English-born Ray Goodlass was a young teacher looking for a bit of adventure when he decided to come to Australia on a working holiday.

That two years has turned out to be a lot longer for the retired university lecturer and former trade union organiser, who has now lived in Wagga for more than 40 years and served on Wagga City Council, at one time, as deputy mayor.

After standing for The Greens in the byelection in 2018, Mr Goodlass is back for the party at the general election.

"I haven't stopped working with The Greens, but there was time when Ros Prangnell and Kevin Poynter were candidates, so I really only came back last year," he said.

"I did stand around 2010 and then I had quite a bit of time off, and then I came back for the byelection last year and this election specifically because I wanted to work with David Shoebridge.

"He's a man I greatly admire, and I thought it would be great to work with David as the top of our upper house ticket.

"He came down and launched our Power NSW policy, which is a plan by 2030 to have 100 per cent renewable for all electricity needs and it would be all generated and delivered along the wires and retailed all in public ownership, and that would make it a hell of a lot cheaper.

"That was one of my campaign points during the byelection: We could reduce electricity prices considerably by getting ownership back into public hands.

"I do enjoy campaigning. There is a certain adrenalin rush that goes along with it."

Campaigning in the election is a long way from Mr Goodlass's early days in Australia, when he was keen to simply see more of the world.

"I'm a 10-pound Pom. I came on a two-year working holiday - I thought - as a teacher with the department. They were advertising heavily in England. I didn't really want to settle down. I'd only just graduated, so I thought 'oh yeah, I'll go to Australia and if I don't like it, I can come back after two years'.

"What kept me here, I think, was Gough Whitlam, and the 1972 election. It didn't only make the money flow into things like education, but it was a mindset. It was completely different: 'We can do stuff', and the stuff was all progressive.

'I just developed an interest in focusing my teaching career into drama. I eventually became the first full-time drama teacher in the NSW system.

"That would have been about 1975 and there was money available for in-service courses and I eventually moved - after I got it established in my school - to what was the Department of Education's speech and drama branch as an adviser to teachers.

"After about three years of that, I came here to what is is now Charles Sturt University."

In his four decades in Wagga, Mr Goodlass, 73, has seen a lot of change.

"It's becomes incredibly diverse. The population is no longer white bread, if you like, it's multi-grain. It really is," he said.

"I put that partly down to the university, I put it partly down to the fact we are a refugee resettlement city and the Wagga Multicultural Council in helping them and also, I think, the medical fraternity because when I look at Wagga Base Hospital and Calvary, every house around them is a specialist's office, so that must have had an amazing impact as well on the community, not just in the services that are available, but in the people who come to provide those services: A lot of them are foreign-born doctors.

"It's no longer just the army, the air force and the farming community."

For Mr Goodlass, the stand-out issue in this election is climate change.

"I think people are realising that if the feds won't do it, the states must, like in America," he said.

"Another thing that's important to me is rescuing the environment. I don't know if you've noticed, but something I started to notice is that when you go outside now, you're not surrounded by a cloud of flies. We're killing the insects.

"It's very noticeable. I can open my balcony door and leave it open, and nothing comes in. That's a very visible sign that we are destroying the natural environment.

"That's made this election very different to the byelection, where the major parties were doing a massive exercise in pork-barreling."

Mr Goodlass is also pushing for what he calls the proper provisioning of public services.

"Look, we built this wonderful new base hospital. They can't staff it, they're outsourcing surgery," he said.

"In schools, teachers are buying the consumables themselves. School buildings are run down, class sizes are too big, teachers are harassed. TAFE and universities must be free."

Adrian Wintle, a former theatre critic for The Daily Advertiser, has known Mr Goodlass for many years.

"During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a major force in directing theatre for the Riverina College of Advanced Education and Riverina Murray Institute of Higher Education [the forerunners to the Wagga campus of Charles Sturt University]," Mr Wintle said.

"He was particularly bold in his choice of material."

Mr Wintle also recalls the "tremendous energy" Mr Goodlass brought to any project he was undertaking.