Katerina Angelopoulos, a long standing member of the ALP in the seat of Wills, outside the Pantheon Cafe in Brunswick. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer His departure after 19 years comes at a difficult time for the ALP, with Malcolm Turnbull in a dreamy honeymoon period, and the Victorian party in turmoil over branch-stacking. While Labor holds government in Victoria, Bill Shorten's popularity rating is among the lowest ever recorded by a federal Opposition Leader. Factional infighting over the failure of the Victorian party to address widespread membership rorting – including by Shorten's own lieutenants – has left many among the party faithful despairing. If, as Angelopoulos fears, the ALP under Shorten delivers a factional crony as the candidate for Wills – unpopular among its own members much less in a restless constituency beyond – local Labor will be further dispirited and the Liberals and Greens emboldened.

11 Lever Street, Coburg, the postal address of 30 ALP members. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer "The new candidate for Wills must be a person other than a branch-stacker or a lawyer, and they must be someone who knows the community well," Angelopoulos says. Nominations for the Wills preselection close next week, ahead of ballots in January to finalise the result. The Wills vote is being viewed by locals as a test of the party's policies and internal health. It is far from clear that it will pass. Like Game of Thrones, the TV series that Labor's factional bosses so love to cite, outcomes are anything but certain in the Game of Wills. If it is not already, a walk along the length of Sydney Road from the old Pentridge Prison to Parkville should be a major Victorian tourist attraction. It is a buzzing embodiment of multicultural Melbourne full of middle eastern clothes and colours, tastes and smells, and a sprinkling of remaining Italian and Greek influence – including Angelopoulos' favourite cake shop, the Pantheon, near the intersection with Blyth Street.

An observant regular visitor would also notice a northward push up Sydney Rd by more Anglo-ish young Australians; cafe by cafe, boutique by boutique, Mediterranean migrants are making way for Green-inclined hipsters. At its best, Labor in Wills reflects this rich diversity. Almost 1200 ALP members live in the electorate, one of largest Labor memberships in Victoria's federal seats. Some of the local branches are organised by ethnicity: the Anstey Greek branch, the Brunswick North Italian branch, the Brunswick West Arabic branch. Meanwhile, the Coburg South branch is predominantly Kurdish and Coburg North basically one large Lebanese family. Like Sydney Road, the large Brunswick branch in the south of the electorate is more Anglo-Celtic. It includes big names like former party president Barry Jones, and a good few of the bright young things you might find in the cafes at the southern end of Sydney Road. Wills has long been a hotbed of activism in the best of Labor tradition. In the past, the old dominant factions fought pitched Cold War battles overlaid by waves of immigration and a kaleidoscope of ethnic groupings seeking political influence both locally and in foreign policy.

Such politics was not always done by the rules, but in Wills it was earthy, heartfelt and effective. Yet so too does Wills reflect the worst of Labor, in particular the stifling control of the party's factional bosses. As real rank and file involvement diminishes – as it has in the other parties, unions, mainstream churches and the like – that power of factional leaders is ever greater. In the ALP, and in Victoria Labor in particular, this problem seems particularly acute. The end of ideology has left factions increasingly splintered and preoccupied with the spoils, rather than ideas, of politics. Numbers are paramount in winning seats, jobs and party positions. Soon after his election as Labor leader, Bill Shorten promised major party reform and a reduction of the disproportionate power held by union/factional chiefs. But in 2014, Tony Abbott's slump in the opinion polls distracted Shorten. Instead of cleaning out his own party he focused on victory over a dysfunctional, conservative government.

Turnbull's ascendancy will almost certainly deny Shorten victory, but also leave him having failed to deliver the internal reform he promised. That failure is now in stark relief as Victorian Labor grapples with the high-profile Wills pre-selection while in turmoil over branch-stacking. Currently, the party's two dominant factions, the ShortCons (named after Shorten and right-wing hard man Stephen Conroy) and the left group led by veteran party boss Kim Carr, are in a "stability" deal under which they allocate seats. Ostensibly, the pact minimises the traditional factional bloodletting over preselections. Wills is a right-faction seat. But at the local level, and especially in preselection for plum territory like Wills, the factions themselves are splintered and tend to engage in bitter sub-factional war. In such cases, Shorten, Conroy and Shorten's erstwhile buddy and frontbench colleague David Feeney, often find themselves at odds with each other. Preselection is a two-stage process, with half the vote from a central panel elected by state conference and unions, the other half from a ballot of local members. Local numbers are important in both the selection of state conference delegates and the preselection ballots.

This is where the ethnic groupings – and branch-stacking – come in. Talk to the power brokers from any of these sub-groups and they will detail each others' numbers in any seat. While they will deny it publicly, their estimates are based largely on ethnicity and "stacks". Conroy's man in the Wills race, and the current frontrunner, is Andrews government adviser Mehmet Tillem. In Labor circles Turkish-born Tillem is regarded as an archetypal factional henchman, renowned for trading in numbers and political patronage. His numbers are based on three branches to the north of the electorate – Moreland, Fawkner and Coburg North – and on groupings of Turks, Lebanese and Italians. The latter has been controversial because his local grouping has included Moreland councillor Michael Teti, who was expelled from the party in 2015 over his connection to alleged Mafia figures. Today The Age also reveals how in the case of Coburg North, almost the entire branch of 41 people claim their postal address as the same one of two neighbouring houses owned by one family of Lebanese background in Lever St, Coburg. North Coburg branch secretary Hashem Ouaida acknowledges the branch is made up of the Ouaida family or friends and acquaintances, but insists that every member pays their own dues. "Most of the members are part of the Ouaida family," he said.

They use common postal addresses, he said, because as part of their culture every membership would go through the senior member of the family, who was his late father. Senator David Feeney holds the neighbouring Northcote/Preston-based seat of Batman and is renowned for his appetite for factional power and intrigue. In Wills he has the single largest battalion of Labor Right foot soldiers. Long associated with the disgraced Health Services Union and embattled former leader Kathy Jackson, Feeney is now in an alliance with the conservative, Catholic-dominated, shop assistants' union. On the ground in the Wills he counts among his troops a Kurdish group including numbers man, Enver Erdogan. Erdogan shifted his allegiance from the Socialist Left faction to Feeney's group after being defeated for preselection for the state seat of Brunswick in 2009, by now Victorian gaming minister, Jane Garrett. The shift also coincided with Erdogan's employment by legal firm Maurice Blackburn, where Feeney's wife Liberty Sanger is a principal and practice group leader. Feeney also counts among his numbers Coburg market chief and Lebanese Christian, Milad El-Halabi. In 2010, The Sunday Age reported El-Halabi's alleged involvement in a takeover bid for the Merri Community Health Service, where entire Lebanese families signed up, some without their knowledge and with their signatures forged. At the time El-Halabi's son Johnny was working for Feeney.

Shorten's own group, based on the Australian Workers' Union and plumbers' union, is not strong on the ground in Wills. But it does count among its numbers the Brunswick West (Arabic) branch linked to controversial warlord, David Asmar. More than 20 members of that branch were signed up as part of a massive branch-stacking operation based on the use of Visa gift cards and first revealed by The Sunday Age in October. Such widespread use of gift cards for branch-stacking, including by the Shorten-aligned plumbers' union, triggered a party inquiry (overseen controversially by Shorten loyalist Garth Head) that was finalised this week. In an effective whitewashing of the gift card scandal, Garth Head and fellow inquisitor Liz Beattie (a Carr Left winger) overlooked the stacking by Asmar's and the plumbers' union, instead largely focusing on credit card abuses by low-ranking minions. Yet even a probe engineered to hide abuses will lead to hundreds of expulsions. Such is the extent of the branch-stacking problem. Branch-stacking, the stackers will always say, is a subjective thing, hard to define and pin down. But when members do not pay their dues – many of the "stacks" don't know who pays – and have no real interest in policy or party matters, their votes and influence undermine the work of real members. The reality is a good many of the 1200 members in Wills are indeed stacks. Labor insiders from across the factions agree the real membership of Wills is somewhere between 40 per cent and 60 per cent. Angelopoulos says the proportion of stacks is "high" in her electorate.

One federal MP in another Labor stronghold recently conceded to The Age that more than half the members in his own electorate were either Right or Left wing stacks. Like many ALP members in Wills, Kelvin Thomson fears the present row over branch-stacking will provide the trigger for the party's national executive to intervene and appoint its own candidate. He acknowledges "irregularities" among Wills memberships but argues that a local ballot is still more democratic, and favourable, than preselection decided by a handful of national power brokers. "I would like to see candidates engage in one or more forums where they can be quizzed on a range of issues so ALP members to get an opportunity to assess their suitability as Labor candidate for Wills," Thomson told The Saturday Age. But in the likelihood that locals do get a say in Wills, Shorten and Feeney still have the problem of finding a credible candidate to run against Tillem and the other numbers men who fancy a seat in parliament.

Firming as a possible starter is Shorten staffer, Anna-Maria Arabia. Although not well known she ticks a series of boxes including her gender, age (40ish), her name, her Italian background and her qualifications as a scientist (therefore not a union leader or lawyer). Nor is she known as a factional player, having also worked for Shorten's leadership rival in 2013, NSW Left faction leader Anthony Albanese. If Shorten defies his factional ally Conroy, and succeeds in getting a genuine political talent preselected in Wills (a woman in particular) some party members will at least will be able to hail the preselection as a victory over the warlords. However, a deeper problem remains in a party dominated by backroom bovver boys, including a coterie of trade union leaders. Kelvin Thomson is sitting on a primary vote of 45 per cent. When he retires next year he will take with him a personal following worth possibly 5 per cent. Already party insiders accept that the state seat of Brunswick – most of which is the southern part of Wills – is likely to fall to the Greens at the next election. Labor needs to smarten up or face the real prospect of losing once safe seats like Wills. This is an especially real threat if, as he has flagged, the Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger opts to preference the Greens ahead of Labor.

"The party needs to come clean and refuse to support people who have numbers through branch-stacking," Angelopoulos says. "It makes demands of the membership and expects you to pay up every year, but it is taking those members for granted." Thousands of new young Wills voters are swarming into the apartment towers growing fast like summer tomatoes on the Brunswick and Coburg skylines. Such voters would have been been ripe for the picking by the ALP 40 years ago. In 2015 they can certainly not be taken for granted.