1. Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce was born on 17 April 1967 and is an Australian politician who was the leader of the National Party of Australia from 2016 to 2018 and again from 2021 to 2022.
77 Facts About Barnaby Joyce
1. 2.
Barnaby Joyce was born in Tamworth, New South Wales, and graduated from the University of New England.
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Barnaby Joyce was elected to the Australian Senate at the 2004 federal election, taking office in 2005.
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Barnaby Joyce became the National Party's Senate leader in 2008.
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Barnaby Joyce succeeded Warren Truss as party leader and deputy prime minister in 2016.
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Barnaby Joyce re-entered parliament in December 2017 after winning the New England by-election with a large swing against low-profile opposition.
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Barnaby Joyce was succeeded by Michael McCormack, but remained in the party as a backbencher.
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In June 2021, Barnaby Joyce defeated McCormack in a leadership spill to return as deputy prime minister.
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Barnaby Joyce was born in Tamworth, New South Wales, and raised as one of six children on a sheep and cattle property about 60 kilometres north-east at Danglemah near Woolbrook.
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Barnaby Joyce is the son of Marie and James Barnaby Joyce, who were farmers.
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Barnaby Joyce's father, a World War II veteran, was born in New Zealand and moved to Australia in 1947.
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Joyce's paternal grandfather John P Joyce was a career soldier who participated in the Gallipoli Campaign of World War I, including the landing at Anzac Cove.
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Barnaby Joyce attended Woolbrook Public School, boarded at Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview in Sydney, and graduated from the University of New England Armidale with a Bachelor of Financial Administration in 1989.
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From 1996 to 2001, Barnaby Joyce served in the Royal Queensland Regiment of the Australian Army Reserve.
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Barnaby Joyce's term ran from 1 July 2005 until 30 June 2011.
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Barnaby Joyce was re-elected at the 2010 election as a member of the Liberal National Party, which was formed by a merger of the Queensland divisions of the two non-Labor parties.
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Barnaby Joyce initially expressed misgivings about the government's proposed sale of Telstra, the partially state-owned telecommunications company; nevertheless, Barnaby Joyce voted in favour of the sale a few months later in September 2005.
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In May 2006, after a one-month visit to Antarctica as a member of the External Territories Committee, Barnaby Joyce promoted mining there, banned under the Antarctic Treaty, and stated that other nations did not recognise Australia's 42 per cent claim over Antarctica.
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Barnaby Joyce crossed the floor 28 times and there was a perception that he was a "maverick" and someone not beholden to the Liberals.
20.
In September 2008, after replacing Nigel Scullion as Leader of the Nationals in the Senate, Barnaby Joyce stated that his party in the upper house would no longer necessarily vote with their Liberal counterparts in the upper house, which opened up another possible avenue for the Labor government to pass legislation.
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Barnaby Joyce gained the majority support of the five Nationals senators through Fiona Nash and John Williams.
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Barnaby Joyce remained leader of his party despite the Queensland divisions of the Liberal and National parties merging into the Liberal National Party of Queensland in July 2008.
23.
Barnaby Joyce lasted as Shadow Finance Minister for three months from December 2009 to March 2010 when Abbott, in a reshuffle, moved him to Regional Development, Infrastructure and Water.
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Barnaby Joyce was reappointed to the Shadow Ministry with his portfolio renamed as Regional Development, Local Government and Water as well as remaining as leader of the Nationals in the Senate.
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Barnaby Joyce had expressed interest in transferring to the lower house for some time.
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Barnaby Joyce initially mulled running in Maranoa, which included his home in St George, but this was brought undone when that seat's longtime member, Bruce Scott, refused to stand aside in his favour.
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When Torbay's candidacy imploded, the state Nationals felt chagrin at Barnaby Joyce's renewed interest, even though he had been born in Tamworth and had spent much of his youth on both sides of the Tweed.
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Ultimately Barnaby Joyce faced little opposition in the preselection contest.
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Barnaby Joyce resigned from the Senate on 8 August 2013, and Barry O'Sullivan was selected to replace him in the Senate.
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Barnaby Joyce won the seat of New England with a margin of 21 points.
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Barnaby Joyce was the first person to win back both a Senate seat and a House of Representatives seat previously lost by the Coalition.
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Barnaby Joyce is one of only a handful of people to have represented multiple states in parliament, and the only person to have represented one state in the Senate and a different state in the House of Representatives.
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On 18 September 2013, Barnaby Joyce was sworn in as Minister for Agriculture.
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In September 2015 Barnaby Joyce gained international attention after warning actor Johnny Depp that his two pet dogs would be euthanised if not removed from Australia after being imported illegally.
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At the 2016 election Barnaby Joyce faced a stiff challenge from Tony Windsor, who came out of retirement to contest.
36.
On 11 February 2016 Leader of the National Party, Warren Truss announced his intended retirement and Barnaby Joyce was elected unopposed as his replacement, with Fiona Nash as his deputy.
37.
Barnaby Joyce was sworn in as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia on 18 February 2016.
38.
On 14 August 2017 Barnaby Joyce became embroiled in the 2017 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, announcing to the House of Representatives that he had received advice from the New Zealand High Commission that he could possibly hold New Zealand citizenship by descent from his father.
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Barnaby Joyce asked the government to have him referred to the High Court in the Court of Disputed Returns for consideration and clarification of his eligibility alongside that of senators Ludlam, Waters, Canavan and Roberts.
40.
Later in the day, the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs and the Crown Law Office confirmed that Barnaby Joyce was indeed a New Zealand citizen.
41.
On 27 October 2017, the High Court ruled that Barnaby Joyce had been ineligible to be a candidate for the House of Representatives at the time of the 2016 election, since he had been a dual citizen at that time, and that his election was therefore invalid.
42.
On 2 December 2017 Barnaby Joyce won the ensuing New England by-election with a healthy two-party swing of 7.5 percent, in the process winning almost two-thirds of the primary vote.
43.
Barnaby Joyce was sworn back into the House four days later, and on the same day was reappointed as Deputy Prime Minister as well as Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources.
44.
Prime Minister Turnbull had taken on that portfolio himself after Barnaby Joyce was forced out of Parliament for the first time.
45.
On 20 December 2017, in a rearrangement of the Second Turnbull Ministry, Barnaby Joyce was appointed as the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport.
46.
On 7 December 2017 Barnaby Joyce announced that he had separated from his wife.
47.
Richard Di Natale of the Greens called on Barnaby Joyce to resign for "clearly breaching the standards required of ministers".
48.
However, Turnbull forced Barnaby Joyce to go on a week of personal leave instead of acting as prime minister while Turnbull visited the United States.
49.
In February 2018, Turnbull's office relied on a technicality in stating that Barnaby Joyce had not breached the ministerial code of conduct when his lover was employed by fellow MPs, arguing Vikki Campion could not be considered the Deputy Prime Minister's "partner" at the time.
50.
On resignation, Barnaby Joyce lost his Deputy Prime Minister's and ministerial salaries of $416,000 a year, only to receive a backbencher's salary of about $200,000.
51.
On 4 February 2020 Barnaby Joyce unsuccessfully challenged McCormack as leader of the Nationals.
52.
Barnaby Joyce returned as leader of the Nationals on 21 June 2021, following a leadership spill.
53.
On 29 June 2021, during the second COVID-19 lockdown in Sydney and while being the active Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce was fined $200 for not wearing a mask in breach of COVID-19 health orders.
54.
Barnaby Joyce lost to Littleproud, ending his 11-month term as the leader.
55.
Subsequently Barnaby Joyce became Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs in the Coalition shadow cabinet.
56.
In September 2023, Barnaby Joyce joined a cross-party delegation of Australian MPs to Washington, DC, to lobby the US Department of Justice to abandon its attempts to extradite Australian publisher Julian Assange from the United Kingdom.
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In February 2024 Barnaby Joyce was filmed swearing into his phone while lying on his back in a Canberra street, later explaining he had mixed medication with alcohol.
58.
In July 2024 Barnaby Joyce faced calls to resign as a Shadow Minister after he likened ballot papers to bullets at a protest against a wind farm in Lake Illawarra.
59.
Barnaby Joyce is opposed to abortion, and in 2018 he lobbied NSW Nationals to vote against a bill to provide "safe zones" around the state's abortion clinics.
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In June 2014 Barnaby Joyce changed his views about medicinal cannabis and publicly supported calls for the introduction of a medicinal cannabis trial following a high-profile campaign led by a young man in his constituency who was at the time suffering from an aggressive form of terminal cancer.
61.
In January 2025, Barnaby Joyce said that Australia should copy an executive order signed by Donald Trump which stated that the United States federal government will only recognize two genders, male and female.
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In September 2015 Barnaby Joyce was the first senior minister to call for the Australian Government to accept more Syrian refugees in response to the humanitarian crisis engulfing Turkey and Europe.
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In December 2018, Barnaby Joyce raised this issue again to no avail.
64.
In December 2018 Barnaby Joyce said schools should be allowed to deny enrolment to transgender students.
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Barnaby Joyce has often angered economic rationalist parliamentary colleagues in the LNP Coalition by taking up a number of causes often labelled as populist; such as his support for the retention of a single-desk wheat export marketing system for Australian grain growers, drought assistance for primary producers, amendments to the Trade Practices Act 1974, and media reform regulations that aimed to strengthen the ability of small business to compete with multi-national corporations.
66.
Barnaby Joyce has opposed the sale of large Australian agricultural assets to foreign investors.
67.
In 2012, as the Opposition spokesman for Water, Barnaby Joyce was vocal in his unsuccessful opposition to the sale of Cubbie Station to a consortium led by a Chinese State Owned Enterprise.
68.
When Barnaby Joyce was leader of the Nationals and deputy prime minister, he repeatedly argued against a banking royal commission.
69.
Barnaby Joyce believes that renewable energy causes problems with energy supply.
70.
In 2015 Barnaby Joyce received a Froggatt Award from the Invasive Species Council for taking "principled decisions" in regard to the decision to introduce mandatory biofouling rules to prevent marine pests entering Australia, and for acting quickly and decisively in expelling two dogs belonging to Johnny Depp and Amber Heard which had been brought into Australia in an apparent breach of Australia's strict quarantine laws.
71.
Barnaby Joyce is known as one of the climate deniers in the federal Parliamentary Coalition.
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Barnaby Joyce has been seen as a global warming climate change denier, but in 2016 made comment about its possibility based on some of his own personal observations.
73.
In 2017, Barnaby Joyce stated that the Commonwealth would not intervene regarding accusations of water theft in the basin.
74.
In March 2017 Barnaby Joyce called for Leadbeater's possum to be taken off the critically endangered species list to boost the logging of forest to maintain employment.
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Environmentalists believe that such action would be devastating for the possum and countered that Barnaby Joyce was prepared to kill two dogs but not ensure the preservation of an entire species.
76.
Barnaby Joyce met Natalie Abberfield while at university in Armidale, New South Wales.
77.
Barnaby Joyce became engaged to Campion in January 2022, and they had a country-style wedding on 12 November 2023 at his family estate in Woolbrook, near Walcha.