As political candidates' jobs go, alpaca shearer has to be one of the more unusual.
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Yet that's how Jamie Dixon, the Greens candidate for Whitlam made a crust for around two decades.
"My mum and dad had them from when I was about 15 years old and that's how I got into it," Mr Dixon said.
"I worked at a farm up in Berrima for about three years jackarooing as much as anything. From there I ended up going around the world 10 months of the year shearing alpacas. In Australia, it was all the way from Rockhampton down to Adelaide."
But spending 10 months of the year away isn't ideal when you've got a family, so Mr Dixon has cut that back and is now studying psychology at the University of Wollongong.
"I'll put [shearing] on the back burner but I'm keen not to give it away," he said. "It's very much a part of my identity so I'm hanging onto it."
Some voters may recognise Mr Dixon from previous campaigns. He reckons this federal campaign was his sixth election across all three levels of government - local, state and federal.
He said what kept drawing him back to run for the Greens time and time again was a belief in their policies and a hope that he can get people to reengage with the issues.
"People have become very disconnected from politics," he said.
"I think they feel very disempowered and very removed from the decision-making process.
"That doesn't have to be the case and I'm trying desperately to hope they realise that they can actually initiate change."
Mr Dixon has been a member of the Greens since 2016 but had become politically engaged before then, thanks to his wife.
"I probably been politically engaged for about five or six years before that, mainly through the urging of my wife who is always been very aware, very motivated to speak out on issues that she felt were in dire need of addressing," he said.
"I had been a member of the Democrats prior to that but found that wasn't going to be a way forward.
"I think the Greens policies certainly aligned a lot closer to my personal beliefs and so it wasn't a hard decision to change parties to a better option."
While Mr Dixon said the Greens have a range of policies, he knows plenty of voters saw them as a mono-policy party just focused on the environment.
"We certainly appreciate that people are not willing to vote for a party that will only service one part of their needs without all the others," he said.
"So the Greens actually have 54 separate policy areas and I think just half a dozen of them are certainly climate change and environment-orientated."
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