people mapped across 6 systems: charity boards, foundations, political donations, government contracts, justice funding, and parliament. Scored by cross-system influence.
Source: ACNC responsible persons × political donations × AusTender contracts × justice funding × foundations × parliament.
Top 50 by Power Score
Composite score: boards held + political donations + contract pipeline + justice funding + foundation giving + politician status. Cross-system multiplier rewards people who span multiple systems.
| # | Name | Score | Donated |
|---|
System Distribution
6 systems: charity boards, political donations, government contracts, justice funding, foundations, parliament. Most people appear in 1 system. The power elite span 4-6.
The Person Network Explained
0 people sit on 2+ boards simultaneously. These board interlocks create power networks that span organisations, sectors, and systems.
0 people both donate to political parties AND sit on organisational boards. The direct link between political funding and civic governance.
Trustees decide where foundation dollars flow. When trustees also sit on recipient boards, conflicts of interest emerge.
CivicGraph maps 0 people across ACNC responsible persons, ASIC officeholders, political donations, and government contracts. All linked by name normalization to reveal Australia's civic power network.
Methodology
Person resolution: People are matched across datasets using normalized name matching (lowercase, trimmed, punctuation removed). This approach has limitations — common names may be conflated, and people who use different name variations across datasets may be split into multiple records.
Board interlocks: Counted as people who appear as directors, trustees, or officeholders on 2 or more organisational boards where the cessation date is null or in the future. Data sourced from ACNC responsible persons and ASIC officeholder records.
Political donations: Individual donations (where donor_abn is null) are attributed to people by name matching. Corporate donations are excluded from person-level analysis. Data sourced from AEC political donations transparency register.
Systems count: A person is counted as touching a "system" if they meet any of the following criteria: (1) board interlock (2+ boards), (2) political donor (>$1,000 donated), (3) foundation trustee. Maximum systems count is 3 in this analysis.
Trustee-grantee overlaps: Identified by matching people who hold trustee roles on foundation boards with people who sit on boards of organisations that receive grants from those foundations. Requires foundation grantee data to be available and linked.
Limitations: Name-based matching has error rates. Common names (e.g., "John Smith") may aggregate multiple people. Spelling variations, nicknames, and name changes create false negatives. ASIC officeholder data would significantly improve coverage but is not yet fully integrated. Politicians are identified from political_candidates table which may have incomplete coverage.
Explore Related Reports
See how organisational power concentration, influence networks, and political money intersect with the people who run Australia's civic sector.
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