Meet the Independents: Darren BAIN (Ungrouped, Northern Metropolitan)

I’ve had a rather depressing couple of days, and I can’t face Family First just yet, so I am declaring today Independents Day (see what I did there?)!  Let’s take a break from the established parties, and see what our Ungrouped Independents have to offer us…

Darren Bain is a hard man to pin down.  Running as an Ungrouped Independent in my very own Northern Metropolitan Region, he doesn’t seem to have a website, a FaceBook page, or any other clues to his identity.  It’s always fun to find a candidate with an absolutely minimalist web presence.

This report will therefore be short and a little bit stalker-ish, because basically all I know of Mr Bain is what I have found by matching the contact details he listed on the VEC website to his workplace and Linked In Profile.

All I therefore have to report is that Mr Bain is currently a Policy Advisor / Practice Specialist at Cure Consulting, and previously worked at the Australian Aged Care Quality Agency.  He describes himself on Linked In as:

Quality and Risk Advisor specialising in Human Resource performance and underperformance issues in Small and Medium sized Enterprises. Supporting management with policy systems and the implementation of new or revised procedures. Advising management on employee productivity and performance planning.

When I visit the Cure Consulting website that matches Mr Bain’s email address, it turns out to be a single page, with a quote from B.C. Forbes, a Scottish journalist and founder of Forbes, an American business magazine.

The quote is:

As an un-grouped Independent, Mr Bain does not have a Group Voting Ticket, so I cannot draw any conclusions about what he may or may not think about other political parties.  I can, however, tell you a little about what they think of him.

Mr Bain’s best placement comes from the Sex Party, who puts him at 13, with the Basics putting him at 16 and the Cyclists at 18.  Pretty much everyone else puts him in the late 20s to early 40s on their ticket – well after anyone they actually like, but above the parties they really want to punish.  His worst rating comes from the Palmer United Party, who put him dead last, but Rise Up Australia, the Animal Justice Party and Family First put him at 45, 44 and 43, respectively.

To me, this looks suspiciously as though the various political parties have no idea who he is either.  There doesn’t seem to be any obvious split between right and left here, though the right side of politics appears to be slightly more suspicious of him than the left.

So where does this leave us?  Well, I think it is fair to say that Mr Bain has no obvious political allegiances and no known policies.  He evidently approves of courage and tenacity, and knows how to talk the corporate talk.  I suspect he may in fact be the sole proprietor Cure Consulting – it has the look of being a one-man business, but I’m really guessing, here.   But if I were to wildly speculate, based on the very small amount of text we have, I would expect to find Mr Bain on the centre right of politics, and probably supporting small business.  There’s a decidedly aspirational, pulling-oneself-up-by-one’s-bootstraps air about that quote by Forbes, I feel.

In all seriousness, though, this is wild speculation based on the flimsiest of information.  For my part, I’m inclined to side with the various political parties who seem to have sort of shrugged at Darren Bain and placed him halfway down their tickets.