“That is something I’d be really interested in it if I was a little bit older,” he said to Mr Borsak in a passing conversation about the state director role. "I didn't think anything of it. I didn’t think I was good enough for it or had the confidence for it.” The next morning he had the job. "I threw myself into it. Looking back on it, I was full of blind confidence and ignorance,” he said. "I didn’t know too much about management, about campaigning, organising your workflow, all the sort of stuff that has to go into a business and a campaign."

A lot has changed in four years. Now 25, Mr Despotoski is coordinating the Shooters' most ambitious election campaign to date from a small office shed in Castle Hill - ironically the safest Liberal party seat in the state. "When people think Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, they think redneck, fat, old white people," Mr Despotoski said. "But it couldn’t be further from the truth. “It’s no longer an old, white man party. In fact, a lot of our demographic is young people." Age went against the longest-serving Shooters MP Robert Brown, who was this week dumped as the party's lead candidate for the upper house in favour of Mark Banasiak, a 37-year-old teacher and chairman of the Federation of Hunting Clubs.

Mr Despotoski, who describes himself as "more of a fisher than a hunter", is part of this generational shift. He wasn't even alive when the Shooters Party was founded in 1992 with the single ambition of relaxing NSW firearm laws. Born in Macedonia, he moved with his family to Queanbeyan, near Canberra, when he was three-years-old, and has lived in Sydney since he was 10. It was on his urging that the Shooters took up the issue of Sydney's lockout laws last year, with Mr Borsak sponsoring a private members' bill calling for the law's repeal. In the heightened pre-election anxiety gripping Macquarie Street, no one in Labor or Coalition ranks is prepared to give Mr Despotoski any free kicks.

One political operative, however, conceded he was a force to be reckoned with. "What he has done with the party is really impressive," the source said. "He's basically the reason why the Shooters are in the game at all." At the state election next month, Shooters candidates will contest at least 22 seats, most of them in the bush. At the last election, they only targeted the upper house. “We want to, in the long term, replace the Nationals in the bush. They are our direct competitors,” Mr Despotoski said. "In the short to medium term - so maybe in the next two or three election cycles - I see us becoming as big as the Greens. A 10 per cent party, with a couple of people in the lower house and couple of people in the upper house."

It's a bold call - one certain to irritate the party's critics, especially those in National Party ranks. But it would be foolish to dismiss this as pure braggadocio. On his watch, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party - as it has been called since 2016 when it added "farmers" to its remit - has launched an assault on the Nationals with a degree of success that has caught even the Shooters by surprise. "A lot of people would say we’re just pissing in the wind with that. But that’s ok," Mr Despotoski says. "I would’ve said we were pissing in the wind if we thought we could get Orange.” Phil Donato became the party's first ever lower house MP when, in a shock victory, he ended the Nationals 70-year reign in Orange at a 2016 byelection. “It was the biggest moment in our party’s history. It was the first time we had ever seriously run a lower house campaign," Mr Despotoski said.

A year later, at a byelection in October 2017, the Shooters almost captured Murray in the state's far south western corner, whittling the Nationals' 22 per cent margin down to 3 per cent. At the Cootamundra byelection, held on the same day, the Shooters' candidate won almost a quarter of the primary vote. It was at this point, Mr Despotoski said, that the party's senior ranks took stock. "We were thinking 'there’s something going on here'. This isn’t just an off-the-cuff thing. There’s a pattern developing here. People are actively searching for a new viable alternative.” The Shooters are hopeful of holding Orange at the election, and are again expected to threaten the Nationals in Murray. But the party also has its sights fixed on the western NSW seat of Barwon - where the National Party has been shaken by mass fish kills along the Murray-Darling river system.

There are clear signs the Berejiklian government is rattled. This week Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Treasurer Dominic Perrottet redoubled their offensive in the media, repeating their attack-lines against the Shooters as a "dangerous" party that "wants to give guns to 10-year-olds". Mr Despotoski concedes it is "smart politics on their part", but insists the party abandoned that position several years ago. "[W]e wanted to streamline the laws that allow 10-year-olds and older, under strict adult supervision, to learn how to safely operate a firearm," Mr Despotoski said.

"We abandoned that. No flavour for it. The electorate didn’t want it. And that’s it. Now we just believe in the status quo, which is 12-year-olds and over." Nonetheless, the government's attacks feed into a perception of the party as fringe-dwelling, gun-toting radicals, which Mr Despotoski says he wants to change. The party’s critics argue it is a perception with a solid footing in reality, and point to photos of Mr Borsak posing next to a dead elephant, which he later boasted to parliament he had shot and then eaten, as well as comments he made in 2013 urging Americans to resist adopting Australia’s “stupid” gun control laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. For his part, Mr Despotoski says the party’s campaigns against forced council amalgamations and the greyhounds ban, and its opposition to the relocation of Sydney’s Powerhouse museum are evidence of the party’s genuine push into the policy mainstream. "Gone are the days where it was all about shooting, shooting, shooting," he said.