Various branches of the Labor Party continued to benefit from the guild’s largesse.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia may have fallen off the list of top 10 corporate donors to political parties in the 2024-25 financial year, but it still managed to spend around $200,000 more than the previous year.
In total, the lobby group representing community pharmacy owners gave out $600,170; a significant increase on the 2023-24 total of around $400,000.
To put this into context, $600,000 is a larger donation than those from major companies like Woodside Energy Group, Sportsbet and KPMG put together.
The Australian Labor Party was the big winner from the guild’s generosity, with its various state and territory arms receiving about $360,000 all up.
Branches of the coalition – or then-coalition, as it were – received the balance of the donations, at around $240,000.
The two largest single donations from the guild both went to Labor’s federal branch; $110,000 in March 2025 and another $100,000 one month later in April 2025.
There was a federal election in May 2025, and the budget that year was delivered in late March.
The third and fourth largest payments were both less than $50,000 each and went to the Liberal Party of Australia and the National Party of Austra, respectively.
WA’s branch of the Labor Party received the biggest single state or territory donation from the guild, at $27,500 in April 2025.
The state announced an expanded pharmacist-led prescribing pilot in July of that year.
In all, the guild made 64 separate donations over the financial year.
The Pharmacy Guild remains the largest political donor from the health sector, with the next-largest being Private Healthcare Australia.
PHA, an industry group made up of private health insurers, donated a total of $285,000. The largest chunk of this went to the Australian Labor Party’s federal division.
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Medicines Australia, which represents pharmaceutical companies, donated $182,000.
The individual drug companies which also opened their wallets were:
- MSD (Merck & Co) donated $132,000;
- Bristol-Myers Squibb Australia donated $89,000;
- Organon Pharma donated $62,000;
- Bayer Australia donated $39,000;
- Roche Products donated $37,000.
Telehealth company Eucalyptus also made it into the mix, having donated $65,000 to the Victorian branch of the Labor party.
Other donors of interest were tobacco giant Phillip Morris, private hospital operator Ramsay Healthcare, Next Healthcare, non-profit health fund HCF and vitamin magnate Marcus Blackmore, who personally parted with $125,000.
