Amid huge swings to Daniel Andrews’ government, the Greens could see party room cut in half when parliament returns

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Greens have blamed “backroom preference deals” and attacks from Labor for a disappointing showing in Victoria’s state election, as the party faced the prospect of seeing its party room cut in half when parliament returns.

Amid huge swings to Daniel Andrews’ Labor government throughout suburban Melbourne, the Greens appeared certain to lose the inner-city seat of Northcote, held by the state’s first lower house indigenous MP, Lidia Thorpe, and suffered a blowout in nearby Richmond.

The inner northern seat of Brunswick, where the party was hot favourite, remains on a knife edge, and the Greens are likely to see the five-member-strong upper house contingent whittled down to as few as one. The party looks likely to hold Melbourne and is in front in Prahran, which is too close to call.

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Statewide, the Greens suffered a 1.6% swing in the lower house, according to the count on Sunday, a result that followed a campaign dogged by scandals over the personal background of some candidates.

With most believing Labor faced the possibility of minority government, the party had pitched itself as potential kingmakers in a hung parliament.

Greens leader Samantha Ratnam on Sunday claimed the party’s vote had held up “against huge swings toward Labor”, which showed “the strength of our campaign and the platform we put forward”.

“If Dan Andrews was truly committed to a progressive state, he should have spent less time attacking the Greens and more time worrying about the backroom deals that have the potential to see a host of right wing MPs controlling the agenda in the upper house,” she said.

Throughout the campaign, the Greens accused Labor of preferencing right wing minor parties such as the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers in the Western Metropolitan region, where the Greens’ Huong Truong was unlikely to be returned.

The Greens campaign was thrown into disarray after its Footscray candidate, Angus McAlpine, was revealed to have rapped misogynistic lyrics about date rape.

The party declined to disendorse McAlpine, prompting Labor to pounce, with the premier accusing the Greens of a “toxic culture” problem and Labor running negative ads on social media throughout the inner city. In the dying days of the campaign, the party stood down another candidate accused of sexual misconduct.

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Nick Economou, a Monash University political expert, said the party had not had a “bad election” but was the victim of inflated expectations.

The party also “didn’t get a chance to talk about policy”, as it defended itself “against accusations they have a ‘toxic culture’, which was a Labor line”, Economou said.

The party was not conceding Northcote, but were 2000 votes behind on the two-party count on Sunday.

“They made the member for Northcote something of a really important symbolic member of their team,” Economou said. “The flipside of that is if they lose that person, it’s a devastating result.

“The really disappointing seat for the Greens would have to be Richmond because the Liberal party did not run a candidate there and yet that doesn’t seem to have had an effect.”

Thorpe’s campaign in Northcote was thrown into disarray after the Herald Sun published tweets belonging to a staff member, Paul McMillan, which the paper said contained references to “porn, fat fetishes and misogynistic slurs”.

McMillan said the tweets were satirical and offered to resign. On Sunday, he said in a tweet: “As I’d been planning for months, I cancelled my greens membership this morning. Those who know me know I have been a critic of the party’s mishandling of sexual assault cases, both in private and via this account. It absolutely guts me that I’m now a poster boy for these problems.”

mum jeans (@maxuthink) What compounds my pain is knowing I contributed to Lidia’s electoral loss, the loss to Victoria of a representative who understands what it is to grow up in public housing, to survive family violence, to live in this society as an Aboriginal woman, an outsider on her own country

The preselection of Kathleen Maltzahn in Richmond, who suffered a big loss to the planning minister, Richard Wynne, angered Greens members due to her life’s work advocating the so-called Nordic model on sex work, at odds with party policy.

The analyst Kevin Bonham said it was possible the Greens could end up with only one upper house seat, while Economou agreed the party could only be guaranteed one seat, which belongs to Ratnam, with complex preference flows to determine its fate elsewhere.