[2] Bayly is a former director of Envirofert, an organic compost product company that received the prestigious “Green Ribbon Award” in 2010 for making an outstanding contribution to protecting the environment.

[2] In 2016 he and his eldest son James each dragged sledges 120 km to the North Pole, raising $10,000 for the Kōkako Recovery Programme in the Hunua Ranges.

[8] In January 2019, Bayly and his second son Daniel spent a month trekking 500 km across Jordan on camels, retracing the routes of Lawrence of Arabia when he worked with Arab forces during the First World War, as described in his book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

[9] In late December 2022, Bayly travelled to the northernmost province of Mongolia with his third son George to spend time with the Dukha people, one of the last groups of nomadic reindeer herders in the world.

Climate change has adversely affected the terrain inhabited by the Dukha and has led to a decline in reindeer herds.

Bayly engaged a NZ film producer and arranged for a Mongolian cameraman to accompany them to record the trip, with a view to making a documentary that will eventually be promoted overseas.

[2] In September 2016, Bayly proposed a private member's bill to Parliament that would give landlords more power to test and remedy their rental properties of dangerous levels of methamphetamine contamination.

The bill would have placed an obligation on the landlord to provide rental accommodation free of methamphetamine contamination while giving them more power to confront the problem in their properties.

[17] In September 2019, Bayly was ejected from Parliament for attempting to disrupt Parliamentary proceedings during his questioning of Housing Minister Megan Woods about the Ihumātao dispute.

[22] This was a promotion of 14 places in National's shadow cabinet, and Bayly was described by reporters as the "big winner" in the reshuffle, but also as "relatively unknown" and "little-known".

[29] Following the appointment of Christopher Luxon as party leader on 30 November 2021 and a subsequent reshuffle of the shadow cabinet in early December, Bayly was demoted to 15th position and given responsibility for revenue, small business, commerce and consumer affairs, building and construction, and manufacturing.

[30] Bayly contested Port Waikato in the October 2023 general election, but the electorate vote was postponed to a by-election in November after another candidate died.

[31][32] In the Sixth National Government, which formed during the by-election period, Bayly was appointed as a minister outside Cabinet with responsibility for commerce and consumer affairs, statistics, and small business and manufacturing.

[33] In October 2024 Bayly apologised after telling a worker at an export business he had visited to "take some wine and fuck off", and calling him a "loser".