Cheryl Hammer didn’t think she’d be back on the campaign trail.
Following the 2018 Victorian election campaign, while she was buoyed by the results, she felt she’d had her shot.
But four years later, here she is, once again vying to become the next Member for Shepparton.
“We've had a very different four years to the four years that led up to the last campaign,” Ms Hammer, a businesswoman, farmer and former journalist, said.
“I did have to really think about it, but I felt really strongly in the end about standing.”
The treatment of Victorians during the pandemic was the thing that swung Ms Hammer into action, especially as the pandemic dragged into a second year and lockdowns continued.
“We've been locked up, locked out, locked in ... after years rolled on, not months, I could really see the handling was more about the control and the power of the state rather than considering people's business situations, their mental health situations.
“I've seen small businesses close. I was a small business owner myself who didn't receive any of the funding.”
Ms Hammer felt Shepparton had been left out in the cold over the past four years and had been ignored by the Labor Government.
“I'm not seeing all the positives that have been rolled out over the last four years,” she said.
“I feel really strongly that another four years under a Labor government and an independent member who votes with Labor or is aligned with Labour won't be good for us at all.”
The polls don’t indicate that change of government is coming. They’ve been wrong before, notably at the 2016 Federal Election, but Labor currently holds a comfortable lead, making it more likely Ms Hammer would be elected into Opposition instead of government.
She still thinks a member in Opposition will be better to hold a fourth term of a Labor government to account than an independent.
"I'm really trying not to think about being in opposition. I really tried to be very, very positive about winning government,“ she said.
“I think it's going to be a lot closer than the polls are saying.”
Ms Hammer brushed aside concerns the seat of Shepparton could become a safe conservative seat again, as it was for nearly five decades before Ms Sheed was elected in 2014, and potentially be taken for granted by the Coalition.
She said the past eight years had proven the seat wasn’t safe at a state or federal level.
Ms Hammer has been running a three-legged race of sorts with Nationals candidate Kim O’Keeffe, attending the same funding announcements and having — largely — the same policies.
“Our differences are our backgrounds and our lived experience,” she said, citing herself as the only farmer of the three major candidates running.
“'I’m not just saying ‘I want to represent you’. I'm actually saying I live this every day and I think I've got to really, you know, I have a really intimate knowledge of what you're going through.”
The two issues Ms Hammer said most people talked to her about were education and roads.
Roads is a theme uniting all three candidates, who say governments need to be investing more money into maintaining and upgrading the roads we have and building new ones, with the Coalition putting $260 million forward for stage one of the Shepparton Bypass should it win the election.
Education is a more divisive issue. Ms Hammer sat through what she calls the “lack of consultation” over the amalgamation of four schools into the Greater Shepparton Secondary College.
She said it was something she didn’t agree with and wanted to revisit to provide “choice” for students and parents who might not fit in at the GSSC.
She was also confused about how the community was told the old campuses would be too expensive to refurbish for a new school, only for Verney Rd School to move on to the site.
Ms Hammer said while it was a “very good scenario” for the school, what the government told the community “didn’t stack up”.
“If we’re elected, there definitely will be a second secondary school somewhere in Greater Shepparton ... I strongly believe Mooroopna needs a school,” Ms Hammer said.
Ms Hammer said she didn’t think opening another school would send Greater Shepparton on a path back to the same issues that plagued the four previous schools — funding and resources split across campuses and less choice of subjects.
She said the “neglect” was partly due to being unable to retain staff and attract people to the schools.
She didn’t have an answer for how that neglect started under Coalition members and could have been nipped in the bud decades ago, before drastic changes were seemingly the only option.
“It’s a good question. Why wasn’t it dealt with then? Sometimes it has to get to this situation where the community is looking at education,” she said.
“This is not a smear campaign, about the school that we have at the moment. It's the only school we've got, so it's got to work for the students that are going there.”