The South Australian Liberal Party has withdrawn an ad minutes before polls closed in a key by-election after a bizarre eleventh-hour intervention by the electoral commission left both sides of politics perplexed.
The Electoral Commission of SA published a public post on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday afternoon, tagging the SA Liberal Party account and asking the account holder to get in touch after the Labor Party made a complaint about a breach of campaign rules.
The commission has made no further clarification about the nature of the complaint, nor its communication with the Liberals.
The tweet came less than 24 hours before polls were set to open for a state by-election in the seat of Dunstan in Adelaide's inner east.
A spokesperson told AAP the commission was not in a position to provide a statement as the complaint was still being investigated and was not yet finalised.
But in a tweet posted less than an hour before polls closed on Saturday, the Liberal Party account confirmed the electoral commissioner found it posted material in breach of the electoral act.
The ad in question contained the "inaccurate and misleading" claim that "SA Labor’s new GP patient tax is bad news for our health system and your hip pocket".
"I withdraw the above statement and advise that SA Labor have not introduced a new GP patient tax," the Liberal Party post said.
The government copped a barrage of criticism during the campaign for not intervening to stop a legal reinterpretation that meant GPs employed in large clinics would be liable to payroll tax.
While complaints about campaign materials were not unusual, what was "utterly remarkable" was that the commission had to publicly tweet at the Liberal Party to get a response, Premier Peter Malinauskas said.
"As far as I know, the electoral commission would have only made that tweet publicly because they weren't able to get the Liberal Party to respond," Mr Malinauskas told reporters earlier on Saturday.
Opposition Leader David Speirs was at a loss as to why the commission felt the need to contact the party publicly.
"The Liberal Party is pretty easy to get in touch with," he said.
"The tweet was a bit unusual, but that's the electoral commissioner's prerogative to communicate into the public domain and we'll await a determination in due course."
Dunstan voters will be relieved to escape a repeat of the 1979 election result, when the court of disputed returns sent them back to the polls over another Liberal Party advertisement.
