South Australia’s Labor tacticians are in panic. With an election just six weeks, the state’s Attorney-General, the irascible Michael Atkinson, hit the headlines in a way that could make an experienced campaigner crawl into the oven and turn on the gas. Atkinson was derailing four years of work by Premier Mike Rann and his team to be comfortably returned on March 20.

On  March 5 last year, Atkinson introduced legislation to change the SA Electoral Act.

These were very contentious changes. First, Atkinson moved to increase the minimum number of members a political party needs to be registered, and therefore to be capable of effective electioneering. That was to destroy single-issue community groups and the struggling Democrats.

The second change was to outlaw election posters on Stobie poles. That was to destroy low-cost campaigning by independents and advantage the cashed-up major parties, and SA Labor is the most cashed-up of all.

Third was to force voters to put their date of birth on the electoral roll, so an MP knows when to send the birthday card, and fourthly the changes made it illegal to say anything political in an election campaign on any medium — blog, news site, Twitter, Facebook, even text messages — without full disclosure of your name and postcode address.

Media organisations had to keep your real name and address on file for six months after the election. The Electoral Commissioner could force a news organisation to hand over this information on pain of a $5000 fine.

Parliament went nuts. Even in the Lower House the Government amended its own Bill to water it down a little. When the Bill arrived in the Upper House the government leader, Paul Holloway, sensing trouble, assured the House that full disclosure of names and addresses “applies to the internet to electronic versions of a journal rather than any electronic publication on the internet”.

Holloway told MPs the government had addressed concerns that it would also cover “personal web pages and social networking sites and the internet publication of Twitter”.

On that basis, the Opposition and Greens MP Mark Parnell passed that part of the Bill, and on the insistence of the Liberal Opposition, election posters on Stobie poles would not be banned until after this election.

But after Parliament agreed to these changes, with amendments, Atkinson said the new Act actually does include blogs, Twitter and comments to news sites such as Crikey.

There was outrage. “Parliament has been misled,” shadow Attorney-General Vickie Chapman complained yesterday.

Last night Atkinson recanted. He won’t impose the law, he said.

He — the state’s chief law officer — then told South Australians they could break state law, a law he said this morning he would repeal after the election.

Has the man flipped? Here’s a candidate up for election, his fate in the hands of the voters in the electorate of Croydon, telling electoral commissioner Kay Mousley not to enforce the law.

He said voters who wrote or blogged anonymously would be immune from prosecution because he would back-date the law after the election to remove the penalty.

Mick of Brompton, what if you’re not a member of Parliament after the election? What if you’re not Attorney? What then, Mick Atkinson of postcode 5007?

Chapman this morning demanded Atkinson change the mandatory identity disclosure law right now or hand in his resignation as Attorney-General.

Unless he does that, she said, Premier Mike Rann should sack him immediately.

“Mr Atkinson has the power to repeal the Electoral Act by regulation today,”  Chapman said, “otherwise it will still be illegal to use pseudonyms on political blogs, Twitters or comments to news sites.”

Meanwhile, in the bizarre world that is SA politics, and the smaller world that is Atkinson’s brain, people can now break the law because it will be legal retrospectively.