A review of the Victorian Greens’ torrid 2018 state election campaign – in which the minor party aimed for 11 seats but won just four – has blamed the poor result on an ill-prepared and fractured campaign, a hostile media and Labor’s ruthless exploitation of scandals involving its candidates.

One MP who lost her seat, Samantha Dunn, has since quit the party in acrimony, accusing the party of being "distracted by populism, self interest, power, ego, narcissism [and] megalomania".

The party sought to retain the lower house seats of Melbourne, Prahran and Northcote and win Richmond and Brunswick, but lost Northcote and could not win Richmond.

In Northcote, Labor "maliciously" targeted Greens MP Lidia Thorpe, the review found, while the Greens’ own aggressive campaign against Planning Minister Richard Wynne in Richmond failed to sway voters and was undermined by some members' hostility towards the party’s own candidate, Kathleen Maltzahn.

Membership numbers in the Greens fell by a third in the 21 months to December, a time in which the party was wracked by internal war in its biggest branch in Darebin.