Our recent piece on Gina Rinehart described a donor who picks winners. This one is about her close friend, who runs the opposite play. Anthony Pratt, executive chairman of the Visy packaging empire and one of Australia's two richest people, does not bet on a side. He pays everyone: both major parties at home, the sitting president abroad, every cycle, in two countries at once. If Rinehart's money is a wager, Pratt's is an insurance policy. This is what the premiums look like on the public record.
The inheritance
Pratt did not build the machine; he industrialised it. His father Richard built Visy, the box and recycling group founded in Melbourne in 1948, and Anthony took the family business into the United States, where Atlanta-based Pratt Industries is now the largest privately held maker of 100% recycled corrugated boxes in America. The fortune that sits on top, estimated in the billions on every rich list and topping the AFR Rich List, funds everything that follows.
One clarification our donations data makes and readers often miss: Pratt Holdings (Anthony Pratt's Visy) and Kin Group (the family office of his sister Fiona Geminder and her husband Raphael) are separate entities within the wider Pratt family, and their donations are disclosed and counted separately in the Party donations tab.
The Australian ledger
Start at home, with figures drawn from AEC disclosures already published in our donations database. Across the 2021-22 to 2024-25 disclosure years, Pratt Holdings gave about $5.78 million to federal Labor, including $2 million in 2024-25 alone. Over the same period it gave roughly $2.9 million to the Coalition parties: about $2.67 million to the Liberals, $250,000 to the Nationals and $35,000 to the Queensland LNP.
Read those numbers the way a risk manager would. Both sides are covered in every cycle, but the weighting moves with power: with Labor in government, the 2024-25 split ran two to one in Labor's favour, and the $1 million tranche landed, as The Nightly reported, ahead of a dinner with the Prime Minister. This is not a donor trying to change who wins. It is a donor making sure the winner, whoever it is, takes his call.
The American ledger
The same strategy runs offshore, at larger scale. When Trump won in 2016, Pratt became a paying member of Mar-a-Lago and pledged US$2 billion of new American manufacturing investment. In the 2024 cycle, OpenSecrets records about US$14 million from Pratt Industries to MAGA Inc., the main pro-Trump super PAC; with a reported US$1.1 million to the inaugural fund on top, our donations registry lists him among the top five donors behind Trump's 2024 campaign, at about US$15.1 million all-in.
What does the premium buy? Watch the ritual. In April 2025 Pratt stood at the White House "Invest in America" event and pledged US$5 billion and 5,000 new manufacturing jobs across Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. The pledges are real investments in a real business; they are also the currency of access, announced beside whichever president is in office. A cardboard manufacturer with factories in swing states has a permanent, entirely lawful reason to be photographed with power.
What proximity looks like up close
The clearest documented picture of that access, and its risks, came from the special counsel's files. In April 2021, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump allegedly discussed sensitive details of US nuclear submarines with Pratt, including, according to ABC News, the number of warheads they carry and how close they can run to Russian submarines undetected. Pratt then reportedly shared the remarks with at least 45 people, among them journalists, Australian officials and three former Australian prime ministers, and was identified as a potential witness in special counsel Jack Smith's case. Trump's reported reaction, in the headline of a Fortune account, was regret at having talked to "the red haired weirdo from Australia."
No charge was ever laid against Pratt, who cooperated with investigators. But the episode shows exactly what a Mar-a-Lago membership purchases: a seat close enough to power that the President of the United States talks submarines with a box manufacturer. That is the product. The donations are the price.
The friend on the same circuit
Which brings us back to Gina Rinehart. The two are genuinely close. They met at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Sydney in 2010, where Pratt noticed how diligently she took notes; the same profile records him, years later, serenading her with the opening lines of the Beatles' "Oh! Darling" in the bar of the Raffles Grand Hotel d'Angkor in Siem Reap. "We are great mates," Pratt says. It was Pratt who introduced Rinehart to Mar-a-Lago, and both attended Trump's January 2025 inauguration, each taking out US newspaper ads praising him.
Same circuit, same club, same photographs. But as our Rinehart article sets out, the money tells two different stories. Rinehart's giving turned directional after the Coalition's 2025 collapse: concentrated on One Nation, aimed at changing who wins. Pratt's giving is symmetrical: both Australian majors, every cycle, plus the incumbent American president. She is trying to select the government. He is making sure he can work with any of them. Two similar fortunes, two opposite theories of political money, and a friendship that shows the strategies are chosen, not inherited.
The philanthropist
Pratt's giving is not only political. The Pratt Foundation, established by Jeanne and Richard Pratt in 1978, describes itself as one of the largest private sources of philanthropy in Australia; its grants have ranged as widely as the environmental group The Wilderness Society. Anthony Pratt has pledged to give away $1 billion through the Foundation in his lifetime. The Foundation's own statement describes a "central commitment to the Australian Jewish community, Israel, and world Jewry" continuing alongside its broader social investment programs. As with every entry on this site, we record what the organisation says about itself and let readers weigh it.
In fairness
The counterweights, stated plainly. Everything above is disclosed and lawful; most of it comes straight from AEC and FEC filings. Visy and Pratt Industries employ thousands of people in Australia and the United States, and the American investment pledges are real factories and real jobs, whoever cuts the ribbon. Pratt's answer to all of this has always been the manufacturer's case: he backs governments that back manufacturing, and says so in public, to every administration alike. Take that as read.
The question that remains
An insurance policy only makes sense if the risk is real. Pratt's money says he believes access to government, any government, is worth millions of dollars a year, every year, on two continents. The question his ledger leaves open is the one worth asking of every entry in our donations database. If access bought nothing, why would the most methodical businesspeople in the country keep paying for it?
Follow the disclosures yourself in the Party donations tab, where Pratt Holdings' giving is listed as disclosed to the AEC, alongside the separately counted Kin Group. For the other half of the donor playbook, read The selection play: why Gina Rinehart is now backing One Nation. Every figure above is drawn from public disclosures and reputable reporting, linked in-line; where a claim rests on reporting of allegations, it is labelled as such.