Do we like Jimmy Barnes?
Our score: 9 out of 10. He has backed marriage equality, told anti-Islam rallies to stop using his songs, and called out scare campaigns on refugees, with no harmful words found.
Jimmy Barnes is the voice Australian pubs have been shouting along to since Cold Chisel, then a solo run that took off with his debut Bodyswerve. His 1985 album For the Working Class Man made the title track a staple, and it sold over half a million copies in Australia. He has since been on Mushroom Music's books and is touring that album's 40th anniversary.
On the harm test, his record is a good one. In 2015 he turned up at Sydney's Mardi Gras Fair Day and called marriage equality “a basic human rights issue”. He and his wife posed for photos in a rainbow phone booth and he urged fans to ring their MPs. A year later on Q&A he argued against the same-sex marriage plebiscite, saying “I don't think we need to spend $170 million.”
He has also been blunt about people using his music for causes he rejects. In 2015, after anti-Islam group Reclaim Australia played his songs at rallies, he posted that those groups did not represent him and said “we are a multicultural family”. The group said it was “deeply saddened” and would stop playing them. In 2017 he told then Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg not to use his songs to sell policies he disagreed with.
On Q&A in 2019 he called political scare campaigns about refugees “dishonest” and “very, very, very uncool”, and said he thought Australians would see through them. That is the grievance-free opposite of the slide we watch for. We found nothing on vaccines, climate or trans people from him, good or bad, and no run of films or projects with anyone dodgy. The record is thin on those topics, not bad.
Nothing new on him in a controversy sense lately. In 2025 his team told Rolling Stone Australia that a report he was keen to judge The Voice was “not accurate”, and he said he would keep the NRL grand final date free for the song's anniversary. The rest is touring: the Working Class Man 40th anniversary shows with Icehouse, Ian Moss and Kate Ceberano.
On the good-person side, we found no court outcomes and no allegations against him in the sources we read. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017 for services to the performing arts. We couldn't open a dated source on his charity work, so the evidence for the good-person test is lighter than for the harm test.