Every happy labor party is the same, but every unhappy labor party is unhappy in its own way. That would appear to be the case of the branch of the Australian Labor Party (Labor hereafter), centered on Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state, which is currently in uproar over the exposure of widespread dirty factional warfare, in pursuit of control of first the state party and then the federal party as a whole.

There’s nothing strange about the practice in general, but what many find unusual in this case is how it has gone down this time — the amassing of enormous power by one man, a junior minister and member of Victoria’s somnolent upper house, Adem Somyurek.

Somyurek, who was sacked from the state cabinet and expelled from the Labor Party this week, was a leader of a group called the “Mods” (or “Moderates”). For the past several years, the Mods have been taking over suburban branches of Labor in Melbourne, using networks drawing on the city’s Turkish-Australian, Lebanese-Australian, and Indian-Australian communities. Somyurek and his officers were caught on concealed video forging signatures and paying for others’ memberships, and that was enough to get him removed. Without the surveillance — underway for months before it was revealed by a media investigation, working with Labor insiders — the Mods’ takeover of dozens of branches (guaranteeing power to appoint the state executive) would have continued unabated.