By Alexandra Smith State Politics
THE former deputy premier Carmel Tebbutt has been accused of breaching electoral laws after her campaign team accepted a donation from a social media company to run her ''Keep Carmel'' Twitter campaign during the election.
Brad Keeling, a former OneTel director and now head of strategy and development at One Small Planet, ran the KeepCarmel account, tweeting more than 300 times from early February until election day.
Ms Tebbutt's campaign team did not pay for the service and Labor insists it was below the cap for in-kind donations.
Under the donations laws, donations are capped at $2000 for a candidate, $5000 to a political party and $1000 for in-kind donations such as advertising.
But the Greens maintain that there was no way the service provided to Ms Tebbutt could have cost less than $1000 and they have referred the matter to the NSW Electoral Funding Authority.
''If One Small Planet was not paid then the work behind the tweets was a donation and Labor's Marrickville campaign has broken the law designed to create fairer elections,'' the Greens MP John Kaye said.
''Social media such as Twitter and Facebook are not exempt because they are new. Whether it's an advertisement in a newspaper or 368 tweets, the value of donations in kind cannot exceed the legal limits.''
A NSW Labor spokesman said: ''The Marrickville campaign received a donation of services from Brad Keeling estimated at no more than $1000, and will disclose this amount to the NSW Election Funding Authority.''
A case study of the campaign on the One Small World website said the company offered its services to Ms Tebbutt and the Balmain MP Verity Firth, both of whom were under threat from the Greens. The Greens won Balmain.