Bayly was born in Wanganui and has a twin brother. He had a long career in adventure racing, including competing in three Coast-to-Coast events, marathons and Ironman events. More recently he took up mountaineering, having scaled many mountain peaks, including Aoraki Mt Cook and Mt. Aspiring, and four mountains in Antarctica, including Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica. In the summer of 2012/13 he dragged a sled 112 km to the South Pole. In 2016 he and his son each dragged sledges 120 km to the North Pole, raising $10 000 for the Kokako Bird Recovery Programme in the Hunua Ranges. Bayly attended Wanganui Collegiate School and graduated with a degree in Accounting & Finance from Massey University. He is a Chartered Accountant and a Fellow of the NZ Institute of Management, the NZ Chartered Institute of Corporate Management and the UK Chartered Association of Certified Accountants. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London. Bayly was an officer in the New Zealand Army Territorials and also served in the British Parachute Regiment.
Business career
Bayly worked as a merchant banker, founding the Cranleigh firm with his brother Paul, where he offered corporate advisory and capital markets advice to a range of government entities, local authorities and corporate clients. Cranleigh has offices in New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. He was a director of numerous companies, the chair of the board of New Zealand Financial Planning and a trustee of the Enterprise Franklin Development Trust, the economic development arm of the Franklin Council. 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. Envirofert receives around 60,000 tonnes of green waste and building products every year, and turns most of it into beneficial products, including compost and gypsum. It also has a partnership with Fonterra to process and recycle its waste products.
During the 2014 general election Bayly was elected to Parliament as the National MP for the Hunua Electorate with a majority of 17,376 votes. He replaced Paul Hutchison, who retired. He had the fourth highest majority of all Electorate seats in New Zealand. During the 51st New Zealand Parliament, Bayly served as a member of the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee, Transport and Industrial Relations Select Committee, and Deputy Chair of the Regulations Review Select Committee. In September 2016, Bayly introduced 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, which was backed by the National Party caucus, would place 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.
In September 2019, Bayly was ejected from Parliament for attempting to disrupt Parliamentary proceedings by asking several questions about the Ihumātao dispute's implications for treaty settlements in New Zealand.
