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Senator elect Barnaby Joyce is an Australian politician from Queensland, who was elected to the Senate in the parliamentary election held on 9 October 2004. According to the Constitution of Australia, under which Senators (generally) enjoy a fixed term ending on 30 June six years from the year of their election, Joyce will take up his seat in the Senate on 1 July 2005.

Joyce was the only member of The Nationals elected to the Senate from Queensland in 2004. This was in addition to the three Senators elected from its coalition partner, the Liberals. This marked the first time since the enlargement of the Senate in 1985 that a party or coalition had won four of the six available Senate seats from a single state. Joyce's victory was hard-won and went down to the wire right up to the counting of the last votes. In the multi-member constituency covering the state of Queensland, Joyce won 6.5 percent of the vote on first preferences (see Australian electoral system), well short of the 14.3 percent required for election, but made up for lost ground by the flow of preferences from eliminated candidates of the Family First and One Nation parties, as well as from the independent candidate, Pauline Hanson. The count attracted considerable media attention because his eventual winning of the seat gave the ruling Liberal-National Coalition control of the senate for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, a result that no political commentators had expected.

Born in Tamworth in 1967, Joyce was brought up in Danglemah, New South Wales. One of six children from a sheep-and-cattle farming family, he was educated at a boarding school in Riverview. Later, he graduated with a Commerce degree from the University of New England in Armidale.

Between 1994 and 1999, Joyce served in the Australian Army Reserve.

A devout Catholic, Joyce has served as President (1998-2004) of the St George branch of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. He holds conservative views on most moral and social issues, but opposes extremism. He took offence at a pamphlet put out by Family First Party campaigners, which identified brothels, masonic lodges, mosques, and Hindu and Buddhist temples as "strongholds of Satan," and said that he did not want the preferences of such a party. Joyce publicly slammed the party, calling them "the lunatic Right", and stating that "these are not the sort of people you do preference deals with." (Later, the Family First Party disavowed the pamphlet and said that it had "disciplined" the person responsible for it).

Joyce has four daughters with his wife, Natalie, whom he married in 1993. They live in St. George in western Queensland, where Joyce has run an accounting business, but recently signalled their intention to relocate to the Gold Coast. He has been active in the Rotary Club, which awarded him a Paul Harris Fellowship. He helped to establish the Balonne Further Education and Building Group, which raised $1.3 million for a Skill Centre to train local members.

As a National Party Senator, Joyce is a member of the ruling Coalition. He has made it clear, however, that while he will work constructively within the coalition, he will not be a cipher and that the Howard government should not take his support for granted. In particular, he has expressed misgivings about the government's proposed sale of Telstra, the partially state-owned telecommunications giant, and has said that he may vote against the sale unless he and the rest of the party can be satisfied that its service in rural areas is adequate and that privatization will not adversely affect it.

• 1967 births
• National Party of Australia politicians