 It was revealed that he was suffering from pancreatitis, a condition which had dogged him through his time as leader, but after repeatedly failing to reappear in public and after nearly a month of questions as to his whereabouts, he announced his resignation from politics on 18 January, thus creating the need for a by-election in his seat of Werriwa.The local branches in and around Werriwa had been the scene of major branch-stacking battles throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, due largely to preselection battles over the state seat of Liverpool, and as such, Labor's Werriwa Federal Electorate Council, which would normally select the candidate, had been "put on ice" since 2003.As a result, the party's left and right factions agreed to hold a ballot among the state's 34-member administrative committee to select the candidate.